Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on December 3, 2019

Documentary "Hate Among Us" connects the stories of the current victims and survivors of ... [+] anti-Semitism to those of the Holocaust.

In 2017, executive producers David McKenzie, Dean Cain, Montel Williams and Sergey Sarkisov tackled a subject that to this day is not fully acknowledged, the Armenian Genocide (also known as the Armenian Holocaust), in documentary Architects of Denial. Most historians call this event a genocide: a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people.An estimated 1.5 million Christian citizens, most of them Armenian, were impacted from approximately 1914 to 1923. Yet, the Turkish government still does not acknowledge the scope of these events.

Architects of Denial has been adapted into television special Denial.

In October of this year, McKenzie, alongside Cain, Williams and Sarkisov, launched the annual Impact Humanity Television and Film Festival (IHTFF) at the Moscow Cinema in Yerevan, Armenia to raise awareness on the issues related to the global humanitarian crisis. The gathering showcases the key television shows, the feature films and the documentaries that educate, inform and help prevent acts of inhumanity around the world. The goal is to offer this festival in other places to raise awareness of human rights through storytelling.

Now, the quartet McKenzie, Cain, Williams and Sarkisov have executive produced documentary Hate Among Us, which shines the spotlight on anti-Semitism at present worldwide. It opened on Friday, Nov. 29 at two theaters: Cinema Village in New York City and Laemmle Town Center in Encino, California.

All these years after the Holocaust and the anger and the hostility that prevails against the Jewish community is still visible at alarming rates, warned filmmaker David McKenzie in an interview for Forbes.com. We must educate the public about what is happening, and we must, both as a community and as a society, take a stance. We need to necessitate change. And we need to do it now.

Dean Cain and Montel Williams actually have very different political viewpoints, and they are both not even Jewish, he noted. But they are also committed about stopping anti-Semitism. This film is an important step forward. It needs to be seen.

Hate Among Us

Distributed by Associated Television International (ATI), documentary Hate Among Us reflects on the persecution and the ultimate murder of an estimated six million European Jews (as well as millions of others, including Gypsies and homosexuals) by the Nazi regime and its collaborators under the leadership of Adolph Hitler from 1941 to 1945. Exhibiting present day violence against the Jewish faith, Hate Among Us takes us from different neighborhoods in Europe (including a Kosher grocery in Eastern Paris, where four people were killed; and the armed guards needed outside synagogues throughout Germany on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement) to streets in the United States. Featured in the film is news coverage of The Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the victim of a mass shooting in October 2018 that resulted in the death of 11 people.

We really thought we were past this in this country, but here it is again, said Montel Williams, following a scene where students at high schools in Newport Harbor and Costa Mesa, California posted pictures on social media highlighting a drinking game set up with cups designed as a swastika.

I open up my computer to check the news this morning and I see that this is happening 20 miles from my house, noted Dean Cain in the documentary in reference to flyers with Nazi swastikas posted at a school days after Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss shared her firsthand horrors with students who had posted anti-Sematic photographs.

Said Schloss, who is the stepsister of Anne Frank, one of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and the author of the book After Auschwitz: When I heard about this incident here I was shocked, that in 2019, in a well-educated town and in a very highly-educated school, that incidents like this are still happening.

More recently, Syracuse University in November 2019 suspended students in connection with a string of racist and anti-Semitic incidents. There were 12 reported occurrences of racist and anti-Semitic graffiti found on or near the universitys campus.

In the 1930s, the world ignored all the early signs of anti-Semitism. Afterwards, we look back in hindsight and wondered why we didnt act before it exploded, said Montel Williams in the film. The signs are there again. Why are these signs repeating themselves?

Thats when we knew we had to make this documentary, he added. When a group gets singled-out and dehumanized, innocent people die.

The Rise of Anti-Semitism

Many people hoped and believed and thought that after the Holocaust anti-Semitism would go away, noted Dr. Robert Rozett, Director of the Yad Vashem Libraries in the film. Given the force of this horrible tragedy, that were perpetrated by human beings on other human beings, perpetrated by people who hated Jews, anti-Semitism was, again, at the heart of it. People thought they would see this and it wouldwellgo away. It was politically incorrect for a long time to express anti-Semitism in a great many places around the world. But that started changing again in the 2000s.

According to Montel Williams, anti-Semitic incidents were up by 86 percent in the United States in 2017. Dean Cain, meanwhile, cites a staggering 48 percent of the 1.4 million Jews currently living in Europe who have considered moving because of anti-Semitism.

"History tells us that anti-Semitism is a form of bigotry that can easily escalate from rhetoric to violence, he said. In showing audiences what this rising tide of anti-Semitism really looks like, I hope we can contribute to an equally dramatic decline in this dangerous ideology of hate."

Laura McKenzie, host of syndicated weekly Laura McKenzies Traveler and another executive producer on Hate Among Us, talks about the advancement of anti-Semitism, in particular, throughout Europe.

Im seeing a steady increase in places like Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Spain, Scandinaviaeverywhere, she said. I have a lot of Jewish friends in Europe. Now, its reached the point where those who have not already moved are scared. They have to hide any signs they are Jewish when they are in public. Just like they did in the 1930s, people are leaving their homes out of fear.

Some Recent Statistics

In 2017, more than 100 anti-Semitic incidents per month were recorded in the UK. In 2018, a reported 1,646 hate crimes against Jews were committed in Germany. The latter was an increase of 10 percent from one year earlier. In 2019, former vice president Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, expressed concern on social media. I am deeply disturbed by the news coming out of my law school alma mater, Syracuse University, Biden wrote on Twitter. We are truly in a battle for the soul of this nation, and it requires all of us to stand up together as a country against racism and bigotry.

With footage of writer Andrew Anglin, who pens website The Daily Stormer, which advocates the genocide of Jews; to recollections about the victims of anti-Semitism, as well as the survivors of it, Hate Among Us is truly terrifying to digest because of this documentation of what could be the beginning of a modern day Holocaust. Most importantly, the film raises awareness, in tremendous detail, of something that must be snuffed out now before it escalates any further.

A lot of people have asked me why Im involved in this documentary. They ask, are you Jewish? And I say, no, I am not Jewish, and neither are Dean and Montel. And, that is actually why I am so proud of them, said Laura McKenzie. We believe that now, everyone, whether they are Jewish or not, needs to take a stance against anti-Semitism.

One way to do that is to watch Hate Among Us, which is a pivotal step. Given the rise of streaming services, an outlet like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon or Apple TV+ would be the ideal platform to showcase it. We all need to see this film.

Read more:

Documentary Hate Among Us Sheds Light on the Rise of Anti-Semitism in the World - Forbes

Category: Holocaust Denial
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