Antisemites Got You Down? Try These Classic Hollywood Moments.

Scenes from Manhattan, Spartacus, A Clockwork Orange and To Kill a Mockingbird play out in my head for ways to confront hate.

My wife and I recently visited the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum, located a dreidel’s toss from the outdoor mall and food market called The Grove in the city’s upscale Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood.

I was mesmerized by the museum’s trove of well-preserved Nazi artifacts – swastika armbands and SS-engraved knick-knacks, a children’s book depicting Jewish students as subhuman creatures mocked by Aryan classmates, worshipful mini chapbooks about the Führer, striped concentration camp uniforms, personal effects pulled from the gas chambers. And copies of Der Stürmer, the viciously antisemitic weekly German tabloid whose popular slogan was “The Jews Are Our Misfortune.” It’s a chilling display, no matter that many of the repellant items are nearly 90 years in the past.

But of course, the chill is still with us. Just days after our field trip came news of black-booted neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Columbus, Ohio, waving swastika flags and spouting “Heil Hitler” past dazed shoppers and families in the city’s arty Short North district. That followed reports of Nazi adherents slurring and intimidating theater-goers near Detroit attending a local production of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” ironically performed at an American Legion Post. An Army veteran on scene explained that audience members in Howell, Michigan “were afraid to leave the building and had to be escorted to their cars.” Weeks earlier, a Jewish student at the University of Pittsburgh was kicked and punched by a gang who taunted him for wearing a star of David.

These incidents – and so many more – have occurred outside the orb of Free Palestine protests, though perhaps some were inspired by the events of October 7. The New York Times reported that the Columbus “flash mob” may have been prompted by “a rivalry with another hate group based in Ohio.” Get out your swastikas, lads, before someone else takes credit!

Whenever I hear stories about old-fashioned Jew-bullying I immediately recall a scene from Woody Allen’s Manhattan, in which Allen’s character Isaac Davis, dressed in tuxedo, greets friends at a fancy gala and amidst the chit-chat suddenly blurts, “Hey, has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? We should go down there – get some guys together, with bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.”

One of his swell pals responds, “There’s this devastating satirical op-ed piece on that in the Op-Ed page of the Times – it is devastating.” Allen cuts him off and says, “A satirical piece in the Times is one thing – but bricks and baseball bats really gets to the point.” A gowned woman retorts that “biting satire is always better than physical force.” Allen gets the last true word: “Oh, no – physical force is always better with Nazis.”

Would that Woody was in fighting form, though he’d need a deep bench of bats to keep pace with the current crop of Nazis on parade. What’s more disturbing is how our laws of free expression are used to uphold the rights of extremists who would like nothing more than an all-out brawl – and worse – against Jews.

The question of how best to directly confront antisemitic threats remains a vexing one. Is it best to slip past the rabble in hopes of not being targeted, or to square up and go to bat, no matter the consequences? Either option likely leads to brutal injury, as Jewish soccer fans trying to dodge November’s “Jew hunt” in Amsterdam can attest. Or should we leave it to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League to call out the rising tide of attacks? Or maybe just stick with the op-eds?

Another classic cinema moment comes to mind when envisioning a heroic response to predatory hate. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic Spartacus, Roman soldiers acting on orders from General Crassus (Lawrence Olivier) offer to spare a large contingent of rebellious slaves from crucifixion on condition they turn over their leader Spartacus (Kirk Douglas). Just as Spartacus starts to rise to sacrifice himself for the greater group, his fellow slaves stand up beside him one-by-one and declare, “I am Spartacus,” befuddling the Romans and infuriating Crassus.

It may have been a Hollywood contrivance but such waves of mass, protective allegiance are well known to us. Think of the widespread posting of “Black Lives Matter” signs and banners following the death of George Floyd in 2020 – in stores, homes and on social media profiles far beyond the Black community. Ditto the blue-and-yellow Ukraine placards hoisted by so many after Russia’s 2022 invasion – suddenly, we were all Ukrainians.

