A Guy Holding a Rubik’s Cube

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

My liberal and libertarian friends say that Edward Snowden is a hero, who uncovered a dangerous government conspiracy to invade our privacy and curtail our liberty.

My conservative friends say that he’s a traitor, who seriously compromised the security of our nation and the ability of our government to fight terrorism.

The Edward Snowden who emerges from the pages of Permanent Record, his 2019 autobiography, isn’t so much either of these as something else entirely—a hacker.

Even as a child, Edward Snowden never met a system he didn’t want to hack. To learn the rules by which it operates and find a way around them. Not just computer systems, like the Los Alamos servers he hacked as a teenager, but any sort of rule-based system: How to solve the Rubik’s cube. How to get around his mother’s rule that he had to read a book before he could rent a new game for his Nintendo. How to game the grading system at school to get a passing grade with the minimum amount of work.

Snowden’s affinity for hacking is what made him so valuable to his employers. But it was also what made him a risk to them.

Born in 1983, Snowden was ten years old or so when his father brought home the family’s first desktop PC. It was “a Compaq Presario 425,” he writes. “List price $1,399…and initially set up—much to my mother’s chagrin—smack in the middle of the dining-room table. From the moment it appeared, the computer and I were inseparable”—he often had to be sternly ejected when other members of the family wanted to use it.

This part of the book is a delightful trip down memory lane for those who lived ‘90s Internet culture—it captures the energy, the all-nighters, and the Wild West mentality that prevailed before Facebook and Google corporatized the web. Not to mention the noisy, slow-ass modems (“the computer would beep and hiss like a traffic jam of snakes”) which dropped your connection when some less computer-savvy, or simply spiteful, member of your family picked up an extension phone.

Snowden soon became enthralled by the vast opportunities for learning on the Internet. “A crash course on how to build my own computer led to a crash course on processor architecture, with side excursions into information about martial arts, guns, sports cars, and—full disclosure—softcore-ish goth-y porn. I sometime had the feeling that I had to know everything and wasn’t going to sign off until I did.”

He also became an avid gamer. Loom was a particular favorite. “The deep psychological appeal of games," he writes, "which are really just a series of increasingly difficult challenges, is the belief that they can be won.”

A bout with mono caused a substantial gap in his high school attendance, but he graduated via GED—right around the time of the September 11 attacks; his country was going to war. Wanting “to be part of something,” he enlisted in Special Forces training, but an injury prevented him from finishing the course.

Snowden had another idea, though: “I thought I could best serve my country behind a terminal, but a normal IT job seemed too comfortable and safe for this new world of asymmetrical conflict. I hoped I could do something like in the movies or on TV—those hacker-versus-hacker scenes with walls of virus-warning blinken-lights, tracking enemies and thwarting their schemes.”

Such jobs required a college degree and a security clearance, neither of which he had. But that was just another system to be hacked. Some courses at Anne Arundel Community College and a stint as a night watchman in a top secret government facility under construction got him what he needed, and Edward Snowden was launched on his career as an intelligence officer.

There followed a series of positions with the CIA and NSA, both as employee and contractor. As in his teen years, he had to know everything, and now, with a top secret clearance, it seemed he could. Classified information is supposed to be compartmentalized, parceled out on a need-to-know basis, “but the computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything.”

An older colleague (quite a character in his own right) told him “the first things everyone looks up on the CIA’s internal networks are aliens and 9/11” and Snowden was no different. “For the record,” he says, “as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven’t contacted US intelligence. But al-Qaeda did maintain unusually close ties with our allies the Saudis.”

Of course it was not files about aliens that ultimately led Snowden to blow the whistle on the US government. It was the federales' mass surveillance capabilities.

Snowden first suspected their existence when he attended a conference about the Chinese government’s capabilities, and started to wonder whether Uncle Sam was working along similar lines. His suspicions were confirmed by accident in July 2009 when some “Exceptionally Controlled Information” was left on a system where it didn’t belong. It was Snowden’s job, as SysAdmin, to scrub it. “It” turned out to be a draft copy of the classified version of the Inspector General’s report on the President’s Surveillance Program.

The existence of this program had already been leaked to the public and there was outrage over the revelation that the Bush Administration had been conducting electronic surveillance of targeted individuals without obtaining warrants from the FISA court—the so called “warrantless wiretaps.” [As a matter fact, it was my own outrage over that which got me started as a blogger].

