The Believer

In terms of the most damning films about Jews and Judaism, I believe it was not the National Socialists nor Islamists who were responsible for greatest and most provocative celluloid examinations of the Jewish question, but cinematic works penned and/or directed by the Jews themselves, with The Man in the Glass Booth (1975) directed by Arthur Hiller, Weininger's Last Night (1990) aka Weiningers Nacht directed by Paulus Manker, and Henry Bean’s The Believer (2001) being some of the most notable examples. What all of these films have in common aside from featuring great anti-Semitic rants is that all three works feature a self-loathing Jewish antihero with a split-personality who ultimately dies in the end as a result of circumstances relating to their diseased Hebraic mind. Undoubtedly, Bean’s The Believer is the freshest and most modern of these films, as a work that stars Hollywood heartthrob Ryan Gosling (Drive, The Place Beyond the Pines) during his pre-fame days in an insanely intense and totally unforgettable role as a Jewish neo-Nazi skinhead who finally loses control of his unhinged mind. Loosely based on the true story of Daniel "Dan" Burros—a former member and propagandist of Yankee Führer George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and, later, a recruiter for the KKK, who had a purported genius IQ of 154 and who committed suicide on October 31, 1965 by shooting himself in the chest and head while listening to Richard Wagner only an hour or so after an issue of The New York Times had been released that uncovered that he was 100% kosher. A rather conflicted fellow who supposedly derived great pleasure from drawing elaborate images of Jews being tortured yet at the same time would do curious things like bring Knish for his neo-Nazi friends to eat and would say things like “Let's eat this good Jew food!,” Burros was apparently heavily influenced by the neo-Spenglerian tome Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948) written by Francis Parker Yockey (who is rumored to have been ¼ Jewish himself), which argued against the ‘racial materialism’ of the Third Reich and made the dubious claim that the 'spiritual' element of race was more important than the biological, hence why the work would appeal to a Jewish Nazi (incidentally, Leo Felton, a neo-Nazi criminal of both black and Jewish ancestry, was also influenced by the book). A sort of postmodern theological approach to Judaism written by two assimilated reform Jews, Henry Bean and Mark Jacobson, that exposes to the Goyim why it is not all that strange that a Jew might turn into a neo-Nazi, The Believer is like a thinking man’s take on American History X (1998) that is less about skinhead culture than a serious attempt to portray Judaism’s place in modern America in an age where true so-called ‘anti-Semitism’ has become an anachronism and where the religion itself has begun to lose meaning among its people, who typically consider themselves culturally kosher more than anything else. Once described by co-writer/director Henry Bean as being “embarrassingly philo-Semitic,” the film was nonetheless described by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center as “a primer for anti-Semitism” and because of this, the The Believer was doomed to the deplorable fate of being released straight to cable TV, even thought it had won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and the Golden St. George at the 23rd Moscow International Film Festival. To the Rebbe’s credit, Bean’s work has more philosophical ammo against the Jews than the infamous Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (1940) aka The Eternal Jew directed by Fritz Hippler (who was ironically 1/8 Jewish himself) and thus can seen as one of only a handful of films that will intrigue both rabid Zionist and National Socialists alike. 

