Jewish skinhead

Today: Please join us in welcoming the debut of our newest Hydra, Josie Riesman, New York Times-bestselling author of RINGMASTER and TRUE BELIEVER.

Issue No. 146

‘The Believer’ and Me
Josephine Riesman

‘The Believer’ and Me

by Josephine Riesman

“None of us is innocent,” I wrote in my diary at age 19 and a half. I had just left Israel’s Holocaust memorial/museum, Yad Vashem. “I want to cry, but that is pornography. Rich Jews. Rich fucking Jews.”

I started scribbling my words larger and less legibly as my agony and confusion grew. I was on a free trip for college students, but I was not having the proper reaction to anything, least of all the venerated site I’d just toured. I spiraled beyond the ruled lines of the notebook, barreling into antisemitic free association. I’ll spare you all the slurs, but the general gist was: I hate the Jews now. And therefore: I hate myself. 

The crime of the Holocaust was too much for my adolescent brain to contain; to a certain extent, I just shorted out. But I also couldn’t stand how proud of our suffering the place seemed to be. The path of the museum steers you toward the exit to the sound of the Israeli national anthem, accompanied by displays announcing the happy ending to the story: the founding of the Jewish State. We suffered more than anyone else, it seemed to say, and therefore we were rewarded with the Promised Land.

The force I was channeling is allergic to reason. But I know that in that moment I felt disgust, a kind of lightning bolt of antisemitism; a new and bitter intimacy with all the parts of myself that I wanted to destroy. 

I began to connect this experience with a film I’d seen two years before: Henry Bean’s overlooked 2001 cinematic masterwork The Believer. Hailed upon its pre-9/11 festival debut and subsequently ignored in the puritanical aftermath of 9/11, The Believer tells the story of a young neo-Nazi, Danny Balint (played by Ryan Gosling), who hides a secret from his fellow fascists: that he was born and raised as an Orthodox Jew.

Today, almost eleven months after the October 7 attacks, I see Danny’s ghost everywhere I turn in the Jewish community.

More than 75 percent of Orthodox Jews are likely to vote for Donald Trump and his cryptofascist Project 2025 agenda this November. Jewish politicians in the Democratic Party regularly endorse massive arms sales to Israel, even as it commits mass murder in Gaza and herds Palestinians into concentration camps (sorry, humanitarian zones). Jewish communal institutions deny obvious facts about the bloodshed and jump headlong into the abyss. 

But a hell of a lot of anti-Zionist Jews, too, have been presenting Jewish nationalism as a singular evil—perhaps even a uniquely Jewish pathology—that threatens the world. Forgive them, Lord; they know not what tropes they echo. Not even getting into the memes about bloodthirsty cabals and global puppetmasters blithely distributed to left-wingers by the antisemitic right on Twitter. Noble criticism of one’s own privilege slips into a generalized anger at the community into which one was born. It’s hard to walk that path and not develop some Danny Balint–esque views on Jewry.

In The Believer, a longtime fascist tells a reporter, “I think antisemitism today is largely a Jewish phenomenon—wouldn’t you agree?” There are days when I feel tempted to do so.

And yet, the movie is not an antisemitic diatribe; not in the least. It is an ode to Jewishness and Judaism, written with passion, knowledge, and a heaping helping of ethnic epithets. It is not unlike my diary entry at Yad Vashem, in that way.