32 | MAY 21 • 2020
Arts&Life
documentary
‘Viral’ Anti-Semitism
Filmmaker Andrew Goldberg talks about his new documentary
that premieres on PBS May 26.
T
he new documentary Viral:
Antisemitism in Four Mutations
examines four different iterations,
or “mutations,
” of anti-Semitism across
the globe today. Its director, Emmy-
winning filmmaker Andrew Goldberg,
trains his focus on the political far-right
in the U.S., the far-left members of the
United Kingdom’
s Labour Party, a gov-
ernment-backed propaganda campaign in
Hungary and Islamic extremism in France.
Goldberg has directed
and produced other films on
Judaism and anti-Semitism,
including 2007’
s Anti-Semitism
in the 21st Century: The
Resurgence. He spoke to the
Jewish News ahead of Viral’
s
TV debut.
This interview has been condensed and
edited.
JN: What was the inspiration behind this
film? Why did you decide to make it?
Goldberg: After the [2016] election, there
were a number of indicators that showed
anti-Semitism was on the rise … And it just
sort of suddenly raised eyebrows that there
was a change in tenor in the conversation,
certainly here in the United States. And
when we looked internationally, we started
to see the same thing was happening, but
each different country had its own variant,
if you will, and its own mutation. And that’
s
kind of what gave us the idea for “viral” —
that this affliction in each country was the
same premise but a different expression.
JN: How did you decide which countries
— which mutations — to include?
Goldberg: We looked at a lot of countries,
but these… were just four very clear exam-
ples. We had anti-Semitism on the right in
the U.S.; on the left in England. We had it
from the government in Hungary and then
we had it from Islamists in France… We felt
that these four were the most emblematic, I
think, of where the conversation was today.
JN: How did making this movie feel dif-
ferent or similar to making your first film
about anti-Semitism?
Goldberg: Every year at the seder, my rela-
tives would bring up other examples of hate,
other examples of bigotry, other examples
of racism, other examples of anti-Semitism
… I find that it’
s all kind of similar. I mean,
people just continue to spew hate, and we
do our best to report on it and try to cover
it. And there’
s an awful lot of overlap. So it
was different in the architecture and it was
different in the structure, it was different
in some of the technology, but the stories
are very similar. We’
re interviewing perpe-
trators and victims and experts, and that
doesn’
t really change.
JN: How long did it take to film this
movie, from start to finish?
Goldberg: Three years, but it would
have been shorter if we didn’
t have [the]
Pittsburgh and Poway [synagogue shoot-
ings] because that really sort of changed the
conversation. Keep in mind that when we
started this film, those things hadn’
t even
happened yet.
In the process of making this film, a
woman was thrown from her window to
her death in France, and more and more
statistics came out of France, and then the
MAYA GOLDMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER | PHOTOS COURTESY OF VIRAL: ANTISEMITISM IN FOUR MUTATIONS
Rabbi Elisar Admon of
the Jewish Burial Society
discusses the 2018
Pittsburgh shooting in the
documentary Viral.
Goldberg