After its slam by the Times, the audience vanished for this well executed enlightenment, even though “Defamation” is no more anti-Jewish than another documentary on Jews and the Holocaust, the fine “Hiding and Seeking”, which dealt with its director’s efforts to stop his sons’ alienation from other cultures such as the Poles by taking them to Poland to meet the farmers who had saved both their grandfathers at the risk of their own lives. But “Hiding and Seeking” was well received by the Times, compared with “Defamation,” whose New York Times reveiew effectively destroyed its audience here in Manhattan, it would appear. We hear that one discerning man went to see it this week in Manhattan and found he was the sole member of the audience.

Of course they could have had ads trumpeting the other long and admiring reviews, but probably didn’t want to spend the money, or didn’t expect the Times rejection. Maybe they should have – the ADL released the following press release on May 8:

ADL Statement on “Defamation,” a Documentary Film by Yoav Shamir

Two years ago Yoav Shamir approached the Anti-Defamation League for assistance on a documentary he was making on the subject of anti-Semitism. We provided him wide access to film ADL in action, in our offices, at our annual national meeting, on leadership missions in Italy, Ukraine and Poland, and in Israel. Our expectation was that his documentary would present a serious portrait of what Jews worldwide face today — anti-Semitism in both its age-old and new forms, and the actions taken to counter it.

After seeing “Defamation” we can only say the film fell far short of our expectation. Rather than document anti-Semites and their hatred of Jews and the Jewish State of Israel, the film belittles the issue and portrays the work of ADL and that of his own country as inconsequential. There was so much more Shamir could have and should have done.

“Defamation” is neither enlightening, nor edifying, nor compelling. It distorts the prevalence and impact of anti-Semitism and cheapens the Holocaust. It is Shamir’s perverse, personal, political perspective and a missed opportunity to document a serious and important issue.
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But New York ignored all the other good reviews, including this one from NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120452232 Exploring The Politics Of ‘Defamation’

by Ella Taylor

Showing the Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir around the New York offices of the Anti-Defamation League, the group’s jovial national director, Abraham Foxman, tells a colleague, “He’s a journalist, so he wants good stuff.”

Shamir gets very good stuff for Defamation, a bracing inquiry into beliefs about the prevalence of world anti-Semitism today, but it’s doubtful that Foxman will think so. Depending on which parts of the film you respond to, Foxman has either dedicated his life to making the world safe for the Jewish people or reaped a handsome living by stoking fears that hatred of Jews — far from being extinguished by the defeat of the Nazis — is alive and kicking all over the globe, including in the United States, long regarded as a safe haven for Jews and a staunch defender of Israel.

Shamir isn’t out to get Foxman, who’s a Holocaust survivor and one of the nation’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbyists, but the filmmaker clearly takes a different view of what’s good for the Jews and for the soul of Israel. A member of Israel’s peace movement, Shamir garnered widespread acclaim for his verité film Checkpoint, which assessed the impact of border-control posts in the Israeli-occupied territories, both on the Israeli soldiers who manned them and on the Palestinians forced to pass through them. His superb 5 Days observed Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza with approval—- and with sympathy for the anguish of both the evicted settlers and the soldiers, whose orders were to remove resisters bodily from their homes.

Asked by a Sundance Film Festival audience member how he felt about the pullout, Shamir answered wryly, “As a peacenik, I was glad things went smoothly. As a filmmaker, I was hoping for more trouble.”

Shamir instinctively goes where the drama is, but he also has a gadfly’s sharp radar for the gap between rhetoric and reality. When he presses ADL staffers for evidence to back up their claims of a sharp spike in North American anti-Semitism in 2007, they can offer only wan transgressions — letters from employees denied time off for a Jewish holiday, or people offended by a cop’s incautious use of the word “Jew” — that hardly stack up compared with the Holocaust, which is repeatedly invoked by ADL officials as something that could happen again anytime, anywhere.

In the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, where tensions between blacks and Jews flared into a serious 1991 riot, Shamir finds Jewish residents on one side who are fearful for their safety, and blacks on the other who recommend a thorough read of the notorious anti-Jewish pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But he also finds an Orthodox rabbi who notes that when a black person robs a Jew, the crime isn’t necessarily an anti-Semitic one. The rabbi ventures further that the hypervigilance of the ADL inflames already volatile relations between Jews and blacks.

Indeed, Shamir finds far more sensitivity to anti-Semitism among secular Jews than among their religious counterparts, both in the United States and in Israel. Accompanying Israeli teenagers on a school trip to Polish concentration camps, Shamir watches as their teachers, guides and a zealous security detail whip up fears of rampant neo-Nazism among their charges. One student, hilariously, comes away from an encounter with elderly Polish locals (who speak not a word of English) with the firm conviction that they’ve called her a “monkey” and a “donkey.”

If Shamir is gifted with an anthropologist’s openness to complication, he also has a contrarian’s impish appetite for the opposing argument, the more intemperately expressed the better. The leftist Israeli publisher Uri Avnery assures him that anti-Semitism in America is “a Jewish invention,” while Norman Finkelstein — a professor and son of Holocaust survivors who argues in his controversial book The Holocaust Industry that Israel and its supporters play the Shoah card to justify the oppression of the Palestinians — denounces Foxman as a “thug and a hoodlum.”

That’s a lot further than the mild-mannered Shamir is willing to go. He airs without comment the view, expressed by Foxman’s companions on a trip to a concentration camp, that the Holocaust could happen again anytime. But he’s enough of a polemicist to question Foxman’s equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. And he’s shocked that American scholars Stephen M. Walt and John Mearsheimer have been labeled as anti-Semites for suggesting that the influence of pro-Israel lobbyists — the ADL prominent among them — is good for neither Israel nor the United States. (Walt and Mearsheimer have argued, among other things, that the Iraq war was “due in large part” to the influence of pro-Israel groups on the Bush administration.)

