 Screencap from ‘The Believer’ via YouTube Today: Please join us in welcoming the debut of our newest Hydra, Josie Riesman, New York Times-bestselling author of RINGMASTER and TRUE BELIEVER.
Issue No. 146‘The Believer’ and Me
Josephine Riesman
‘The Believer’ and Meby Josephine Riesman“None of us is innocent,” I wrote in my diary at age 19 and a half. I had just left Israel’s Holocaust memorial/museum, Yad Vashem. “I want to cry, but that is pornography. Rich Jews. Rich fucking Jews.” I started scribbling my words larger and less legibly as my agony and confusion grew. I was on a free trip for college students, but I was not having the proper reaction to anything, least of all the venerated site I’d just toured. I spiraled beyond the ruled lines of the notebook, barreling into antisemitic free association. I’ll spare you all the slurs, but the general gist was: I hate the Jews now. And therefore: I hate myself. The crime of the Holocaust was too much for my adolescent brain to contain; to a certain extent, I just shorted out. But I also couldn’t stand how proud of our suffering the place seemed to be. The path of the museum steers you toward the exit to the sound of the Israeli national anthem, accompanied by displays announcing the happy ending to the story: the founding of the Jewish State. We suffered more than anyone else, it seemed to say, and therefore we were rewarded with the Promised Land. The force I was channeling is allergic to reason. But I know that in that moment I felt disgust, a kind of lightning bolt of antisemitism; a new and bitter intimacy with all the parts of myself that I wanted to destroy. I began to connect this experience with a film I’d seen two years before: Henry Bean’s overlooked 2001 cinematic masterwork The Believer. Hailed upon its pre-9/11 festival debut and subsequently ignored in the puritanical aftermath of 9/11, The Believer tells the story of a young neo-Nazi, Danny Balint (played by Ryan Gosling), who hides a secret from his fellow fascists: that he was born and raised as an Orthodox Jew. Today, almost eleven months after the October 7 attacks, I see Danny’s ghost everywhere I turn in the Jewish community. More than 75 percent of Orthodox Jews are likely to vote for Donald Trump and his cryptofascist Project 2025 agenda this November. Jewish politicians in the Democratic Party regularly endorse massive arms sales to Israel, even as it commits mass murder in Gaza and herds Palestinians into concentration camps (sorry, humanitarian zones). Jewish communal institutions deny obvious facts about the bloodshed and jump headlong into the abyss. But a hell of a lot of anti-Zionist Jews, too, have been presenting Jewish nationalism as a singular evil—perhaps even a uniquely Jewish pathology—that threatens the world. Forgive them, Lord; they know not what tropes they echo. Not even getting into the memes about bloodthirsty cabals and global puppetmasters blithely distributed to left-wingers by the antisemitic right on Twitter. Noble criticism of one’s own privilege slips into a generalized anger at the community into which one was born. It’s hard to walk that path and not develop some Danny Balint–esque views on Jewry. In The Believer, a longtime fascist tells a reporter, “I think antisemitism today is largely a Jewish phenomenon—wouldn’t you agree?” There are days when I feel tempted to do so. And yet, the movie is not an antisemitic diatribe; not in the least. It is an ode to Jewishness and Judaism, written with passion, knowledge, and a heaping helping of ethnic epithets. It is not unlike my diary entry at Yad Vashem, in that way. Though all but forgotten now, The Believer is perhaps the best and most important Jewish movie of the 21st century. It doesn’t stop at trying to explain antisemitism; rather, it leaves the viewer with a question that, for many, felt irrelevant or distasteful at the time of its release. Now, tragically, in the age of the Gaza War and its backlash, it has become an all-important question: When the oppressed throw off their chains, how will they avoid the seductions of the old oppressors’ tools? In classical Jewish discourse, the biggest questions don’t lead to answers—only better questions. In that regard, Danny the Nazi is a very good Jew. He presents everyone around him with nothing but questions, all of them explosive and revelatory. I’ve rewatched The Believer many times over the last year, but, like my diary entry, it feels almost too intense to understand. So I tracked down the auteur to ask him some questions about his movie—and about what the hell happened to our people.
