"Defiance" Director Not So Defiant on Islamic Terrorism

On Friday, I asked Big Hollywood readers to provide suggested questions for my interview with “Defiance” writer/director, Edward Zwick. The movie is about the Bielski brothers, Jewish partisans, who fought back against the Nazis. They saved hundreds of Jews and killed several Nazis in the process. It’s a great movie. But, after the interview, I can’t say the same for this director. He simply doesn’t get it on Islamic terrorism.

I’ve written a column on this that I hope you’ll read in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt:

He said he couldn’t see himself doing a movie about the Jews versus the Islamic terrorists in Israel because, “It’s very difficult to parse morality in what’s going on in the Middle East and especially in the last two weeks. It’s full of moral complexity that I’m not sure I could address in a two-hour movie. What I’m loathe to do is to analogize between this [the Nazis vs. the Bielskis] and the contemporary situation. I didn’t want to have a movie with an agenda.”

But when I pointed out that there is clearly an agenda and clearly good guys and bad guys in “Defiance” (not to mention, “The Siege”), he responded with more psychobabble gobbledygookish squirming, that his movie “showed the difference between passivity and powerlessness [and was] a necessary historical redress.”

Well, there’s a “necessary historical redress” about what Islamic terrorists are doing against Jews in Israel and throughout the world.

It’s sad that Edward Zwick can’t make the connection between the old Nazis the Jews fought to survive then, and the new ones the Jews fight to survive now. Dr. Jay Bielski, son of Zus Bielski (one of the Bielski brothers depicted in the film), fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur war as a member of the Israeli Defense Force after serving as a U.S. Marine during Vietnam. His sons now serve in the Israeli Army.

Read the whole column.

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