Claim: Spielberg Didn’t Know About The Holocaust Until His Late-30s
"...he didn’t have time for much history until he was older."
Bradford Thomas
In a recent interview with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, Tablet's David Samuels said that he learned from Hollywood legend John Milius that Steven Spielberg did not find out about the Holocaust until his late-30s. Spielberg, Samuels explained, was a "suburban prodigy" who apparently "didn't have time for much history until he was older."
After discussing the difference between being a Jew in New York and L.A., the Cold War nostalgia and Jewish themes interwoven into Mad Men, and the rising anti-Israel movement as thinly veiled anti-Semitism, Samuels paraphrased a firsthand account from the writer of Apocalypse Now involving Spielberg. Here is the relevant excerpts:
SAMUELS: Twenty years ago, I was staying at a friend’s house and her dad was a personage of whatever note among California architects, and he had a dinner party, and the person sitting to my right was John Milius, who wrote Apocalypse Now [...] At some point he was like, “You’re from New York, are you Jewish?” I was like, “Yeah I’m Jewish.” He’s like, “I got a good story for you. You know that I went to film school with Steven Spielberg, right? We’re friends.” I was like, “All right.”
He says, “So, one day I got a call.” This is sometime in the late ’80s, 1990s, something like that. So he got a call and it’s Spielberg, and he says “John, you’ve got to come over right away.” [...] I said, ‘Is something wrong?’ He said, ‘Just come over, come over.’ And so I said, ‘OK.’ So, I get in my car and I drive up to the Spielberg mansion and I’m going through the gate, I parked the car, Steven comes to the door himself, and he’s like, ‘Come in here, John. I’ve got to show you something.’ And so I got in with Steven and we go in his living room and there are books all over the living room, dozens of books, like Time-Life books, open to these photographs of the ghettos and the gas chambers and whatever else. And he says, ‘John, did you know that they killed 6 MILLION Jews during the Second World War?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Did you know that they had gas chambers where they gassed Jews to DEATH.’ And I said, ‘Yes, Steven. I knew that.’ ”
I was so stunned, for a moment, and then I was like, “No, that’s bullshit.” And Milius said, “No, no, no, that really happened. Steven discovered the Holocaust when he was in his late 30s. He had no idea it happened.”
Samuels went on to note that Spielberg was a "suburban prodigy" who was apparently too busy producing massive blockbusters to learn about one of the most significant episodes in the 20th century:
SAMUELS: His parents knew about it, for sure. But he was a suburban prodigy. Then he was doing Jaws, he was doing Close Encounters, E.T., he didn’t have time for much history until he was older. Plus it was California in the ’70s and ’80s. So it does make sense.
The subject of the Holocaust came up earlier in the interview, when Samuels and Weiner discussed the "180" done by the media in its treatment of Jews in the last few decades:
SAMUELS: But thinking back on those immigrants, and then on the Holocaust, it’s a strange thing now with Jews in America, because they suddenly don’t count as a minority group anymore. They did a 180, from being the definition of a minority group to being the embodiment of white-skin privilege. Especially to white elites, who may find it useful to position the Jews as flak-catchers.
WEINER: Well, here I can quote something that I read in Tablet—Howard Jacobson’s comment that the Holocaust made it taboo to be anti-Semitic, but now they can direct all of those words and emotions at Israel and not realize that it’s the same thing.
SAMUELS: I think they realize it.
WEINER: It’s the same sentiments, the same clichés.
SAMUELS: Israel is definitely a useful word. But when someone looks at you and says, “Those Israelis are worse than the Nazis,” I think both parties know what’s being said, and to whom.
WEINER: I remember the first time I saw, sometime early in the Intifada, that thing in Time magazine where they used Israel and genocide in the same sentence. I thought, “Wow, they must love doing that.”
SAMUELS: I think it also plays into a particular politics in the media world in New York, which has been dominated by Jews for a long time. So, people come in, they feel like outsiders, and now they have a club that the Jews can’t dominate, even though of course they still try. And that combines in a funny way with the energy of new media, because old media is the thing that was supposedly owned and run by Jews. Therefore, the Israel-is-the-most-hateful-and-oppressive-country-on-earth meme is great because it expresses two kinds of hostility at once: The old resentments, and the will to power of the new medium.
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