Vengeance is not Jewish. This is an idea that people
throughout history have had difficulty reconciling with their own (at times)
warped views of Jewish people. A sense of fairness and justice has primacy in
Jewish intellectual and political history. From Shylock to Steven Spielberg’s Munich the question rages on: What is
fair and just punishment for a crime and when do we cross the line in to pure
revenge.
John Madden’s The
Debt, based on the 2007 Israeli film Ha
Hov (unseen by me), treads similar ground to Munich, although with far less cunning insight. And I’ve never viewed
Steven Spielberg as a particularly insightful or challenging filmmaker. The Debt concerns a fictional Mossad
mission to capture The Surgeon of Birkenau, a Nazi war criminal obviously modeled
on Josef Mengele, who performed grotesque medical experiments on Jewish and
Roma men, women, and children at Auschwitz.