No doubt Shamir will be accused of claiming that anti-Semitism is dead. He doesn’t, but the ambiguities in the title of Defamation suggest that, in an age of viral and often inaccurate media messaging, we have lost the capacity to distinguish between degrees of evil — between systematic racism and the minor slights that are the price we pay for living in democracies.

Shamir means to liberate Israelis and Diaspora Jews from the defensive crouch they inherited from the Shoah, an admirable goal he undermines only slightly when he suggests that Jews and Israelis “normalize” themselves by looking more to the present and the future than the past. Neglecting the lessons of the past may be throwing out the baby with the bath water, but it’s hard to argue with Shamir’s gentlemanly hint that when talking about anti-Semitism, shades of gray apply.
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That excellent, balanced and appreciative review – who knew that NPR carries such good stuff on line? – shows how low the Times has sunk with its current staff cuts, or perhaps this isn’t new at all, who knows?

Certainly it mirrors the experience of House of Numbers.

Here’s a synopsis of “Hiding and Seeking”, which was an equally good film rated 100% by critics according to Rotten Tomatoes:

Synopsis: In a testimony to the power of tolerance, filmmaker Menachem Daum, his wife, and their sons travel to a Polish town where his father-in-law and his two brothers hid from the Nazis with a non-Jewish family for 28 months. Daum proposes the journey when he becomes increasingly worried that his ultraorthodox sons, who live in Israel, have become affected by a culture of interfaith intolerance and distrust. At first, Daum’s family resists his idea, unwilling to explore the country of their family’s persecution. But eventually they agree to go along. His father-in-law fears for their safety, and also worries that the Muchas, the family who hid him, will demand compensation or express anger over his failure to keep in touch with them after the war. As they travel to the Mucha farm, the family visits sites important to their history–visiting relatives’ graves, and giving a blessing at a former synagogue–both emblems of a once-thriving Jewish community. Later, as Daum’s wife and sons tour the farm, their cynicism gives way to raw emotion. After so many years, the Muchas find the expression of gratitude they seem desperately to have desired, and the Daums tearfully piece together their history. Ultimately Daum’s journey begins to heal wounds between the two families and provides a solid foundation from which to increase interfaith tolerance, within his own family and the world.
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This is the Times review:

Movie Review
Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust (2003)
February 6, 2004
FILM IN REVIEW; ‘Hiding and Seeking’ — ‘Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust’
By DAVE KEHR
Published: February 6, 2004

Directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky
In English, Yiddish and Polish, with English subtitles
Not rated, 97 minutes

The filmmakers Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky collaborated on the 1997 ”A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” a sympathetic and informative documentary on Hasidim, members of the Jewish sect, many living and working in large modern cities while strictly following forms of worship developed in 18th-century Central Europe. ”A Life Apart” presented Hasidism as being built on apparent contradictions: at once cosmopolitan and isolationist, full of joy and oppressed by tradition.

Now these directors have made ”Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust,” a documentary centered on Mr. Daum’s strained but loving relationship with his sons, Tzvi Dovid and Akiva, Talmudic scholars who left their native Brooklyn to study in Israel. Mr. Daum fears his children have turned their backs on the non-Jewish world, regarding all Gentiles with suspicion bordering on hate.

Mr. Daum, who narrates the documentary and frequently lends his warm, bearish presence to the scenes he is filming, is an Orthodox Jew with a broad streak of what fundamentalists of many persuasions have become fond of denouncing as ‘’secular humanism.” He passionately believes that all men are brothers, and that all of humanity contains a touch of the divine. His sons, who look nearly identical with their black hats, scraggly beards and skeptical smiles, firmly contradict him, pointing to 1,900 years of religious persecution leading to the Holocaust.

Mr. Daum resolves to take his sons and his wife, Rifka, to Poland, the country from which his parents, Holocaust survivors, fled. (Mr. Daum was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.) Hoping to find traces of his family history, he discovers much more. His search leads him to a Polish couple, now elderly, whose family hid his wife’s father and his two brothers in a hole beneath a hay barn for 28 months during the Nazi occupation, risking their own lives in the process.

The sons are moved by such compelling, living evidence of goodness in non-Jews, but neither one is ready to abandon his beliefs. Through Mr. Daum’s efforts, the Polish couple receive the Righteous Among the Nations Award of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, and the Daum family returns to observe the ceremony. But even while the sons express their gratitude, they cling to their separatist ideas. There may be a few good Poles, one of the young men observes, but given a chance to mount another Holocaust, ”they’d probably do it again.”

The outgoing manner of the elder Mr. Daum makes it easy to share his pain and disappointment before such statements. Like so many people of goodwill these days, he is confounded by the revival of ancient ethnic conflicts when technology is making the planet a much smaller place with more porous boundaries. His film, which opens today in Manhattan, offers no answers and is all the more moving for it. An honest befuddlement may be the most apt and true response to the world as it is. DAVE KEHR
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The real puzzle of Hiding and Seeking is the fact that the two grandfathers rescued by the Poles at such lethal risk to themselves and their families never dropped so much as a postcard after they reached the States to thank their saviors. Apparently some gifts are just too large to thank for except in person.

So, I think we can take a commonly believed assumption — that the Jewish race are more moral than the average person, and are “the conscience of humanity” — with a grain of kosher salt.

Now, please, more Rodgers and Hart on the airwaves, okay?