Steven Spielberg finally got the love he was seeking from the Hollywood establishment when “Schindler’s List” nabbed him Best Director and Best Film honors at the Oscars (despite being only the second-best film he made that year, after “Jurassic Park”). The Holocaust drama also established the director as a Serious Artist. He founded the Righteous Persons Foundation with his profits from “Schindler’s List,” saying that he wanted to educate Americans about the Holocaust.
“I could not accept any money from ‘Schindler’s List,’” Spielberg said, ” if it even made any money. It was blood money, and needed to be put back into the Jewish community. My parents didn’t keep kosher and we mainly observed all the holidays when my grandparents stayed with us,” the filmmaker explained at the time. “I knew I was missing a great deal of my natural heritage, and as I became conscious of it, I began racing to catch up.”
Ah, but Stevie lives in the Hollywood woke bubble, and intersectionality and progressive cant dictates that in the Hamas-Israel war, the Jews are the oppressors—they are white, see. Whites are always are oppressors.
A large chunk of the Righteous Persons Foundation’s funds now go to radical social justice groups including anti-Israel organizations like T’ruah, the group that organized traffic obstruction and a protest outside the Israeli consulate in Midtown Manhattan this year. The group’s mob of anti-Israel protesters carried signs accusing the Jewish State of “ethnic cleansing” “starving Gaza” and “genocide.”
Since 2021, Spielberg’s foundation has given $650,000 to T’ruah. CEO Jill Jacobs accused Israeli officials of “incitement to genocide;” Jacobs and T’ruah also accused Israel of “war crimes” when its exploding pagers attack assassinating Hezbollah leaders—-these are terrorists, after all—worked so well. The group denies that the October 7, 2023 surprise attack on Jewish civilians and children was provocation for the war on Hamas, which is the equivalent of a denial of Israel’s right to exist.
Writes an Israeli blogger: “Spielberg had gone from funding Holocaust survivors to funding those accusing Israel of a new Holocaust while enabling Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to perpetrate a new one.” That seems fair. Evidently Spielberg, like the late Rob Reiner, manages to be a brilliant artist with a middle schooler’s sophistication regarding history, politics and ethics. And that’s OK. But he should stick to what he’s good at.
Ethics Alarms 
I hated Schindler’s List. Sentimental slop, and the frame you’ve shown here is emblematic of the film’s sentimentality. Spielberg is a second-rate auteur whom Nabokov would have called poshlost.
Shindlers List was a provocative and authentice depiction of the psychopathologic violence of the Nazi mindset. It was well done in my opinion. Unfortunalty, its mesaage has been frgotten, as has the Holocaust itself, this is evident in the increasing anti-semitism of today.
Didn’t hate it, but agree that it was slop, that scene especially. SS is a child at heart and at brain.
I haven’t seen “Schindler’s List.” Watching “Sophie’s Choice” was enough for me.
In honor of William Styron’s magnum opus, my treatment of the time the German people industrially murdered ten million or more men women and children because they didn’t like them is titled “The Critic’s Choice.”
By the way, my good, favorite professor friend took a writing class with, as he called him, Bill Styron when they were both at Duke. Styron would come to class drunk/hung over and stinking and proceed to put his head down on the desk and sleep for the duration.
So, Carl had another son named Ron?
He did! Ron Reiner was a lesser-kown independent director who directed the Royal political thriller, “The Princess Bribe” and the opioid satire, “A Few Good Meds,” along with his masterpiece about Jerry Seinfeld’s secret friendship with a war criminal, “When Jerry Met Calley.”
You’re right! Now I remember. My personal favorite of his was his faux documentary about a failed but brilliant hip-hop star in Detroit forty years ahead of his time called, “This is Vinyl Rap.”
I have not seen Schindler’s List.
I had a friend/mentor/Robin Williams-Dead Poets Society teacher.
he got cancer.
he died.
I did not want to go to his funeral.
but he wanted me to be a pallbearer.
so, I went and did what I was supposed to do.
I have now lived more time in this planet than he did.
we were going to see Schindler’s List
he was dying at the time. He decided he could not go. He told me that he was going to go to his grave “un-Schindlered.” He did.
maybe I will too.
an incident with him popped up in a recent post on this site.
I did not post that comment
it is probably one of my top-five worst moments in life (sorry-I am a fan of the movie High Fidelity and have been reading the book over the Holidays).
I think I resolved that with him.
well, that is a bit of a digression, but, for someone who has not watched Schindler’s List, this is about all that is relevant for me to say.
-Jut