What Snowden discovered in the classified report was that the warrantless wiretaps were just the tip of the iceberg.

The NSA’s historic brief had been fundamentally altered from targeted collection of communications to ‘bulk collection,’ which is the agency’s euphemism for mass surveillance…the US government was developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. At any time, the government could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past…a historic effort to achieve total access to—and clandestinely take possession of—the records of all digital communications in existence… It was then that I realized where these new technologies were headed, and that if my generation didn’t intervene the escalation would only continue. It would be a tragedy if, by the time we’d finally resolved to resist, such resistance were futile. The generations to come would have to get used to a world in which surveillance wasn’t something occasional and directed in legally justified circumstances, but a constant and indiscriminate presence: the ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and permanent.

In other words, a permanent record.

For a while, Snowden was in a quandary as to what to do. “I was lost, and fell into a dark mood while I struggled with my conscience.” After much soul-searching, he remembered he had “sworn an oath of service not to an agency, not even a government, but to the public, in support and defense of the Constitution.” He resolved to reveal what he knew.

But he knew the government would try to paint him as a member of the tin-foil hat brigade. He had to do things in a way such that he would be believed. Which meant spiriting classified documents out of a top secret government facility, fleeing the country before the NSA caught on to him, and getting the documents into the hands of someone prominent enough that they couldn’t be ignored.

In other words, Edward Snowden needed the ultimate hack.

The part of the book in which he details how he did all that is absolutely thrilling. A real-life spy story.

I have no doubt that Edward Snowden was motivated by a sincere love for our country, and for the ideals of freedom that make it what it is. His dedication to those ideals is evident throughout Permanent Record. He talks about liberty and the Constitution constantly, and the way he talks about them, it’s clear that they are not merely buzzwords to him. He demonstrates a keen understanding of the philosophical principle on which they’re based: “In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state.”

Snowden’s decision came at great potential cost to his personal life. He was very much in love with his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, and their love story is as much a part of Permanent Record as the NSA is. In going public and leaving the country, he risked never seeing her again. After he bolted, the FBI absolutely raked Lindsay over the coals—we get all the details in Lindsay’s own words from a diary she kept. Snowden knew this would happen and had given Lindsay no inkling of what he was about to do. Thanks to this precaution, when the FBI interrogated her, she knew nothing and there was no crime they could charge her with. Snowden could only hope she would forgive him. Only a person who sincerely believed in what he was doing would put his whole life on the line like that.

And yet one can’t dispute that some part of Snowden was in it for the hack. In describing his arrival in Hong Kong with his stash of classified documents, he says, “I’d made it out of the NSA, I’d made it out of the country. I had beaten the game.”

He had arranged to meet documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald at his hotel. He told them how to find him. “Go to a certain quiet alcove by the hotel restaurant, furnished with an alligator-skin-looking pleather couch, and wait around for a guy holding a Rubik’s Cube.”

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. He is the author of Full Asylum, a comedy about hacking, hospital gowns, and government surveillance. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): YouTube, Mike Mozart/FLICKR Commons

This is our homeland. Isn’t it?

The Plot against America, Episode 1.
TV Review by Kerey McKenna.

The new HBO mini-series, The Plot Against America, has a refreshingly simple, though evocative, opening credits sequence that does a great job of setting what I hope will be the tone and methodology of the series as a work of alternate history:

The images are all, to my knowledge, real black and white footage from the ‘20s through the ‘40s. In quick succession we see aviator Charles Lindbergh’s fateful transatlantic flight, the jubilation of the roaring ‘20s, the dire poverty of the Great Depression, and the hope of the New Deal. After a bit of googling I found the jaunty song, “The Road is Open Again,” is an actual song of the period, written as boosterism for the National Recovery Act. However the images of an ascendent America become interspersed with the post-war rise of another nation...Nazi Germany: Hitler’s rise to power, persecution of the Jews, and the Blitzkrieg across Europe. Throw in snippets from American Nazi rallies and a last scene of goose-stepping troops and it instills a great deal of unease. Is the road now open for America, or for her enemies, foreign and domestic?

