Ed Zwick's "Defiance" is a Naïve Paean to Jewish Power
Recent Jewish history has taught us two lessons that are at variance with pre-Holocaust thought: first, Jewish power doesn’t guarantee Jewish safety, and second, Jewish power, like Christian or Muslim power, is impure. Despite Israel’s creation in 1948 and the establishment of a financially secure and politically influential American Jewish community, Jews around the world–and in Israel itself–still live in danger. Take, for example, the recent attack on Mumbai’s Chabad House, the Israeli bus bombings of the 1990s, or the lynching of Jews in France. And both Israeli and American Jews have been tainted by power. Look at the recent assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank that Ehud Olmert called a “pogrom,” Olmert’s corruption, or the missteps by Jews that helped create the crises in Iraq and the financial sector. Being tough, we’ve learned, isn’t enough.
So it’s hard to see “Defiance,” Ed Zwick’s new Holocaust drama, as anything but woefully antiquated. A crusade to discredit the myth of the weak Jew might have made sense in 1960 (think “Exodus”), but “Defiance” is simply a betrayal of contemporary Jewish values. It glorifies violence and machismo at the expense of intellectualism and women, endorses revenge (with some reservations) despite its historically high price tag, and disparages Yiddish culture, which, despite its mythological association with the “weak Jew,” is currently “in.” Maybe Zwick thought he could ingratiate himself with Jews by defying, like so many before him, the weak-Jew stereotype. Maybe he worried that the stereotype, or even the weak Jew himself, was making a comeback, and that by championing an alternative Jew he could be of service to the Jewish people. But in “Defiance,” he offers an obsessive exaltation of hyper-masculinity that negates everything the modern Jew has come to represent.
Based on Peter Duffy’s 2003 book The Bielski Brothers, “Defiance” tells a revised version of the brothers’ story. Led by Tuvia (Daniel Craig), a striking man with blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, a group of Jewish partisans build a village in the Belarusian woods, a romantic and appropriately pristine setting for a Jewish rebirth. The camp, communalistic albeit with a strong leader, resembles a Kibbutz, and serves both as the Jews’ home and their base to fight the Nazis.
As rumors about the Bielskis spread through the camps and ghettos of the Pale, they reach the ears of desperate Jews who abandon their faithful yet ultimately powerless rabbis in favor of the woods and true salvation. Redemption appears in the form of Tuvia, a Moses figure with added oratory powers, who rides a majestic white horse that seems to materialize ex nihilo as the mini-Zion begins taking shape. With the growing group of “forest people” huddling in reverence, Tuvia gives a hair-raising speech, reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s in “Braveheart,” pledging to lead them to some metaphorical promised land. Later, in an absurd twist, as the bitter winter and intermittent battles with Nazis take their toll on Tuvia’s followers, he kills the horse to feed them. Note from Ed Zwick to Jews: God is dead.
Women and intellectuals are also casualties of the film. Along with children and rabbis, they comprise the “malbushim,” a derogatory term indicating that their contribution to survival is on par with that of pants. It is telling that there is never a discussion about how valuable pants actually are, much less an effort by the non-fighters to make themselves useful. With the exception of Tuvia’s girlfriend, who wins his love by shooting a wolf, women are portrayed as at once helpless and manipulative. And while most men take “forest wives” to protect and have their way with, the elderly teacher and the socialist intellectual oddly prefer each other’s company, and are often pictured snuggled together playing chess.
Despite having triumphed in an ideological struggle with his more militant brother Zus, who abandons the group in favor of a Soviet military unit, Tuvia, it turns out, is too weak to save the Jews himself. When Nazi raids force Tuvia to uproot the entire camp, including the old and the sick, he and his youngest brother Asiel lead them across the “Red Sea,” though “not by miracles”–and straight into the Nazi’s arms. As defeat looms, Zus and his Jewish-Russian comrades come to the rescue, ambushing the Nazis and saving Tuvia from a last-second suicide assault. Zus might have been wrong to trust the non-Jews, but he was right about the value of violence.
“Defiance” bills itself as “an epic tale of family, honor, vengeance and salvation,” but it’s also a story about Jews and oppression, history and ideology, power and powerlessness. And the social Darwinist interpretation of recent Jewish history it offers is politically incorrect, demeaning to the vast majority of Jews who do not fit the mold of Tuvia or Zus, and by most accounts, just plain wrong. Zwick is no stranger to violence–indeed, he made a compelling case against it in “Blood Diamond” (2006), a vivid film about child soldiers in the Sierra Leone–but he’s off the mark with “Defiance,” however real it seems and however gripping it is. Rather than turn our backs on the lessons of the last sixty years, let’s keep them in mind as we strive for a better, fairer, and more peaceful future for all people.
