OK, you're right, I was wrong--it wasn't Frontline.
Here is a summary of the film from its producer:
ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE 21st CENTURY:
THE RESURGENCE
Premieres on PBS, Monday, January 8, 2007
10:00-11:00PM EST (check local listings)
New York, December 12, 2006 - Today, many parts of the world are experiencing a massive resurgence of anti-Semitism - from hate propaganda, to vandalism, to violent attacks on Jews themselves. Worldwide, since the year 2000, major violent acts against Jews and Jewish institutions have nearly doubled from 1990s levels. People are asking: Why is this happening? What real threats does it pose? And what roles do Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict really play? The answers will surprise almost everyone. Hosted and narrated by veteran broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff, Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence explores the roots of anti-Semitism and examines how and why it continues to flourish today. The 60-minute documentary was written, produced and directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Andrew Goldberg in association with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Goldberg is also the producer of the recent PBS film The Armenian Genocide.
In June 2006, a poll by The Pew Charitable Trusts revealed that over 97 percent of Egyptians and Jordanians hold "unfavorable opinions of Jews." Among scholars, journalists and experts, there is little disagreement that anti-Semitism is on the rise. Throughout the Arab and Islamic world, overt hatred of Jews has become commonplace in mainstream media. Across the Middle East, a recent 30-part mini-series depicts Jews murdering a Christian child to make Matzo with his blood; anti-Semitic commentaries and cartoons appear regularly in newspapers.
"I think it is dangerous to underestimate the importance of propaganda and rhetoric in terms of harming people," explains Salameh Nematt, Washington D.C. Bureau Chief, Al Hayat Newspaper. "This anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish attitude is victimizing a huge number of people."
Says host Judy Woodruff, "We live in a time of growing intolerance, especially religious intolerance, and it is unsettling to see anti-Semitism on the rise once again. As a journalist, I am proud to be associated with this documentary, which sheds light on a particularly troubling form of hateful behavior."
Filmed in Syria, Egypt, Israel, the West Bank, France and the US, Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence includes interviews with David Ignatius of the Washington Post; Israeli Knesset Member Natan Sharanksy; Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi; New York Times best-selling author and NYU Professor Tony Judt; Professor Hisham Ahmed of Birzeit University, Ramallah; Hassam Hamed, Head of Egyptian State Television and others.
Through extraordinary and disturbing archival footage, interviews with leading experts, and bold man-on-the-street interviews, Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence weaves together the past and the present to explore the evolution and re-birth of an age-old prejudice.
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Producer Andrew Goldberg is the owner of Two Cats Productions in New York City. His television credits include numerous documentaries and long form programming for PBS, ABC News, E!, CNN and others. His recent documentary, The Armenian Genocide, aired nationally on PBS in 2006. It was described as "powerful" by the New York Times, "serious, literate and heartbreaking" by the NJ Star Ledger, and garnered outstanding reviews and coverage from virtually every major newspaper in the US. His previous productions include A Yiddish World Remembered for PBS, which won an Emmy in 2002, and The Armenians, A Story of Survival, which aired on PBS stations nationally in 2002 and was awarded the CINE Golden Eagle. He has also written and produced commercials for such companies as BellSouth, Sephora/Louis Vuitton, AT&T, PetSmart and others.
Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) is a major provider of programs for the PBS national primetime schedule and American Public Television (APT), producing a variety of freestanding documentary specials and series. OPB is also a statewide network of community-supported learning resources, including OPB Television, an affiliate of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and OPB Radio, presenting local news coverage and the programs of National Public Radio (NPR), American Public Media (APM) and Public Radio International (PRI). The OPB Web site is opb.org.
Major Funding for Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence is provided by: Stockton Media, Harvey and Constance Krueger, The Marc and Diane Spilker Foundation, The David B. Heller Foundation, and The Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Foundation.
DVD copies of Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence are available for $29.95 + S & H. Offer made by: Oregon Public Broadcasting, 1-800-440-2651. Or visit www.twocatstv.com.
twocatstv.com
And here is a not very compelling review/summary from the NYT:
The Libeling of a People Surges With a Vengeance
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Diatribes against the Jews are shockingly crude in Arab television programs and newspapers. They are also shockingly commonplace, “the elevator music for the Arab world,” as David Ignatius, an international affairs columnist for The Washington Post, puts it in “Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence,” a PBS documentary that is broadcast tonight. And that background noise has become more strident and pervasive over the last few years, spread by satellite television and the Internet throughout the Middle East and North Africa, with echoes reverberating deep into immigrant groups in Europe.
“Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century” tries to explain the origins of that hate as well as its surge. Whatever its roots, anti-Semitism in the Muslim world is linked inexorably to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and keeps getting worse. And no topic is more sensitive or incendiary. So not surprisingly, the script is cautious and elliptical, more comfortable exploring the past than the present.
The film begins with a vitriol sampler, clips of various Islamic clerics culled by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington monitoring group founded by Yigal Carmon, a former counterintelligence adviser to the Israeli government. In 2004 on Al-Manar TV in Lebanon, for example, Sheikh Taha al-Sabonji said, “Those responsible for all civil strife and other problems throughout history were the Jews.” (Muslim extremists are not the only ones to express such sentiments, of course. Mel Gibson expressed a similar idea when he was arrested for drunk driving.)
A history lesson follows. Various experts explain that Jews did not have equal rights in the Muslim-ruled world, but were relatively tolerated until the 19th century, when the crumbling of the Ottoman empire and the rise of the Zionist movement dramatically changed the landscape. Jewish refugees escaping persecution in Europe arrived in Palestine en masse. “The Arab reaction was a refusal of Jewish presence,” says Zeev Sternhell, an Israeli historian. “It was not anti-Semitism.”
But European missionaries and colonists supplied those biases, bringing to the region a Christian rationale for anti-Semitism, steeped in images of Jews as devils and killers of Jesus.
During World War II Arabs found common cause with European fascists. Hitler won the allegiance of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by promising to remove the Jews from Palestine.
Fabrications like the early-20th-century “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and medieval blood libels, legends that Jews baked matzo with the blood of murdered Christian children, faded in Europe after World War II. They lingered on in the East, finding new traction when Arab armies were defeated in 1948 and Israel emerged as a state and Palestinians were displaced.
Israeli’s victory in the 1967 war left the Arab world humiliated and angry, so anti-Semitic theories of an all-powerful worldwide Jewish conspiracy were “soothing,” says Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton.
The film does not mention that Mr. Lewis is one of the leading scholars that Vice President Dick Cheney consulted to formulate the administration’s rationale for toppling Saddam Hussein. The documentary makes very little mention of the American occupation of Iraq — which is odd, given how often the Arab media paint the war as a sinister conspiracy cooked up by Israel and its supporters in Washington.
The film reports that anti-
Semitic acts of violence have almost doubled since the 1990s. But there are lots of other indicators besides violence. Lately lurid television dramas include cockeyed depictions of Jews and Jewish history.
One notable example from 2003 is a lavish, Syrian-made series called “Al Shatat,” a term for diaspora, which begins with Baron Edmond de Rothschild, an earlier financier of Jewish settlement in Palestine, on his deathbed, telling his family and friends that “God has given the Jews the mission of ruling the world.”
“Al-Shatat” also includes a modern-day blood libel: bearded Jews slitting the throat of a Christian child.
Scholars say that Israel’s enemies exploit anti-Semitism to rally support for their cause, but Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, argues that Israel also finds anti-Semitism useful. “I think that the brouhaha about it is a systematic attempt to draw attention away from the roots of the conflict,” Mr. Khalidi argues. “There has been an oppressive occupation going on for 40 years, a people has been dispossessed.”
The narrator, Judy Woodruff, steps in as if to cool frayed tempers. “And while some say that hatred of Israel is caused by Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights and West Bank, and the conflict in Lebanon,” she says, “others note that overt calls by Arab leaders for the destruction of the entire Jewish state were commonplace even before the occupation which began in 1967.”
“Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century” explores the ancient hatreds that have risen up in new forms. But the film’s circumspection reveals just how complex the problem is to address, let alone redress.
ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY
The Resurgence
On most PBS stations tonight; check local listings.
Directed, produced and written by Andrew Goldberg. Produced by Two Cats Productions. Presented by Oregon Public Broadcasting.
nytimes.com |
