Evil Through the Eye of the Lens

What do a Congressman, a documentary about Nazi filmmakers, and a 10-time Emmy Award winning director have in common?

A discussion about propaganda and human rights, of course!

Evil Through the Eye of the Lens, an event held at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Monmouth County in Deal Monday night,  combined a 100-minute subtitled documentary about Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, a talk on the difference between propaganda and art by acclaimed filmmaker David Grubin, and humanitarian awards for United States Congressman Christopher Smith and executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education Paul Winkler.

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss is the compelling story of the only Nazi filmmaker who was prosecuted (and acquitted) of war crimes for the Nazi propaganda films he made. More than this though, it is the story of his family's complicated relationship with its legacy. 

An audience member astutely noted after viewing the film that she was uncomfortable with the ambivalence of Harlan's family members toward him and his wife (an acclaimed actress who starred in his movies), but that the film was ultimately a story of redemption as each of them sought to atone for the sins their elders had committed. A son hunts Nazis after the war and speaks out publicly against his father, for example, and two daughters marry Jewish men.  One of those marriages ends in divorce. The other is unhappy.

The film was introduced by 10 time Emmy winning documentarian David Grubin, who signed copies of his PBS series The Jewish Americans: 350 Years of Jews in America and showed clips from his own 30 year old documentary about chief Nazi filmmaker, Fritz Hippler.

Harlan made feature films while Hippler made documentaries and news reels, said Grubin.

He show a clip from Hippler's film, The Eternal Jew, in which Jews were compared to rats who spread disease and destruction. He said that like Harlan, Hippler never took responsibility for what he'd done.

"We did our jobs. We had no idea this could be the basis on which mass murder would funnel," Hippler says in another clip.

"The real aim of propaganda is action," Grubin countered. "If you compare Jews to rats, it's very clear what that action is."

I asked him what the difference is between propaganda and art.

"The propagandist knows in advance what he's trying to do, what he wants people to do when they see the film. That's the big difference. An artist is free to explore, discover, change his mind, learn more.  A propagandist has his mind made up already," Grubin said. 

I wondered then what the difference is between working from a point of view and making propaganda. 

"You can't make a film unless you have a point of view, unless you hold it together, but you're doing that freely. You're discovering it for yourself and you're allowing what you learned to change your opinion.  Your point of view can change then. The propagandist isn't interested in any of that," Grubin said.

In his talk, he said modern political campaigns, advertising, and public relations are forms of propaganda. He also named filmmaker Michael Moore as  "a kind of propagandist."

"It's all meant to manipulate hearts and minds," he said.

United States Congressman Christopher Smith and Executive Director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education Paul Winkler were honored for their human rights work.

Smith said for him this work began in 1982 with "the fight for Soviety Jewry." 

"From that I continued to work on anti-semitism, human rights, religious freedom issues. Very quickly after the breakup of the Soviet Union ... we saw that trafficking was stepping in in an unprecedented fashion. The buying and selling, the commodification of women," Smith said. 

He authored the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000.

"It establishes a very aggressive, coordinated strategy of prevention, prosecution of the traffickers, and protection of the victims," he said.

I asked the congressman if his human rights work emerges from his Christian faith.

"It does come out of my faith," he said. "I do read the Scriptures all the time. I love the Psalms; Psalm 37 and 73 are my favorite. I love the Scriptures because I am a Christian. There's a Scripture, Matthew 25, where the Lord says, 'Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do likewise to me.' In any society and in any culture, there is a whole group of people who are unwanted and disenfranchised and then subjected to extermination," Smith said.

He mentioned the Holocaust and the Aremnian and Rwandan genocides as examples, but said, "No one has endured it more anywhere on earth than the Jews."

He then took the United Nations to task for singling out Israel for criticism.

"Israel is picked out among all the other countries of the world for not just excessive, but totally unfair scrutiny by U.N. bodies, especially the Human Rights Council. So Israel itself is one of the most disenfranchised countries in the world. We, the United States, have to stay very close to them," Smith said.

The other honoree was New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education Executive Director Paul Winkler. A lifelong educator, he was asked to be on the commission in 1976 when Governor Tom Kean introduced legislation mandating Holocaust and genocide education. Winkler said he has been coordinating training at the state's network of Holocaust centers ever since.

"New Jersey has become a leading state in the country. That's why having the congressman here is a perfect match because he talks about anti-semitism, bias, and prejudice all over," Winkler said.