Media Monitor

Oskartime For
Spielberg

ARTHUR J. MAGIDA SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

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F

ew films have received as
many glowing reviews as
Schindler's List, Steven
Spielberg's opus about a
Czech-German who saved
1,300 Jews during the Holo-
caust.
Not only has it copped the
New York and Los Angeles
movie critics'
"best film of the
year" awards, it
has also been
hailed as:
* "Great" by
the New York-
er's Terrance
Rafferty, who
also called one
particular scene
"the most terri-
fying ever
filmed."
* "The movie
of the year" by
Newsweek,
which promised
that the film
"will shatter
you, but it earns
its tears honest- Steven Spielberg:
ly.... [Spiel Glowingreviews.
berg's]
abundant virtuosity is in the
service of a harrowing authen-
ticity."
* "Masterly" by the New Re-
public's Stanley Kauffmann,
who added that Mr. Spielberg
"has made his own Holocaust
museum" (a nod to the nine-
month-old Holocaust museum
in Washington.)
The Jewish press has been
almost as laudatory, but with
qualifications. In the New York
Jewish Week, Letty Cottin
Pogrebin said the film "delivers
a volatile combination of deso-
lation and deliverance, torment
and rebirth — and music to tear
the soul to shreds... It is not a
movie you want to see before a
portrait sitting. It leaves your
face a wreck, your spirits si-
multaneously elated and in-
consolable, your mind
throbbing with images that will
surely haunt your dreams."
And yet, Ms. Pogrebin pon-
dered how audiences "will
process this brilliantly direct-
ed, fiercely engaging story in
which all the Jews one cares
about are saved... I wish Holly-
wood didn't need nice white
guys and good Germans to
draw 'mainstream' Americans
into its movie houses..."
Ilene Rosenzweig made a
similar argument in the For-
ward. She got "peeved" because
"whoever greenlighted this pic-
ture may have figured more

-

non-Jews... want to see a Holo-
caust movie with a Christian
hero. I wish I would have had
a hero in this movie to identify
with other than the ever-eelish
Ben Kingsley playing
Schindler's accountant, king of
the Jewish wimps..."
The Los Angeles Jewish
Journal adroitly
straddled the
two thumbs/no
thumbs,
good/bad issue
by publishing
two reviews. In
one, Morrie
Warshawski
called it "one of
the most engag-
ing and gripping
films ever made
about the Holo-
caust" But
Jonathan Kirsch
wondered "why,
if Spielberg
wanted to tell
the story of the
Holocaust..., he
chose to make a
movie in which
the hero is a
Nazi, however goodhearted,
and the principal Jewish char-
acter... is an accountant whose
life is spared because he is so
adept at cooking the books for
his Nazi masters? I wish Spiel-
berg had found his way to, for
example, the story of Bielski
partisans rather than the
`Schindler Jews.' "
And the Jerusalem Report
said Mr. Spielberg "[couldn't re-
sist turning the Holocaust into
another elaborate, overpower-
ing, all consuming Swiss watch.
While the director loses himself
in [the film's] technical intrica-
cies, the rest of us are left know-
ing less about Oskar Schindler
than we should, and possibly
more about Spielberg than we'd
like."

Meyerhoff
A "Hero"

Baltimore's Harvey "Bud" Mey-
erhoff is one of Town & Coun-
try magazine's eight "heroes of
philanthropy."
The super up-scale magazine
hailed Mr. Meyerhoff for being
the leading force that brought
Washington's United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum
into existence. He was chair-
man of the museum's founding
council from 1987 to last April
and donated $6 million to the