 During the first couple minutes of The Believer, Jewish yeshiva student turned neo-Nazi skinhead Daniel Balint (Ryan Gosling) stalks a young Orthodox Jew wearing a yarmulke through a NYC subway and eventually smacks a book out of the young Yid’s hand, hands the book back to him, and then smacks and beats the shit out of the young bookish Heeb for not fighting back like a real man. Most interestingly, Mr. Balint begs the Jew to hit him back, stating, “Do me a favor…why don’t you fucking hit me, okay? Hit me. Hit me! Hit me, hit me, hit me. Fucking hit me. Hit me, please! You fucking kike!,” but the cowardly 'kike' naturally does nothing. Indeed, Daniel Balint hates the Jews due to their innate cowardliness and pacifism, as he associates Abraham’s obedience to God's command to kill/sacrifice his son Isaac in the Bible with the fact that most European Jews refused to fight back during the holocaust. As a young yeshiva student, Danny would argue with his teachers over scripture by interpreting it in a rather unorthodox way, but now as a neo-Nazi, he wants to kill Jews and believes he has found true comrades in the form of philistine skinheads who have no idea who Adolf Eichmann was. When Danny and his motley crew of skinhead dumb asses attend a small gathering hosted by intellectual fascists Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane) and Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell), he proposes randomly killing rich and successful Jews, including an investment banker/philanthropist named Ilio Manzetti (Henry Bean). Zampf considers Danny’s anti-Semitism and brute tactics outmoded, but Moebius , who “doesn’t care about the Jews one way or another,”sees a bright speaker and visionary in the young Jewish Nazi, as he reminds her of her ex-husband, who was a fascist revolutionary that went insane and now lives in a mental institution. Moebius’ daughter Carla (portrayed by ½ Jewess Summer Phoenix) also takes an interest in Danny and when he gets arrested the same night after getting in a brawl with some savage nig-nogs, she bails him out of jail and the two make somewhat violent sadomasochistic love (Carla is left with a bruise around her mouth). When Danny goes home, it is quite obvious that he resents the fact that his Father (Ronald Guttman) is a weak and sickly Jew. While at home, Danny gets a call from a journalist named Guy Danielsen (A. D. Miles), who flatters the kosher Nazi by telling him that he has heard that he has “interesting ideas” and that he wants to interview him. Unbeknownst to Danny, the journalist knows he is Jewish and his life as he knows it is about to change forever as a result. 

 When Danny meets journalist Guy Danielsen at a cafe, the postmodern Stormtrooper goes on a number of highly sophisticated and articulate anti-Jewish rants, including one in the spirit of self-loathing Austrian Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger where he argues that “the Jew is essentially female,” stating, “Real men—white, Christian men—we fuck a woman. We make her cum with our cocks. But the Jew doesn’t like to penetrate and thrust—he can’t assert himself that directly—so he resorts to perversion.” In his most impassioned speech, Danny makes his most damning attack against God’s chosen tribe most cherished geniuses, arguing: “Take the greatest Jewish minds ever—Marx, Freud, Einstein—what have they given us? Communism, infantile sexuality, and the atom bomb. In the mere three centuries it’s taken these people to emerge from the ghettos of Europe, they’ve ripped us out of a world of order and reason. They’re thrown us into a chaos of class warfare, irrational urges, relativity, into a world where the very existence of matter and meaning is in question. Why? ‘Cause it’s the deepest impulse of a Jewish soul to pull at the fabric of life till there’s nothing left but a thread. They want nothing but nothingness. Nothingness without end.” At this point, the journalist seems rather impressed, but he catches Danny off guard by asking him, “How can you believe this when you’re a Jew yourself?,” thus inciting the Hitlerite Hebrew to whip out a glock pistol and put it in pansy journalist Mr. Danielsen’s mouth while threatening to kill himself if the writer dares to print an article revealing his Judaic origins. Danny ends up going to a training camp setup by Zampf and Mobius with his skinhead comrades and during the first couple minutes upon arriving there, he beats up the biggest and most muscular neo-Nazi after he picks a fight with him, thus demonstrating he is far from an archetypical Jewish wimp. Danny also befriends a dorky explosives expert and a skilled marksman/possible fellow Jewish Nazi named Drake (Glenn Fitzgerald). Meanwhile, Danny attempts to rekindle his sexually violent relationship with Carla, but he soon realizes that Mr. Zampf is also carrying on an affair with her, even though he is in a relationship with her mother Lina Moebius. When Danny and his friends start a fight with the owners of a Jewish deli, they are sentenced to ‘sensitivity training’ by the courts where they must listen to the experience of holocaust survivors. When one elderly holocaust survivor tells a story about how his 3-year-old son was impaled with a bayonet right before his eyes by a German sergeant, Danny calls the man a “piece of shit” for not fighting back and protecting his son. Undoubtedly, the turning point for Danny comes when he and his friends wreck a synagogue and plant a bomb in the pulpit of the building. Danny’s racial/political schizophrenia becomes rather pronounced when he yells at his friends for messing up a Torah scroll, which is more or less the only holy object of Judaism. Danny decides to take the Torah, as well as a ‘tallit’ (a Jewish prayer shawl), back to the camp with him and comes to realize that being a Nazi alone is not fulfilling and that his Judaism has never left him. After learning the bomb that he planted at the synagogue malfunctioned (the timer stopped at 13 minutes, with the number 13 being a mystical number in Judaism), Danny begins repairing the torn Torah and even does fascist salutes while wearing the tallit and singing a Jewish prayer. When Drake asks Danny, “Do you wanna kill a Jew?,” the Judaic neo-Nazi reluctantly agrees. Drake reveals that he has already killed four Jews and when Danny asks him how he knew that his victims were Jewish, the marksman responds by stating, “I can tell. I was a Jew in a previous life.” Ultimately, Danny intentionally misses while attempting to assassinate the Jew Ilio Manzetti (the very same Jew he previously fantasized about killing) and Drake soon notices he is wearing the tallit, so a fight breaks out between the two, with the Jewish Nazi wounding his comrade, who later disappears. 