Contrast this with the opening credits for another recent series about fascism in America, The Man in the High Castle:

It contains so many clichés and tropes of the “What if the Nazis won?” school of alternate history. Starting with the “Map at the Beginning of the Book” convention of sci-fi/fantasy literature (not as on the nose as Game of Thrones, but it does establish the geography of this universe), and the somewhat off version of "Edelweiss," it is clear we are going to be dropped into a world where the Nazis have already defeated and occupied the US. Oh, and there's a zeppelin in the sky. Because zeppelins are to alternate history what dragons are to fantasy; in alternate history, expect to see at least one zeppelin in the sky.

I mention this up front because I think it is important to understand The Plot Against America is going for a very different kind of alternate history. This is not an alternate history where the characters are already living in a world that has become a drastic inverse of our own (In the Presence of Mine Enemies and Fatherland, to name a couple examples in addition to MITHC). Instead this is the story of characters living in a world that is very close to our own past and following the lives of the characters as their world changes around them. Furthermore, the point of divergence from history is seemingly played relatively straight at first. There are no Nazi wonder weapons or interference from time travelers and dimension hoppers. The historical figures are acting, so far, in character. The small change is simply that the American isolationist movement finds a champion in famed aviator Charles Lindbergh to challenge Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 bid for a third term, instead of the actual dark horse candidate, the interventionist Wendell Willkie. That even today Lindbergh is a household name while Willkie is an extra hard trivia answer speaks volumes about the strength of Lindbergh's celebrity and name recognition.

In keeping with the spirit of the novel, this is the story of the Jewish American family as they experience the run up to, and then life in an isolationist America under a Charles Lindbergh presidency. Unlike the novel, where the family is named Roth after author Philip Roth’s own family, here the family name has been changed to Levin. We meet them living in their little slice of post-Depression, pre-war America, the idyllic suburb of Newark NJ. The opening tableau plays out similar to stories my mother tells me about growing up on Staten Island, save that this is a Jewish neighborhood so the weekend begins with a Sabbath dinner. Before sundown a man comes to the door asking for donations to support the Jewish homeland, which family patriarch Herman Levin (Morgan Spector) happily agrees to. The youngest Levin boy, Philip (Azhy Robertson), asks isn’t America their homeland, to which the father replies that of course America is their homeland, it’s just that the Jews of Europe need to escape to Palestine. But by the end of the episode he and the audience will be wondering just how safe the Levins and the Jews of America really are.

Expanding from the scope of the novel, which was told just from the perspective of the author’s younger self, the series follows all the Levin family: father Herman, mother Bess (Zoe Kazan), aunt Evelyn (Winona Ryder), older brother Sandy (Caleb Malis), and cousin Alvin (Anthony Boyle) as point of view characters. While the Levins are on an upward trajectory, being Jewish they can’t help but keep a close eye the Nazi Blitzkrieg across Europe, the plight of the Jews left on the continent, and the ever-present background radiation of anti-Semitism at home.

Most of the through-line of the first episode concerns the Levins potentially moving out of their Jewish suburb to nearby Union, should Herman get a promotion at his insurance agency. I was impressed by the way the plot illustrates the different life experiences of Herman and Bess, how their ideals and fears overlap and differ. At first it is Bess who is hesitant about the move based on her experience growing up in the only Jewish family in a gentile neighborhood. As she puts it, it was not that her peers actively harassed her, it was that they actively ignored her. This also explains her insistence on trying to get her son Philip to be friends with the dweeby Seldon, as she probably relates to being the child that was always left out at the school yard. Meanwhile Herman, natural salesman that he is, is more confident that the family can strike out on their own and overcome a bit of social awkwardness among the gentiles. However he is very aware of overt anti-Semitism, anxiously watching the news reels from overseas, following the rise of Lindbergh, and he ultimately shuts down the planned move when he sees that the neighborhood bar is a kitschy German beer hall with members of the German American Bund openly carousing and doing everything short of staging their own un-ironic production of Springtime for Hitler.

There are tertiary plot lines involving the cousin and the aunt. Alvin (who I do not recall from the book) is a bright young man who is unfortunately taking some bad turns in life under the influence of his wanna-be gangster friend “Shush.” The aunt’s story line seems rather innocuous at first as her heart is broken by a lover when it becomes apparent he intends to keep her as a mistress instead of taking her as a wife. By episode's end her prospects are looking a tad better when she is introduced to the influential Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro). As I said, a rather innocuous subplot but considering the actors that they’ve cast, not to mention what’s in the trailers, their relationship is going to play a big part in events as the series unfolds.