There was a harrowing incident in New York in June 2023 when a band of Palestinian disrupters stormed a crowded subway, with one shouting “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist – this is your chance to get out.” Imagine if just one of the riders had thrown up an arm like Spartacus’s mates and declared, “I am a Zionist!” until the entire car was a sea of hands. Sadly, no hands went up – when Jews are menaced publicly, it often seems the only solidarity comes from fellow Jews.

Stanely Kubrick, whose Jewish family emigrated from Austria, created a powerful rebuttal to black-booted thuggery in his 1971 futurist fable A Clockwork Orange, based on the Anthony Burgess novel. After his arrest for leading a crew of romper-stomper hooligans, the lead player Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell in his career-defining role) is subjected to severe negative conditioning, forced to watch newsreels of actual Nazi stormtroopers – as well as a preening Hitler – while a nurse applies some bilious drops into his clamped-open eyes, eventually causing him to wretch whenever a violent urge starts to overtake him.

“You see, when we’re healthy, we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea,” a prim nurse explains to Alex after a bout of vomiting. “You’re becoming healthy, that’s all.”

For Alex, it means having “to sit like a horrorshow cooperative malachick in the chair of torture, while they flashed nasty bits of ultraviolence on the screen,” while having to listening to his beloved Beethoven Ninth Symphony. Screaming, “Make it stop!” he begs the white-coated doctors to turn off the projector, leading them to declare him cured.

Tempting as it is to envision rounding up the Sieg Heil acolytes from Columbus and Michigan and submitting them to Pavlovian eye-drop sessions while watching Nazi home movies, I realize that may be a Borovsko Bridge too far. Think about all the ACLU lawsuits!

Just when I’m resigned that bigotry and group loathing can’t be challenged head-on, I’m reminded of one more chestnut from Million Dollar Movie – a scene in Robert Mulligan’s 1962 masterwork To Kill a Mockingbird. It occurs when the noble lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck in an Oscar-winning performance) goes to the town jailhouse after dark ahead of the trial next morning of his client Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. He’s got his lawbook open on his lap but he’s also there to safeguard the prisoner.

Finch’s young son Jem and daughter Scout are watching from bushes across the street and about to head home when a squad of townsmen drive up and demand Finch hand over Robinson for their own brand of racial justice, very possibly a lynching. One of them has a shotgun. Atticus is outnumbered and can’t win a civil argument with them, until young Scout squeezes through the pile and refuses to leave her father’s side. Just as one of the posse tries pulling her brother up by the pants, Scout calls out to another man she recognizes from around town, a poor farmer named Walter Cunningham.

“Hey, Mr. Cunnigham,” she says. “I’m Jean Louise Finch – you brought us some hickory nuts one early morning. Remember? We had a talk – I go to school with your boy Walter. Tell him ‘Hey’ for me, won’t you?’” Cunningham, one of the ringleaders who moments before had called for Atticus to step aside, is clearly embarrassed at being recognized by the child. After averting his eyes, he acknowledges Scout and instructs his fellow racist avengers, “Let’s clear out of here.” And they do quietly disperse back into their cars.

That combination of shame and humanity seems like a potent disarmament tool, though I doubt it can extinguish the hot prejudice that exists in many people’s hearts. After all, a lot of Nazis – then as now – have been shown to be decent people, nice to their families and kind to their pets. They just despise Jews and blame us for all that’s wrong in their world.

Knowing we can never stop all the flash mobs and Jew hunts, I sometimes revert to the mantra-like verse I learned in Hebrew school to gird me from harm: “Bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill.”  But something else offers hope.

At the LA Holocaust Museum, I watched a group of middle-schoolers from Las Vegas on a docent’s tour. Mostly Asian and Hispanic, they were absorbed as I’d been by the vile relics of Naziism. A pair of girls with elaborately curled hair designs read the descriptions aloud to each other. The were horrified by blow-up images of the Babi Yar massacre of 1941 and recoiled by the grotesque caricatures of a Jewish family passing a school taunted by rosy-cheeked Hansels and Gretels.

“That’s scary sick,” one of the girls said. “I can’t believe it.”  Sometimes all it takes is one brave Scout to stem hate’s tide.

Allan Ripp runs a press relations firm in New York.