A ‘Believer’ in the Right to a Point of View

In a recent article about “The Believer,” a movie about a Jewish man who becomes a neo-Nazi skinhead (“A Question of Identity for the Man Behind ‘The Believer,’” by John Clark, March 15), writer-director Henry Bean expressed regret at having screened the film for Simon Wiesenthal Center staff. “I think we were stupid in going to the Wiesenthal Center without really knowing who they were ... ,” he said. “I didn’t know that [Wiesenthal head] Marvin Hier had been to the Republican Convention last summer. I didn’t understand how politically conservative they were.”

I have some news for Bean. First, I wish we were as influential as he claims and that we held sway over all the powerful Hollywood studios. But that is simply not true.

More to the point, I have never seen his film nor have I given a single interview either praising or criticizing it.

As with any film, people have different points of view about “The Believer.” Within my own family there was disagreement. My wife, Marlene, found “The Believer” offensive, while my son, Rabbi Ari Hier, thought it could be used as a discussion piece for his class. I am no stranger to films. As the creator of Moriah Films, the documentary division of the Wiesenthal Center, which has produced five films to date and won two Academy Awards, I can appreciate that every director and producer wants his or her films to be well-received. But sometimes the public feels differently than we do and we have to be mature enough to accept their criticism and to learn to live with it.

Sadly, rather than accept that reality, Bean used the interview to hurl McCarthy-like invectives, charging me with the astonishing crime (hold on to your seats) of having attended the Republican National Convention. Mea culpa! Mea culpa! I confess. I confess that then-presidential candidate George W. Bush, following his visit to the Museum of Tolerance, invited me to speak about the diversity training programs of the museum and I gladly accepted his invitation.

Astonishingly, Bean does not charge me with the crime of having also attended the Democratic National Convention, a charge of which I am also guilty. (I even attended a party in honor of Ted Kennedy at the home of Arnold Schwarzenegger.) As a matter of fact, I have been an equal offender in these matters since the very inception of the Wiesenthal Center in 1977.

Personally, I abhor labels. I believe that human beings are not robots and consequently dare not limit their thought processes along linear lines. Therefore, there are times that I am more conservatively inclined and other times when I am more liberal. If the issue is terrorists, I am all for confronting them head-on without any reservation. If that makes me a conservative, so be it. On the other hand, if in reaching out to people who are different from us, something we do every day at the Museum of Tolerance, qualifies me as a liberal, then pin that label on me as well.

For Bean to place the blame on his failure to get a theatrical release for his film “The Believer” on the Simon Wiesenthal Center or on my “conservatism” is blatantly dishonest. Bean is well aware that he is the one who asked some staff members of the center to screen the film. Nobody at the center initiated a call to any studio in an attempt to bad-mouth it. When asked by a representative of Paramount Classics what he thought of the film, Rabbi Abraham Cooper expressed his own personal view that the film did not work for him. For that, Bean tried to demonize both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and me.

What would Bean say to the New York Times critic who said of his film that it “fulminates with inchoate thoughts and proceeds with more energy than coherence”? Will he charge her as well with the astonishing crime of conservatism? Or will he wait to confirm which national conventions this critic has attended?