Now to address the elephant in the room.

As Nerds who Read Senior Editor Michael Isenberg pointed out in his review of the original novel, this story about a Republican celebrity with no prior political experience winning the presidency using dog whistles to bigots and allegedly to aid the ambitions of a foreign despot, was published in 2004, and any resemblance to the Trump Administration is clearly coincidental. As for the intentions of the creators of the HBO series, I can only report on what made it to the screen. In the first episode, from what we see and hear from Charles Lindbergh he is a lucid, charming, and well-dressed man. So therefore I can honestly say he does not read as a caricature of President Trump at all 😉.

Seriously, though, there are no attempts to drop in anachronistic slogans or gestures to make him appear more “Trumpy.” His speech on the radio about the FDR Democrats, the English, and the Jews trying to pull America into another world war is based on an actual speech Lindbergh gave at an America First event in September of 1941, and follows his accent and rhetorical style closely. (Here’s an excerpt from the real thing.)

Where any parallels to modern politics/culture really lie are in the regular people of the story. Of course there are no smart phones or Facebook, but as presented here, mass media still plays a crucial role in the characters’ lives. They don’t have newsfeeds on their phones but they have newsies belting out the headlines and selling papers on the streets. They have newsreels before every movie (and the subjects of the newsreels even rate space on the theater marquee). And off course the media that ruled the day, radio, is in the Levin's home and car. After listening to their favorite news pundit, people rush to the “comments section,” i.e., the sidewalk, to talk and debate with their neighbors about the events of the day. Even with people speaking face-to-face, there is still the echo chamber, so familiar to us in 2020; after all, everybody on the Levins’ street is Jewish and from the tri-state area.

After a scathing editorial from Walter Winchell berating Lindbergh for his isolationism, defeatism, and possible Nazi sympathies (again using turns of phrase used by the actual Winchell against the actual Lindbergh), Herman’s spirits are briefly bolstered and he is sure Lindbergh’s campaign can’t sustain such ridicule. Sadly, he is about to learn that a dressing down from East Coast media personalities doesn’t necessarily “play in Peoria.” It may not even play under his own roof as his eldest son and budding artist Sandy is compelled to sketch his portraits of “The Lone Eagle” Lindbergh, based on newspaper clippings, in secret. If the Lindbergh cult of personality has worked its way into the Levin household, what is going on in the rest of the country?

I front loaded this review with a comparison to The Man in the High Castle and a mention of some alternate historical fiction tropes because I really feel it is important to stress how much this book, and so far theis series, have steered away from the science fiction and military fiction that have come to characterize the genre. What sprung to mind while watching the series were not Dieselpunk nightmares of Nazis with Jet Packs or extrapolation for armchair military historians about what would have happened if Rommel hadn’t been forced to choose early retirement by way of a Luger.

Instead, what came to mind were other stories of the Jewish American experience and anti-Semitism on the homefront, like The Chosen and Focus. So all and all, The Plot against America seems to be a work not so much exploring a drastically different historical outcome but, instead ruminating on just how close we came to taking that darker path.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham MA, currently scheduled for May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

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Photo source(s): Google, EW

Any Resemblance to Trump is Purely Coincidental

The Plot against America by Philip Roth.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

On September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh—the hero aviator, first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, and idol of millions—gave a speech to a rally of the America First Committee in Des Moines, Iowa. It was a passionate appeal for the United States to stay out of World War II. He argued that the American people opposed entering the war, and it would be a non-issue except for the agitation of three groups of people: British propagandists, the Roosevelt Administration---and the Jews. Of this last group he said “their greatest danger in this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” Classic anti-Semitic trope. The Jews control everything.

What if, instead of giving that speech in 1941, Lindbergh gave it a year earlier—before the 1940 election? And what if that, combined with his own enormous celebrity, propels him to the Republican nomination for president and, in a surprise to everyone, he defeats the incumbent Franklin Roosevelt in November?

That is the premise of Philip Roth’s alternate history novel, The Plot against America. The novel has been made into a mini-series starring John Turturro and Winona Ryder. It premieres on HBO next week. But as I always say, this is Nerds who Read, and so today I will review the original Philip Roth novel.