Writer-director Henry Bean’s childhood was a product of postwar Jewish complacency and stagnation; raised in a liberal, assimilationist community, not caring all that much for the trappings and rituals of Judaism after his compulsory bar mitzvah. As he put it, “I could hardly have said what my Jewishness was, other than this sense of separateness, a ‘history of persecution’ though, in fact, I had never been persecuted. It was an identity without palpable content.” But as got older, he grew fascinated with his community and its problems. By the time he began working on what became The Believer, he was aflame with questions and critiques, which he poured into his screenplay. “I didn’t access the interesting Nazis, if there were any,” Bean says. While at work on early drafts of The Believer, he wanted to do some fact-finding. So he scoured the streets of New York for self-professed Nazis and waded through chat rooms online. But it was the mid-1990s—proud American fascists were relatively few and far between, and most of the people who identified themselves outright as white supremacists did so from their bedrooms and basements, not at rallies or in newspaper editorials. Bean only ended up meeting a group of limp and lonely New York-area creeps whom he found on message boards—“a bunch of idiots who were too stupid to be interesting.” So it was necessary for him to invent a better one. He had a real-life inspiration: Daniel Burros, a New York Jew who became first a Nazi, then a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s. Bean had heard of Burros from an old writing partner, Mark Jacobson,and had long planned to write something based on Burros’s story. But Burros had been a bit of a nincompoop, weirding out his fellow Klansmen by bringing knishes to meetings and expressing surprise that “Jew food” could taste so good. Only in a farce like The Producers would a guy like that be compelling on screen. So, much as Jorge Luis Borges had done in 1946 with his indelible short story about an unrepentant Nazi, “Deutsches Requiem,” Bean tried to construct a fictional fascist who—unlike most real fascists—has actually done his best to understand the ideology he espouses. He created Danny, a brutal and brutally direct character willing to voice thoughts that are typically left unspoken; who knows both the Talmud and Mein Kampf intimately enough to understand why one civilization felt compelled to erase another, all those years ago; who, having both wielded it and been wounded by it, truly understands the knife of antisemitism, through and through. The character seemed implausible at the time—even to his creator. “The moment in which The Believer was conceived and made was a very, very different moment,” he told me. “It was incredibly safe. We were at the end of the Clinton administration. We’d had basically eight years of peace and prosperity, and no one knew what was coming.” Bean wasn’t even so sure fascism was on the rise. “I had people who didn’t want to work on the film who said to me things like, ‘I understand that your intentions are honorable, but I’m afraid that this film could be misused,’” he said. “And my own naïve reaction was, ‘Come on, we’re living in a different age! That’s no longer a worry!’” The story finds Danny in media res—we are never given the story of how he came to forsake Jewishness. We meet him as an enthusiastic neo-Nazi, fascist symbols emblazoned on his clothing and skin, clad in combat boots for stomping the yeshiva boys he meets on the subway. There’s just one flashback to a moment of childhood. Danny is in yeshiva himself, as a preteen. His rabbi is attempting to teach the class about the Binding of Isaac; Danny refuses to accept the traditional interpretation, which is that Abraham acted piously and wisely in obeying God’s call to kill his son. He offers a more radical reading. “It’s not about Abraham’s faith; it’s about God’s power,” the young Danny says. “God said, ‘You know how powerful I am? I can make you do anything I want, no matter how stupid—even kill your own son. Because I’m everything and you’re nothing.’” The rabbi takes umbrage at this, of course, but Danny won’t back down: “Fear of God makes you afraid of everything,” the lad says angrily. “All the Jews are good at is being afraid and being sacrificed.” By the time the story’s main action takes place, Danny has decided that he will no longer be a sacrifice. He will be the one who binds and kills. He will challenge the God of the Hebrews. And so the twentysomething Danny traverses the streets of New York City with a small coterie of fellow neo-Nazis, who often find him off-putting or strange—sure, they hate Jews, but this guy never shuts up about them. Nevertheless, he proves himself useful to a group of high-society reactionaries who want to start a mainstream fascist movement in America. They want Danny to be their protégé, the well-spoken public face of a slick, approachable Reich. I’m reluctant to give any further details about the plot, as it’s full of surprises and best enjoyed with less background than I’ve given already. But suffice it to say Danny tries quite hard to be a killer of Jews.
Bean initially made a short film about Danny, long out of print, called Thousand, starring a Jewish friend of his, an amateur actor named Judah Lazarus. When Bean managed to get funding for a feature version, however, he recast the part with with a Canadian member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, one who’d mostly worked for the Disney Channel until then: a very young Ryan Gosling. “The fact that [he’d been] a devout Mormon—though he didn’t stay a devout Mormon for very long—that made me think, Oh, he gets it,” Bean recalls. Bean had been disappointed to see that the professional Jewish actors he’d auditioned hadn’t brought any unique perspective to the lines. Gosling, on the other hand? “He’s not Jewish, but he’s Jewish,” Bean says. “He knows what it is to be in this outsider group. He knows what it is to have a heritage that he’s got to relate to in some way; laws, rules, all of that shit.” Indeed, Gosling is so convincing as a New York Jew of Generation X that, for many years after I first saw The Believer on DVD in 2003, I simply assumed Gosling was at least part Jewish (he is not). He gained much of that swagger and intonation from hanging out with Lazarus, the previous Danny, at Bean’s behest. The Mormon turned out to be an expert mimic of the Jew. Lazarus ended up playing a different part in The Believer: that of Danny’s childhood Hebrew school rival, Avi. Where Danny was rebellious, Avi was the obedient teacher’s pet, and when they run into each other in a group of Hebrew School alums, they instantly fall back into old arguments. “He thinks the Jews are wimps,” Avi says of Danny, recalling the discussion about God and Abraham. “He’s a Jewish Nazi; he always was.” He doesn’t mean it literally—no one knows how far, exactly, Danny has strayed. But Danny is ready with a retort: “Whereas Avi’s a Zionist Nazi.” “The Zionists are not Nazis,” Avi spits back. “They’re racist, they’re militaristic, they act like stormtroopers in the Territories,” Danny replies. “And do you hate them because they’re wimps,” Avi asks, “or because they’re stormtroopers?” Danny doesn’t have an answer. Perhaps there is none. He misdirects and starts arguing about massacres in Lebanon until someone breaks up the fight. The reason Danny hates Jews becomes crystal clear in a scene where he and his gang of thugs are doing court-mandated sensitivity training with a group of Holocaust survivors. The session does not go well. “We have nothing to learn from these people,” Danny says, walking out. “They should be learning from us.” “And what should we learn from you, Daniel?” one of the survivors asks. “Kill your enemy,” is all Danny says in reply.
