Laszlo Nemes is right, of course. At Cannes, where his movie Moulin, about the French Resistance leader whom Klaus Barbie tortured to death, is being shown, the Hungarian director delivered himself of some words of warning and despair. More about Nemes’ observations can be found here: “‘An orgy of antisemitism is overtaking the West,’ says acclaimed Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes,” by Hannah Brown, Jerusalem Post, May 22, 2026:
“There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the West,” Hungarian Jewish director Laszlo Nemes told Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian in a piece published earlier this week.
Nemes, who is now at the Cannes Film Festival promoting his latest movie, Moulin, is best known for his first feature film, Son of Saul (2015).
Son of Saul is a hauntingly graphic and frightening drama about a member of the Sonderkommando unit at Auschwitz. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.
Nemes told The Guardian that he didn’t think that the movie would be so well-received if it came out today.
“I don’t even think it would make the [Oscar] shortlist today… Because of the politicization of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered… Nobody would touch it with a 10-foot pole,” he said….
“[It’s] tiring to hear the overclass of Hollywood lecture us morally. You know, from their pools and luxury homes in the Valley and Hollywood hills,” Nemes said.
“Do I really have to listen to millionaires lecture the world about morality?” he asked. “I don’t think anybody wants that.”
Nemes also discussed the issue of what he called the West’s apathy regarding Hamas’s control over and oppression of the people of Gaza – an issue which was unlikely to be raised at Cannes by anyone else.
“Had [the elite] really cared about the people in this region, they would have revolted against these people being ruled by a totalitarian death cult that’s actually killing its own population and at unprecedented levels,” he said.
According to Nemes, they choose to criticize Israel instead: “There’s this obsession with Jews….
Nemes is a Hungarian film director, and a Jew, whose three movies have been about Jews, Nazis, and a heroic Résistant in Occupied Europe. He has felt the wind of antisemitism that, he says, is now at gale-force level, akin to what he says swept across Europe in the 1930s: “I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the West has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] Party.”
This is a cry of despair that comes from a deep way down. Do not turn away. Pay attention.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
If “Never Again” was supposed to be more than a mere cliche, then banning Nazism was by no means adequate: banning both Marxism and islam has to be a part of the formula as well. As long as either is allowed to survive as legitimate, respectable opinions, there will always be antisemitism
James Lincoln says
Just wondering what kind of reception “Schindler’s List” (1993) would receive in today’s anti-Semitic world.
gravenimage says
I shudder to think. James.
Daniel Ben Noach says
I’m learning about Gustave Le Bon’s book, Psychologie des foules. It laid out the process by which masses of people could be manipulated into mass movements, and definitely influenced Mussolini and Hitler. Beware of who is using its lessons today.
https://open.substack.com/pub/paperconnections/p/the-book-that-manipulated-the-twentieth?r=15jgr2&utm_medium=ios
dumbledoresarmy says
I read that article you linked. Very interesting. I find it notable that Le Bon had travelled in the lands dominated by Islam: he had spent two decades travelling through ‘North Africa and the Ottoman East and India’. That bears thinking about…
There is a different – 20th century – Frenchman who has also written about propaganda. He called it ‘Propagandes’ (in the plural) and the subtitle, in the English version, is “the formation of men’s attitudes’. I read it ages ago… I think it might be worth having a look at it again to find out whether Ellul was aware of and had read Le Bon, and if so, what he might have advised to people who wished to refrain from either manipulating or from being manipulated.
Ellul lived through most of the 20th century and was in a position to observe both WWI and then the inter-war period and then the rise of the Third Reich, along with the rise of Communism (he called himself a socialist but he was I think sui generis… for one thing, he was a committed Christian and also a Friend of Zion, righteous among the nations; his tree stands in the avenue of the righteous at Yad Vashem, because of what he did during the Nazi occupation of France).
The true companion volume for ‘Propagandes’ is the book he published in 1986 that analyses the vast and terrifyingly-effective anti-Israel propaganda campaign (emanating both from Soviet and Islamic sources) that he noticed in operation from the 1960s onward until the early 1980s… (and that is still running as if on rails, today, vastly magnified by social media). The book is called ‘Un Chretien Pour Israel’, and it devotes several chapters to what I might call clinical analysis of that anti-Israel campaign. Call it a ‘case study’: like an epidemiologist observing and describing the progression of a pandemic, or a master surgeon in an anatomy class dissecting a cancer. One may note that at one point he describes the atmosphere he had already seen developing, within the western world (western Europe, France, particularly) as ‘pre-pogrom’. That was in 1986.. I fear that the pogroms are now upon us…
One of the things I have remembered from reading that book is this: he argues that the educated person, the intellectual, the person who devotedly reads the newspapers of record, is peculiarly susceptible! It is a warning to all of us.
gravenimage says
Hungarian Film Director Laszlo Nemes: ‘An Absolute Orgy of Antisemitism’ in the West
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Thank you to Laszlo Nemes for speaking out!