 When Danny arrives back in NYC, he is asked by Lina Moebius and Zampf to start fundraising for their fascist organization, which they hope will go mainstream, but the tough Hebraic National Socialist is so disgusted by the thought of doing such Jewish work as attempting to con companies out of their money (after all, he drives a forklift for a living) that he vomits, but Carla makes him feel better by licking the barf off his lips in a sick, if not highly sensual, fashion. Rather absurdly Danny begins teaching workshops on hating Jews during the day while teaching Carla, who is a dilettante of ancient languages, how to read the torah during the night. When Danny attempts to get funding from the head of a corporation, he is told, “Forget the Jewish stuff. It doesn’t play anymore. There’s only the market now, and it doesn’t care who you are.” Danny accuses the CEO of being a Jew and he replies somewhat strangely by stating, “Maybe I am. Maybe we’re all Jews now. What’s the difference?” Needless to say, Danny becomes disillusioned with the whole fascist movement and when he gives a speech arguing that anti-Semites should love Jews because it would cause the entire race to disappear into a sea of assimilation, Lina Moebius fires him from his job as a glorified fascist salesman of sorts. Meanwhile, Drake assassinates Ilio Manzetti and Danny is naturally blamed for the crime. Ultimately, Danny gets back in contact with his old classmates from the yeshiva school and decides to go out in a blaze of Christ-like glory. Danny convinces his friend Stuart (Dean Strober) to allow him to take his place reading from the torah at the bema on Yom Kippur. The night before he reads from the torah, Danny places a bomb in the pulpit of the synagogue. On the day of the big event, Danny notices Carla in the synagogue and forces her and everyone else out after telling his friend Stuart that there is a bomb in the building. Of course, Danny, as a suicidal Semite, refuses to leave and is blown up. In the last scene of the film during an ethereal mystical vision of sorts, Danny aimlessly ascends the stairs of the yeshiva school he once attended while being told by his old teacher that “There's nothing up there.” Indeed, in the end, Danny—the only really ‘believer’—learns that the Jewish (non)afterlife is truly “nothing but nothingness. Nothingness without end.” 

