Something About Those Jews

Filmmaker Raphael Shore has been documenting the words and actions of anti-Semites for decades, but his latest work, Tragic Awakening, actually pushes Jews to embrace their unique mission. And the ultimate irony is that Hitler, the most vicious anti-Semite of all time, understood that mission all along. That’s why the Jew were “the great disrupters of history” and Matan Torah the greatest disrupting event

“IT happens to be that the one person who had an incredibly deep insight into who the Jewish People are is perhaps the greatest anti-Semite of all time — Adolf Hitler,” says Raphael Shore.

Documentary film-maker Raphael Shore’s latest project sprang from this unsettling realization: that Adolf Hitler identified the Jewish belief in G-d’s plan for humanity as the chief threat to the Nazis. But Shore grappled with how to present the Jews’ unique calling through Hitler’s worldview, due to the lasting wounds left by the Holocaust.

“For years I thought that my approach was too radical to find an audience, and would just anger people rather than move them in a new direction,” he says. “Today, I feel there is an openness that wasn’t there previously.”

Raphael Shore has produced 19 documentaries, with a cumulative viewership of approximately 150 million, prior to beginning work on Tragic Awakening: A New Look at the Oldest Hatred. In style of presentation — interviews with experts interspersed with news clips — Tragic Awakening resembles its predecessors. But in other respects, it represents something completely new in Shore’s oeuvre.