Once in the White House, Lindbergh signs an “understanding” with Nazi Germany to keep the US out of the war. But many people, especially Jews, fear he has a plan to impose fascism on America.

We see all this from the point of view a typical Jewish family of the time. Interestingly, it is Roth’s own family. The nine-year-old narrator is named Philip Roth, son of Herman and Bess Roth, brother of Sanford “Sandy” Roth, all residing at 81 Summit Ave, Newark, New Jersey, just as the real-life Roths did.

As in To Kill a Mockingbird, a child narrator puts an idyllic spin on the story, in which the great events often go on in the background, as Philip is engrossed in more pressing concerns. Especially how the latest news is going to affect the amount of time he has to spend with his downstairs neighbor Selden, a drippy boy who follows Philip around with a chessboard. Whatever he does, Philip can’t shake him.

One of the things that intrigues me about history is that it seems so much more confusing when you’re in the middle of it than when you’re looking back decades or centuries later. Today we all know the Nazis were some of the most despicable and evil thugs in history. But during their rise in the 1930s, it wasn’t so clear to many people. Sure there were some like Winston Churchill and J.R.R. Tolkien who saw right through them—and got dismissed as “warmongers” for their trouble. But many others were taken in. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the former Edward VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson) visited Berlin in 1937 and met with Hitler—all smiles. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sat down with der Fuhrer in Munich in 1938 to carve up Czechoslovakia. He returned to England with a worthless piece of paper signed by Hitler and an announcement of “peace for our time”—less than a year before the outbreak of World War II.

Lindbergh himself made a number of trips to Nazi Germany, including attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics, after which he wrote to a friend that Hitler “is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe has done much for the German people.” In 1938, at a dinner at the American embassy in Berlin, he accepted a medal, the Service Cross of the German Eagle, from senior Nazi leader Hermann Göring.

And so it is with the fictional Lindbergh Administration. The anti-Semitism of Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech turns out to be a one-off event, leading many people to believe that he didn’t really mean it. Perhaps he was just poorly advised. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh even has a close Jewish confidante, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf. By a remarkable coincidence, the rabbi marries Mrs. Roth’s sister Evelyn—a teacher and sort of younger version of Delores Umbridge. The marriage doubles as a convenient literary device by which the ordinary Roths, and therefore the reader, gain visibility into the inner workings of the White House.

In any case, nothing the Lindbergh Administration does is really that horrible, at least at first. Indeed Lindbergh seems to want to help the Jews become better integrated into American society. He sets up an Office of American Absorption (OAA), under Rabbi Bengelsdorf, which establishes the “Just Folks” program: Jewish children from urban areas are given an opportunity to spend a summer on a farm in the heartland. Sandy Roth is one of the first to sign up, over his father’s objections—which leads to a knock-down drag-out fight around the dinner table. Mr. Roth sees the sinister and intentional destruction of Jewish culture. You will be assimilated. “Just Folks was the first step in a Lindbergh plan to separate Jewish children from their parents, to erode the solidarity of the Jewish family.” Aunt Evelyn dismisses his concerns as the unfounded fears of “ghetto Jews,” a vile phrase which Sandy is soon imitating.

Aunt Evelyn wins the argument and Sandy goes off to a Kentucky tobacco farm and has a wonderful time. He comes back taller, more filled out—and thanks to the summer sun, blonder. The symbolism is not exactly subtle. The way he shows off his new agricultural vocabulary, words like “flyings” and “topping,” struck me as a very true-to-life portrait of a 13-year-old boy who has acquired some knowledge that the adults don’t share. Thanks to the machinations of Aunt Evelyn, he ends up as poster child for Just Folks with a string of speaking engagements. I can’t help wondering what the real Sandy Roth, who was still alive when the book was published, thought about his now-famous little brother casting him in the role of Collaborator.

The family quarrel over Just Folks turns out to be the first of many; they tear the family apart. The boys' father is still convinced that Nazi Germany is coming to America. Family and friends are skeptical. “Where are the Nazi Brown Shirts and the secret police?” they ask. “The Nazi criminals start with something small,” Mr. Roth warns, “and if they get away with it…” Still American boys aren’t dying on the battlefields of Europe. The stock market is going up and up. What’s not to like?

