Greetings, comrades. Hope you survived the holiday break. I have a new Flaming Hydra essay for you. It’s about Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and the ugliness of what he called the “face of Jewish vengeance.” You can read it here.

Below is a little preview.

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“I’ve been looking, for the last few movies, to come to Israel,” Quentin Tarantino told the Tel Aviv audience before him on September 9, 2009. “And I figured this might be the movie to do it with.”

The occasion was an Israeli screening of his newly released World War II movie, Inglourious Basterds. It was the director’s very first visit to the Jewish state. Major American films hardly ever get red-carpet premiere events in Israel. But Tarantino is a peculiar filmmaker, and this was a peculiar film.

After thanking the audience “for making me feel so welcome here” and adding that he was “looking forward to seeing the movie with an Israeli audience,” Tarantino brought to the stage producer Lawrence Bender, as well as Christoph Waltz, the breakout star who plays a clever S.S. officer in the film.

Then it was time for the show. But the director had a final question to pose to the packed crowd of Israeli Jews.

“So, are you guys ready to kill some Nazis?” Tarantino cried.

The people applauded.

“Are you ready to fuck up some Nazis?!?” he continued, bringing up the volume.

The people screamed and cheered.

“Then let’s get this motherfucker started!”

“There was a sense of liberation” at the screening, Tarantino—who is not Jewish—would tell an Israeli newspaper many years later. By then he had married an Israeli woman and become a resident of the country. He mused that seeing the movie “gave people permission to enjoy something they wouldn’t allow themselves to enjoy if you just talked about it on an intellectual level.”

Indeed.

I’ve long felt that Tarantino’s joyous exhortation to my Jewish kin in their fortress state should precede every screening of Inglourious Basterds. He more or less summed up the reason why people are drawn to the film—or, for that matter, to militant Zionism. Both contain the tempting offer of absolution for committing violence. Of pre-justified violence.

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You can read the full essay at Flaming Hydra today.

Thanks!

J