INSIDE:

The Yiddish
Radio Project

74

Hall Of Fame
Inducts The Ramones. .78

Olympia Dukakis
At Temple Israel . . . . 82

In "The Believer; "
Rvan Gosling plays
Dann), Balint.
"The sense of
being pulled in
opposite directions
is something I've
always felt,"
says Henry Bean,
the films
writer/director:

Henry Bean's award-winning

film about a Jewish neo-Nazi

skinhead, debuts on Showtime.

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN

Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

S creenwriter Henry Bean was
riveted by the story the instant
he heard it 25 years ago.
Back in the 1960s, the New
York Times received a tip that a kid arrest-
ed at a Ku Klux Klan rally at a White
Castle restaurant was in fact Jewish. The
editors sent a reporter to interview
Daniel Burros, who spewed an elaborate,
anti-Semitic rap. The journalist patiently
listened to Burros, then suddenly inter-
rupted him.
He'd interviewed the Queens rabbi
who'd conducted his bar mitzvah, he
revealed.
How come Burros believed this stuff if
he was Jewish?
"If you print that, I'll kill myself,"
replied the racist, who took action an
hour after the Sunday Times story hit the
streets. He put Wagner on the record
player, placed a gun to his head and shot
himself in a barracks at his Nazi head-
quarters in Pennsylvania.
Bean, screenwriter for such films as
Mulholland Falls and Enemy of the State,
studied the book journalists Abe
Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb wrote to
exonerate the Times, but found nothing
surprising save one detail.
Burros "would bring knishes back to
the Nazi headquarters and hang out with
girls who looked obviously Jewish," says
the writer-director of The Believer,
inspired by Burros' story. "The notion of
somebody hiding something and reveal-
ing it at the same time fascinated me."
The film, which debuts on Showtime 8
p.m. Sunday, Match 17, before a limited
theatrical release this spring, isn't so
much about self-hatred as an odd truth
about human psychology — pushed to
the extreme.
"The sense of being pulled in oppo-
CONTROVERSY on page 72

3/15
2002

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