But amid all the debate over what Lindbergh has planned, and whether he is an anti-Semite, one thing is clear: he had emboldened less ambiguous anti-Semites to come out into the open. The Roths first encounter this on a sightseeing trip to Washington, D.C. As the descendants of victims of European pogroms, they know how much better off they are in America, and are passionately patriotic about it. They save for years so they can take their children to the nation’s capital and see all the monuments to great Americans. But Mr. Roth’s tendency to opine in an audible voice about how awful the Lindbergh Administration is, and how much better things were under Roosevelt, results in him being called a “loudmouth Jew” by more than one bystander. Further, when the manager of their hotel finds out they’re Jewish, he evicts them. They come back from sightseeing to find their bags packed and waiting for them in the lobby.

Sadly, these ugly incidents are merely a harbinger of much more terrible things to come.

My main criticism of the book was the ending (no spoilers, I promise). It was almost as if Author Roth got tired of it and just decided to wrap things up as quickly as possible. Some truly epic national events occur, but these are given rapid-fire in capsule format. Then we find out what the Roths were doing during these events, but since we already know the national outcome, there isn’t any suspense, and these pages really drag. Don't get me wrong, this is a good book. But had the national events been allowed to unfold at the pace of the rest of the novel, and the Roths’ lives intertwined with them in real time, as they had up to the final chapter, it could have been a much better one. Still, there’s a really clever twist near the end, which puts a whole new spin on the story, and which I won't spoil for you.

*           *           *

The celebrity president with the glamorous wife. No previous experience in elected office. Refuses to be a puppet to his handlers. The slogan, “America First.” The electoral upset. The polarization of Americans—even the polarization of families—as the president’s passionate detractors insist he’s a racist who is going to suspend civil rights and undermine the Constitution, while his supporters, equally passionate, claim it’s all fake news and everything he’s done is perfectly reasonable. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to President Trump.

Since The Plot against America was published in 2004, Mr. Roth obviously did not intend it as a Trump parable. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. As far as I’ve been able to determine, he didn’t have anyone in particular in mind other than Charles A. Lindbergh. He had heard that the Republicans had considered running Lindbergh in 1940, and he was intrigued and wanted to explore that idea. Of course, the intent of the makers of the upcoming HBO series is another matter entirely.

Whether the resemblance between the real-life Trump Administration and the fictional Lindbergh one is anything more than superficial, I leave as an exercise for the reader. Either way, The Plot against America is an intriguing story, with some vivid characters, and a timeless warning that, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read.

Flippant Entertainment

Is Hunters’ irreverent portrayal of the Holocaust kosher?
by Michael Isenberg.

Last week, Nerds who Read posted Kerey McKenna's review of Hunters, the new Amazon Prime series about Holocaust survivors seeking vengeance against Nazis who escaped to the United States. In it, he raised some questions about whether some aspects of the series were appropriate for a subject as tragic and grim as the Holocaust. “Not just set in 1970s America as a period piece,” he wrote, “Hunters also takes over-the-top steps to callback to 1970s action movies like fantasy sequences resembling 1970s era game shows, PSAs, and Grindhouse movie trailers…the jarring gear shifts between a reflection on historical atrocities to cartoon shoot-em-up against cartoon villainy was a bit hard to reconcile.” He concluded by wondering if “all that ham and cheese is ‘Kosher’ for such subjects.”

Indeed, Kerey was not the only one put off by the comic book vibe of the series, not to mention some historical inaccuracies. TV Critic Daniel Fienberg, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, called it “Jewsploitation,” in analogy to the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s; they were hyper-stereotyped and hyper-violent, and yet groundbreaking in portraying blacks as action heroes, instead of servants or comic relief, as had been the norm in prior decades.

The BBC reported that “Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, told the BBC such portrayals risked fuelling Holocaust denial, and lent a tone of ‘flippant entertainment’ to the programme. ‘We have a real responsibility to protect the truth of the Holocaust,’ said Mrs Pollock, ‘particularly as we're moving away from living history, the survivors are few and frailer.’”