 In describing the real-life Jewish neo-Nazi Daniel Burros, The Believer director Henry Bean curiously stated, “He was a rabbi manque. Antisemitism is a form of practicing Judaism. He’s sort of a rabbi after all. A Jew by day, a Nazi by night. . . . He was desperately hiding something and compulsively trying to bring it out at the same time. People are drawn to contradiction. He undergoes a conversion, but not back to the Torah.” Bean, who is racially Jewish but never really seriously studied the religious aspects of his religion until working on the film, also confessed that by making a film about a Jewish neo-Nazi, he “began to understand what Judaism was.” Indeed, as The Believer demonstrates, unlike Christianity, Judaism is a self-critical religion about constantly questioning things, so it is only natural for a devout intelligent Jew to question the very religion itself, which protagonist Danny Balint did from the very beginning as depicted in his fights with teachers during his early yeshiva days. Although largely forgotten nowadays, some of the greatest intellectuals in the German-speaking world during the late-19th century/early-20th century where ‘self-loathing Jews,’ including the tragic philosopher Otto Weininger (who committed suicide at age 23 by shooting himself in the same room that Ludwig van Beethoven died in), philosopher/historian/actor/theater critic Egon Friedell, Austrian journalist/satirist Karl Kraus, and even one of the most important philosophers of his time, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who once wrote: “My thoughts are 100% Hebraic” and “Amongst Jews "genius" is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (myself for instance.) I think there is some truth in my idea that I really only think reproductively.” Although Ryan Gosling seems far too Aryan in appearance and demeanor to portray a suicidal heeb, his performance in The Believer is nothing short of so amazingly visceral and fiercely impassioned that one almost comes to believe he is the real self-loathing Jew deal. While a discernibly low-budget work featuring a couple plot-holes and sometimes amateurish direction (it was Bean’s directorial debut, after all), The Believer is ultimately not only one of the most sophisticated films to ever deal with the Jewish question, but also a dark and primal examination of the Jewish collective unconscious that exposes an entire people in their most vulnerable and incriminating form. Indeed, for those that ever wondered why some people, including Jews, think Uncle Adolf may have had some Hebraic blood, The Believer is the film to see. Undoubtedly, the fact that a powerful rabbi managed to suppress the film and caused it to miss the mainstream attention it deserved just goes to show how important of a work The Believer is, especially in a post-European-dominated age where a largely Hebrew-run entity known as Hollywood is poisoning the world’s brains with its insipid high shekel filth, not to mention the fact that all of the wars in the middle east are a direct result of Zionist warmongering, among countless other contemporary kosher societal ills.

 Ironically, Zionism (which was described by Karl Kraus as a form of  “Jewish anti-Semitism”) itself was born out of Jewish self-loathing, as its founder Theodor Herzl was originally a German nationalist (he was even a member of the German nationalist fraternity Burschenschaft, which many future Nazis, including Heinrich Himmler, were also members of) who started Zionism after realizing that Jews would never be accepted as real Germans among the indigenous German population and saw the movement as a way to make world Jewry strong (indeed, the early Zionists promoted eugenics and even collaborated with the Nazis during WWII). When director Henry Bean received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for The Believer, he stated during his acceptance speech for the film, “this is truly a story of love and hate. I love the provocative aspects…the notion of being a Jew and a Nazi at the same time.”  Undoubtedly, in those couple sentences, Bean demonstrates the innate strangeness of being Jewish and being from a paradoxical religion where love and hate are not mutually exclusive because, as history demonstrates, Jews thrive on hatred (as Bean's film mentions, there would be no Israel without Auschwitz) for Hebrews would cease to exist without such hatred, thus making the Jewish neo-Nazi, in a bizarre way, the ultimate and most deeply devout Jew. Indeed, while being one of the most unwaveringly Jewish movies ever made, The Believer is also one of the most cleverly and eclectically anti-Semitic, as a work that puts Uncle Adolf's best-seller Mein Kampf to shame.  That being said, Bean's film is more or less the contemporary celluloid equivalent to Otto Weininger's masterpiece Sex and Character (1903) aka Geschlecht und Charakter.  Of course, it is surely a sign of our socially and morally inverted times when the most cleverly quasi-anti-Semitic film was directed by an actual Jew.

-Ty E