Jewsweek Interview with Henry Bean

1) What led you to do a film about self-hate?

I don't think it's about self-hate. One could make a case that the Jewish tradition of argument, self-criticism and so on can, and often does, overflow into self-hatred, and that self-hatred is, perhaps, natural to a people have spent so much of their history - and so much of their own reflection on that history - as victims.

But Danny Balint, the protagonist of the film, is not filled with self-disgust and self-loathing like "typical" Jewish Nazis, such as Danny Burros, on whose story the film is loosely based. The film's Danny hates outwardly; he hates "them," the Jews, and especially the aspects of Jews and Judaism from which he struggles to distinguish himself, above all the passivity.

Danny is actively making himself into something else. True, he cannot fully succeed; all his efforts to "not" be Jewish make him all the more Jewish. But in these efforts he does become something else, or at least something more than the clichés of Judaism. His "self-hatred" is transformative, not solipsistic.

In fact, as he and we discover, the hatred is an aspect of love. To me this was central to my intention. I feel that Danny's rage conceals and reveals and cryptically expresses his tremendous for Judaism. He fails to understand this until the middle of the film, when he goes into the synagogue, but I think the audience understands even before that, though they might not articulate it to themselves in those terms.

Danny is always, even when we first seem him a Nazi, a rabbi-manqué, a rabbi in spite of himself, practicing his Judaism "in the breach," but always passionately attached to it. His explorations of the falseness, the hypocrisy, the weakness of Judaism are almost comically Judaic. As he says in the brief discussion about Eichmann: "Eichmann went to Israel, he studied the Torah, the Talmud, the Mishnah, the whole bit. He hated Jews." In short, to properly hate Jews, you must be a rabbi. But to be a rabbi you must love Jewish learning. It's a paradox.

2) Do you think that all hate groups have a portion of self-hate behind their message?

Not only do I think that, I think that they all have a secret fascination with and even love for the thing they "hate". Take a look at the Nazi propaganda film, "The Eternal Jew" and you'll see what I mean.

3) Tell us a bit about the story of Daniel Burros.

Daniel Burros really was a self-hating Jew. He was short, pudgy, fair, and had a small nose. He began by taunting his Jewish friends with admiring remarks about Hitler, and, when that got the desired rise out of them, he kept going. Soon he forgot he was joking.

He joined the American Nazi Party, had a falling out with its leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, and subsequently joined the Ku Klux Klan. He was arrested at a Klan rally outside a White Castle in the Bronx in the fall of 1965, and the New York Times subsequently got a tip that he was Jewish.

“… I think all of us harbor very complex and often contradictory feelings for the people and groups and even institutions which are closest to us ...”

They sent a reporter to interview him. Burros had an articulate and fairly sophisticated anti-Semitic argument (by the reporter's account). When the reporter asked him how he could believe all this when "you're a Jew yourself," Burros first denied, but, when shown evidence, told the man, "If you print that in the New York Times, I'll kill you and kill myself."

The Times ran it that Sunday. Burros saw the paper in Reading, PA where he was staying with Nazi friends. He came running back to the house distraught. When his friends asked him what was the matter, he told them, "The New York Times says I'm a Jew." The friends, in newspaper accounts, then said, "Sit down, let's talk about it." To me, this suggests at least that it was not a terrible thing from their points of view and quite likely that they already knew this or at least suspected it. In any case, Burros was not reassured. He ran up to his room, put Wagner on the record player. I'm not sure which piece, but I like to think it was the overture to "Tristan and Iseult" and shot himself. Twice. Once in the chest and, when that didn't work, again in the head.

4) What specific relevance do you think his story offers a contemporary audience?

I made the film long before Sept 11, yet it does seem to offer some kind of insight into the mind of a fanatic, albeit of a different sort. But the relevance, I hope, goes beyond the immediate moment. I think all of us harbor very complex and often contradictory feelings for the people and groups and even institutions which are closest to us. That's why I quote Catullus: "I hate and I love, and who can tell me why?"

I think we hate the things we love, often precisely we because love them. When we love people, we can hate our dependence on them, our need for them, our vulnerability to them, the way we sometimes lose ourselves in them. We push them away, often very hard, just to free ourselves from those feelings, and then, if we're lucky, we're able to reunite with them. We need both parts of that, the pushing away as well as the drawing close. Without the hatred, the love itself is diminished.

5) Why does Danny Balint hate himself?

As I said above, Danny isn't really about self-hatred. To the extent that he does hate himself it is for the same reason we all do, because he isn't the person he wants to be. But again, his hatred is transformative, not solipsistic. He wishes to "negate" the part of himself he rejects in the hope of becoming something else, something closer to his dreams. Like all of us, he doesn't realize the paradoxical fact that transformation comes not from rejecting the parts of ourselves we don't like, but from accepting them. But he learns this in the synagogue, and, thereafter, by accepting himself as a Jew, he becomes something new and, to him, something wonderful and wondrous: a Jewish-Nazi, a thing and its opposite, a living contradiction. This is the most vital life he has ever had. Unfortunately, it's unstable, and when it collapses, he is destroyed.

- Steven I. Weiss