The inclusion of a human chess game at Auschwitz—in which the “pieces” get murdered upon being captured—was a particular point of criticism. There is no record of any such atrocity in the annals of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz Memorial, which according to its Twitter profile, “preserves the site of the former German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp,” tweeted, “Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors. Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”

In my humble opinion, there is nothing wrong per se with a comic book-style series about the Holocaust, or including fictional incidents, or even injecting humor into a tragic subject. Any problems with Hunters is not because of what they set out to do. Whether they did it well is another matter.

Certainly comic book heroes confronting Nazism in general and the Holocaust in particular has a long and honorable history. From the March 1941 debut of Captain America, with its now-viral cover art of Cap punching Hitler in the face, to the more tortured portrayal of Holocaust survivor Magneto in the X-Men comics and movies, Nazism has been grist for the superhero mill almost as long as there have been Nazis.

Many reviewers have noted that Hunters was very obviously trying to capture the magic of another comic book-style movie about "killing Nah-tsees": Quentin Tarantino’s simultaneously gruesome and tongue-in-cheek Inglourious Basterds. In this, Hunters bit off more than it could chew. But then, it would be difficult for anyone who isn’t Tarantino to reproduce the dramatic intensity of Basterds’ opening scene, in which a Nazi "Jew Catcher" chats calmly with a farmer over a glass of milk while the Jews he’s looking for are hiding under the floorboards. Or the manic insanity of Shosanna’s fiery revenge against Hitler and his despicable crew in the climax.

Of course, Basterds departed from the history books in a major way, and indeed authors of historical fiction (a category which includes me!) have no obligation to confine themselves to actual events. It is not their job merely to chronicle real life. Historians do that quite well, thank you very much. The job of historical fiction is to entertain, to make the reader empathize with the characters, to explore the human psyche, and to show what life could be, not merely what it is. History can be a starting point. It need not be the ending point. The key word in the phrase “creative writing” is, after all, creative. Or as series creator David Weil put it, Hunters “is not documentary. And it was never purported to be…this show takes the point of view that symbolic representations provide individuals access to an emotional and symbolic reality that allows us to better understand the experiences of the Shoah and provide it with meaning that can address our urgent present.”

Weil had another reason for relying on fictionalized atrocities. As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor himself, he thought it would be disrespectful, in a piece of Holocaust fiction, to appropriate the stories of its real victims. This was the same reason “that all of the concentration camp prisoners (and survivors) in the series would be given tattoos above the number 202,499. 202,499 is the highest recorded number given to a prisoner at Auschwitz. I didn’t want one of our characters to have the number of a real victim or a real survivor.” One may disagree with Weil’s reasoning in this. One certainly can’t deny that his heart is in the right place.

Certainly there may be, as Auschwitz Memorial warns, some Holocaust deniers who idiotically think that the existence of a fictional incident in a fictional TV show somehow proves a cover-up. But there will no doubt be many more people who will be inspired by the series to learn more about the true history of the Holocaust. I know in my own case, vast swaths of the history I know was the result of seeing or reading some piece of historical fiction, 1976’s I, Claudius, for example, and then doing some research to find out which parts were true. Indeed, in the case of Hunters, it seems to be working. For instance, Google Trends showed a 17-fold increase in interest in “human chess” after the series was released.*

But it is perhaps the inclusion of humor in the series that is the most controversial aspect of Hunters in this age of political correctness and perpetually offended snowflakes. As with comic book treatments, people have been making fun of Nazis since the beginning: P.G. Wodehouse created the knee-obsessed would-be Fuehrer of Britain Roderick Spode in 1938. Charlie Chaplin mimicked Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). The Donald Duck cartoon Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943) and the Spike Jones cover of its title song were two of the greatest pieces of war propaganda ever made.

After the war, there was Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1967) with its comically inept pro-Nazi musical, “Springtime for Hitler.”

TV’s Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971) was particularly controversial in its day because of the inappropriate setting for a comedy: a prisoner-of-war camp. So it’s interesting that all four of the main German characters were played by Jewish actors—three of whom—Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink), John Banner (Sgt. Schultz), and Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter) had been born in Germany or Austria and had been fortunate to escape in time (The fourth, Howard Caine [Maj. Hochstetter], was an American Jew). Another Jewish cast member, Robert Clary, who played the French P.O.W. Le Beau, had actually been imprisoned at Buchenwald.