Danny exists in a post-Holocaust landscape, one in which all Jews—Zionists, anti-Zionists, and outright lunatics alike—have to reckon with the fact that six million of us were slaughtered, with minimal resistance, between 1939 and 1945. No one knows what to do with this fact. Did we bring it on ourselves? If so, what were our sins? Was it only done to us? If so, why didn’t we fight harder? And, most importantly, which is the lesson to be learned: “Never again” for anyone, or “never again” only for us? The film offers no answer, but it forces every Jew to see themselves in Danny Balint. An anti-Zionist can relate to his disgust with what he sees as Jewish perfidy and hypocrisy. A Jewish Republican can relate to his palling around with the “intellectual” white-supremacist right. And a mainstream Zionist, whether they know it or not, is buying into Danny’s retort to the survivors. Contemporary Zionism, at its core, is a declaration that a second Holocaust must be prevented through strength and preemptive violence. It holds that Jews will never be safe unless we defend ourselves in a country that primarily serves our ethnic interests. Zionism is obsessed with birth rates and purity. It is a reminder that “self-determination” is often just another word for supremacy. No, Zionism is not Nazism—but it exists in our world, where every dimension of politics has been infected by Nazi ideology. Hitler’s visions of mass destruction in the name of renewal and rebirth are bred into the bones of every nationalist movement, be it one of the oppressed or the oppressor. Genocides are now just the background hum of daily life. What the politicians call “realpolitik” is often just a fancy word for acting like a Nazi. “Now an implacable age looms over the world,” said Borges’ fictive Nazi, in 1946. “What matters is that violence, not servile Christian acts of timidity, now rules." The Nazis may have lost the war, but their mindset—a zero-sum ethnic war of all against all—has infected the whole planet. There are Danny Balints in every ethnic group. Their pain is real, and historically situated. They’re asking the right questions, but their answers are dreadfully wrong. They imagine that the only way to cast off persecution is to become a persecutor yourself. The carnage in Gaza is not the result of a uniquely Jewish problem, nor are the Jewish anti-Zionists who spout blood libels uniquely perverted in their self-hatred. The global Jewish community’s problems today are, at the root, simply the logical outcome of a Western society that never completed the work of de-Nazifying itself.
The secret of The Believer is that Danny is in good company as a Jewish dissident. The Biblical Abraham does assent to killing his son, yes; but that patriarch also risks it all to rebuke God for saying He’ll kill off Sodom and Gomorrah: “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” Watching the movie, you wish you could reach through the screen and tell this young man that he should revolutionize Judaism, not attempt to destroy it. “There’s a joy in this spewing of this rage,” Bean says, of writing Danny’s diatribes. “There is a celebration of the Jewish love of the dialectic, the Jewish love of the thing and its opposite. ‘I’m unsatisfied by the thing, and I’m unsatisfied by the opposite. But if you put them both together, I can dig it.’” Which brings me back to my diary entry at Yad Vashem. I was furious with Jewry when I wrote it. Nowadays, I know even more about the postwar crimes of colonialism committed by members of my community, but I have more compassion and sympathy for my fellow Jews than I did then. Zionists and anti-Zionists alike, we are all trying to cope with the legacy of Nazism—not just the fact of the Shoah, but the philosophy of violence and domination unleashed on all of us. I have no solution to any of this. None of us is innocent. But the answer to suffering is not to inflict more suffering, on others or yourself. You cannot suffer your way to innocence. You cannot make a better world by acting like those who would destroy it. By the stunning finale of The Believer, it becomes clear that all of these projects are in the end projects of self-destruction. I know only that change is won through joy, and joy is often delusional. I have to believe there is something worthwhile in being a Jew, for I am condemned to be one. I have to find that joy among other Jews who share my heart’s concerns; I have to take comfort in the belief that we will one day outnumber the ones who want to drive our community off the cliffside. We are a nation of prophets, and the best prophets do more than denounce and tear down. The best ones rejoice, rejuvenate, retell—and rebuild.
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