Defamation

The Israeli director Yoav Shamir sets out to ask what antisemitism is today, and turns his camera on both ends at once: on one side the Anti-Defamation League in the United States and its head Abraham Foxman, on the other Norman Finkelstein, among the organisation’s sharpest critics. Uri Avnery and John Mearsheimer also speak. The film does not close the question and does not declare either side’s answer to be the right one; Shamir records his own doubts as well. It has been contested since 2009, embraced by some and firmly rejected by others, and that has to be said, because the film sits inside an argument rather than settling one. The Hebrew title in the record carries invisible directional marks at each end; only four films out of the 41,687 in the catalogue have them, and they are there to isolate the text, so they are not an error.