Klemperer once told The Houston Chronicle, “I had one qualification when I took the job. If they ever wrote a segment whereby Colonel Klink would come out the hero, I would leave the show.” Clearly, this was personal for him, as I’m sure it was for all the Jewish actors. I believe that was the reason the show was so wickedly funny. And if actual victims of the Nazis don’t have an issue with the humor, it seems foolish for the rest of us to object.

These examples all made fun of Nazism in general, but stopped short of jokes about the Holocaust. In recent years, even that taboo has been shattered. The 2004 South Park episode “The Passion of the Jew” is a particular favorite of a Millennial I know.

Laughter in the face of tragedy does serve a purpose. It helps us fragile humans deal. It's been said that the most oppressed peoples have the best senses of humor. This is believed to be especially true of Jews, who have faced more than their share of tragedy during their thousands of years of history. A 1978 Time Magazine article explored the question, noting that “Although Jews constitute only 3% of the U.S. population, 80% of the nation's professional comedians are Jewish.” “Why such domination of American humor?” it asked. “New York City Psychologist Samuel Janus, who once did a yearlong stint as a stand-up comic, thinks that he has the answer: Jewish humor is born of depression and alienation from the general culture. For Jewish comedians, he told the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, ‘comedy is a defense mechanism to ward off the aggression and hostility of others.’”

Humor also allows us to explore difficult subjects which might otherwise make us too uncomfortable to confront. And when directed at our enemies, it makes them seem weaker and easier to defeat.

In short, laughing at Nazis is healthy.

Nevertheless, I had issues with the humorous elements of Hunters, which mostly took the form of Family Guy-style cutaways. They just were not well done. It’s difficult to put my finger on exactly where they went wrong, how they differed from Spike Jones, Hogan’s Heroes, and the rest. Part of the problem was most of the show was fairly serious, so when it hit one of the comedic sequences it was, in Kerey’s word, “jarring.” In any case, whatever the reason, they weren’t funny. In particular, a fake game show in Episode 8, “Why Does Everyone Hate the Jews?,” had me sitting in icy and uncomfortable silence as contestants yelled out negative Jewish stereotypes as if they were on Family Feud. As my father used to say, “Laugh? I never thought I’d start.”

Still, even though the series failed to rise to Tarantino-level heights, and the humor fell flat, I recommend it. Flippant entertainment has its place, and it is thoroughly satisfying to see the Jewish characters deal rough justice to the Nazis who once tormented them.

Furthermore, we live in a time of historically high levels of anti-Semitism. When white supremacists march through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Hebes will not divide us.”** When too many Americans—especially the young—are woefully ignorant of the Holocaust. According to a Pew survey, 43% of American teens could not correctly identify the 20 year period in which it happened, 62% did not know the approximate number of Jews who died, and 67% did not know that Hitler became chancellor of Germany via a democratic process. Any TV series that raises Holocaust awareness, and sends its viewers to Google to find out more about the tragedy, is performing a valuable public service—especially if it’s the sort of irreverent series that might resonate with a generation brought up on South Park and Family Guy.

My cousin Louis lived through the Nazi occupation of Belgium. When the Germans invaded, they ordered all the Jews in his town to register with the authorities. Louis’s father was a tailor and one of his clients, who was the mayor of the town, told him to just not register. And so, when the Nazis rounded up the Jews to ship them off to the concentration camps, they missed Louis and his family (Other family members have told me that Louis’s father was going to register but never got around to it, so procrastination literally saved their lives). Louis’s brother Jacques went to Paris at one point where he got picked up by the Gestapo. “We never saw him again,” Louis told me. But Louis survived the war.

Sadly, Louis is no longer with us. He died last summer at the age of 91, after a long and happy post-war life. When I found out his daughter had watched Hunters, I asked her what her father would have thought of it. “Every Holocaust movie or series would upset my father,” she told me. “But he couldn’t turn away...he had to watch it. I think he would watch this and cheer for every murder of a Nazi.”

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Marvel Comics, Google, Historia Obscurum

*--I also checked Google trends for searches on "holocaust," and it is at an elevated level, but it was not clear whether that was the result of Hunters, or a residual effect from the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz a couple weeks before.

**--Contrary to popular opinion, I do not believe that the Charlottesville assholes chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” I listened to the video a number of times, and it sounded to me like “You will not replace us.” But, as I indicated above, they clearly chanted “Hebes will not divide us.”