Defamation (2009)

This brave documentary takes on the topic of anti-Semitism in a relentlessly probing and original way. The director of Defamation, Yoav Shamir, is an Israeli who has grown disillusioned with the way his country's fixation on the Holocaust has, in his view, devolved from a moral necessity into a corrosive ideology of fear. Shamir intercuts teens from Israel on a field trip to Auschwitz; a complexly skeptical look at Abe Foxman, head of America's Anti-Defamation League; and a portrait of the ire faced by authors like Norman Finkelstein, who claims that anti-Semitism is now exaggerated by its victims.

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