Hatred of Jews and Judaism is the world’s oldest social pathology, and Andrew Goldberg’s PBS-TV documentary Viral: Anti-Semitism in Four Mutations (airing in the U.S. on May 26) presents important new insights into this omnipresent odium.
For Goldberg, whose parents were members of Chicago’s Emanuel Congregation, this will be his fourteenth documentary, and as he told me, this one is intensely personal. During the three years required to complete the 90-minute program, acts of virulent, often-murderous antisemitism sharply increased in the United States and Europe.
Goldberg posits that antisemitism has nothing to do with Jews or with Jewish or Israeli behavior. It is, rather, a deep-seated, age-old pathological answer to the question: Why are bad things happening to me? It can't be my fault; someone else must be seeking to hurt me. Blame “the Jews,” then – who, anti-Semites claim, control the world. His documentary focuses on four current “hot spots” of deep-seated antisemitism: the traditional far right; Hungary and its state sponsored antisemitism; the emergence of far left; and the rise of Islamic radicalism.
For Goldberg, whose parents were members of Chicago’s Emanuel Congregation, this will be his fourteenth documentary, and as he told me, this one is intensely personal. During the three years required to complete the 90-minute program, acts of virulent, often-murderous antisemitism sharply increased in the United States and Europe.
Goldberg posits that antisemitism has nothing to do with Jews or with Jewish or Israeli behavior. It is, rather, a deep-seated, age-old pathological answer to the question: Why are bad things happening to me? It can't be my fault; someone else must be seeking to hurt me. Blame “the Jews,” then – who, anti-Semites claim, control the world. His documentary focuses on four current “hot spots” of deep-seated antisemitism: the traditional far right; Hungary and its state sponsored antisemitism; the emergence of far left; and the rise of Islamic radicalism.
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