
Defamation
Yoav Shamir, an Israeli filmmaker, sets out to answer a blunt question: what does anti-Semitism actually look like today? He spends much of the film trailing Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, through meetings, fundraisers, and a lobbying trip where Foxman treats the threat as urgent and ongoing. Shamir also joins a group of Israeli high school students flown to Poland to tour Auschwitz, watching their guides frame every encounter with Poles as evidence of lingering hatred, and cutting the footage against interviews that question whether that framing serves the students or just repeats an institutional script. Norman Finkelstein appears to argue that the label gets used strategically, to deflect criticism of Israeli policy rather than to describe actual bigotry. Shamir keeps himself in the frame as an unconvinced Israeli asking pointed questions of Jewish organizations, students, and ordinary people on the street, and the film never settles the argument so much as it shows how differently Jews themselves define the danger.