Published: 16 July 2025
Last updated: 16 July 2025
French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was best known for his epic documentary Shoah – a viscerally-confronting nine-hour magnum opus in which he interviewed Holocaust survivors, witnesses and even perpetrators, the faces of his subjects filling the entire screen.
Why the need to make the film, asked a perceptive journalist. Wasn’t everything already known about the Holocaust that there was to know? Why the need to create yet another documentary, let alone one that ran for nine hours and took 11 years to produce?
Responded Lanzmann – there was a burning question which had not been asked: When was it too late? When had anti-Jewish racism reached such a crescendo as to be overwhelming? When was it too late for the Jews of Europe to avoid being caught up in the extraordinary killing machine which was Nazi Germany?
Was it too late when the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935, isolating Jews politically and socially, curtailing their civil rights, forbidding marriage between Jews and “bearers of German blood”, banning them from holding government office?
Was it too late when those laws were tightened in 1938, rendering Jews as subjects, rather than citizens, with an incriminating “J” printed on their identity documents?
Or when The Eternal Jew was produced in 1940 – a scurrilous film initiated by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, characterising Jews as parasites squabbling over food and money, and depicting rats scurrying through sewers with the voiceover intoning: “Where rats turn up, they spread diseases and carry extermination. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel, they travel in packs – exactly the way Jews infect the races of the world.”
Or when The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a publication which falsely claimed to be a record of meetings of Jewish leaders plotting to take over the world – became compulsory reading in German schools?
Comments1
Judy18 July at 04:41 am
Vic Alhadeff [TJI, 16 July] raises the question posed by Claude Lanzmann in his [brilliant !!! in my opinion] documentary, Shoah:
“[T]here was a burning question which had not been asked: When was it too late?”
“When is it too late to call out conduct which threatens minority groups?
When does the damage to civil liberties and the assault on human rights become normalised?
And so normalised as to be irreversible?”
I thought, naively, that Alhadeff might be talking about the horrific actions in Gaza that continue, unabated, and mostly undisputed by our Government and citizens.
No – it is his comparison: “Australia 2025 vs Germany 1935.”
Yes – anti-semitism exists here in Australia. As a Jewish-Australian, I am neither unaware of it in the wider community, nor am I free from having anti-semitism directed to me. And anti-semitism is far from the only “anti-xxx-ism” that is raising its ugly head at this time.
When I lost my hair to chemotherapy, I wrapped my head hijab-like to cover and retain body heat. The amount of extra scrutiny I received, including being escorted from events by security personnel and questioned threatening, was humiliating and frightening – I feared for the Islamophobia my head-covering triggered in others and worried for my Muslim sisters who chose to wear the hijab daily.
Even today, with many reports of Islamophobic words and deeds, where is our outrage? When do we ask Muslims how they feel about their safety moving on campus, taking public transportation, walking the streets? When do we take a stand against the nefarious tropes that all Muslims hate Jews, that Arabs want to drive Jews into the sea, that all Palestinians are Hamas?
How can we [rightfully] mourn the horrific brutalisation of 7 October 2023: The rapes, murders, kidnapping, wounding, massacring, assaulting, terrifying, torturing the thousands of people merely because they were / are Jewish or in proximity to Jews … and not at the same time [rightfully] mourn the horrific brutalisation of Palestinians before 7 October 2023 and after 8 October 2023 through today: The rapes, murders, kidnapping, wounding, massacring, assaulting, terrifying, torturing the tens of thousands of people merely because they were / are in proximity to Hamas or were Hamas?
Whether or not we like it, the increase in anti-semitism in Australia is linked indelibly to the increase in violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. And the erroneous, seemingly endemic conflation between Israeli-ness and Jewish-ness, promulgated broadly by Israeli government officials, rabbis / teachers, and the media … and by so-called spokespeople for the Jewish community: Israeli-ness and Jewish-ness are not now, and never have been, one and the same.
“When is it too late?”
We *all* must ask this question, and not just about anti-semitism, but about mis-characterisation, stereotyping, and racism against all groups by all people. We know from history, that whenever “they” come for one group, and we keep silent, “they” will come for “us” eventually, and there will be nobody left to defend us. [Based on Martin Niemöller’s famous quote, 1946.]
…
Reflecting on what I wrote above, I must ask: Is it too late now, for the children of the Holocaust, and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren – is it too late now, to retire, retreat, rehabilitate, and repent and reconcile for our actions in Gaza?