The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred

By Henry Bean

The Believer relates the disturbing and provocative story of a Jewish skinhead from Brooklyn. Screenwriter Henry Bean (Internal Affairs, Deep Cover) was inspired by an actual case to write an original script exploring issues close to his own Orthodox Judaism -- and then to direct what became the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Everywhere The Believer has been shown it has provoked passionate debate about fundamental assumptions of faith, belief, and ethnic identity. The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred is intended to provide a context for the discussion sparked by this controversial film. In addition to the script with an explanatory essay by the filmmaker, The Believer will include additional essays on related topics from such authorities as Cornell Professor Sander Gilman (Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis), Northwestern Professor Lester Friedman (The Jewish Image in American Film), and Professor of the Talmud and Rabbinics at Jewish Theological Seminary David Kraemer. The Believer will feature the script of the award-winning film and also be punctuated by shorter "reactions" to the film and its topic solicited from pivotal opinion-makers. "Henry Bean is a big talent and The Believer is his most courageous and thought-provoking work yet " -- Spike Lee

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 156025372X
• ISBN13: 9781560253723
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

"Self Hatred and Faithlessness"

This is possibly the most intriging work of Jewish fiction published in the last decade. Based on the real life story of Jewish KKK Wizard Danny Burros (1938-65), this book explores the history, psychology and internal motivations of a young Jew, who out of his self hatred, turned violently against the Jewish people. The real life Danny Burros, committed suicide when the New York Times "outed" him as a Jew in 1965.The book contains not only Bean's play ironically titled "The Believer" but also outstanding commentary by scholars David Kraemer and Sander Gilman. The play is set contemporaneously, but the course of a young Jew becoming a Nazi out of self hatred is somewhat archaic. Jews are more likely to support Palestinian "liberation" based on self hatred than Nazism these days.But the truly interesting question is: Why the self hatred at all? This disease has struck Jews all through the history of the Jewish people, and frequently lead those who feel it to persecute the Jewish people, to the point of fanning massacres and riots. In the modern period, it began with towering figures like Marx and Heine, through Lenin and Trotsky, down to the present. Both David Kraemer and Sander Gilman give their own answers for this, derived both from Jewish tradition and modern psychology and literary criticism.However, given that Jewish self hatred is as old as Judaism itself, these answers, for this reviewer ring quite hollow. I find the answers to this question in the nature of Judaism itself; in that Judaism is a religion of analysis, criticism and argument, which enshrines a tradition of severe self critique and reproof in the Bible itself. One sees the Jewish tendency toward almost violent disagreement from the Torah through the Writings to the end of the Prophets.In general it takes a very strong individual, to observe and internalize this culture without finding it defacto flawed by excessive internal divisiveness. This reviewer so found Judaism similarly flawed for decades, until he made a thorough and searching study of the Bible and Jewish history, and realized that the God that inspired the Torah, is still with the Jewish people today.I used this inspiration to write my own commentary on the ideas in The Believer; [...]However, in my case, I discuss in a much more profound way the true causes of Jewish self hatred, which is the illusion fostered by so many different'modernizing' Jewish groups, that God is a thing of the distant past.