Lee - another Holocaust movie without Jews

Lee is a good film, or at least it's a film with a very good central performance by the main star (Kate Winslet playing photographer Lee Miller), but it's also the latest Holocaust film to downplay the fact that Jews were the main victims of Nazi genocide.

Thousands of people disappeared from Paris under Nazi occupation, we are told in one scene - "not only Jews” but also socialists, “homosexuals” and lots of other categories of people. That's the only explicit mention of Jews in a film that climaxes with the liberation of Buchenwald and Miller's photographs of wagonloads of corpses and skeletal figures in striped uniforms.

Oh yes, there's also the moment where Miller's photographer buddy David E Scherman sobs "these are my people" - but we haven't been told he's Jewish, so it's a line that you could easily struggle to understand. The Nazis hated photographers?

This is becoming a pattern, after the biopic of Sir Nicholas Winton, One Life, did something similar. It’s as if for a Holocaust movie to fit with today’s zeitgeist it has to be inclusive and can’t privilege one group above others as victims of Nazi terror. The Nazis hated everyone equally because they hated diversity and multiculturalism, is the underlying message. Except that isn’t true: the Nazis persecuted many groups, but their ideological and practical commitment to eradicating Jews from the face of the earth outweighed all others.

The number of Jews in the world still hasn’t recovered to pre-Holocaust levels - never mind how many of us there might be now, were it not for the Shoah. But it isn’t just about numbers. The reasons why the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews were different too.

Perhaps in the current climate, movie producers feel that audiences won’t connect with a film that highlights Jewish suffering and victimhood. Better to downplay it than risk people switching off. I may be doing the film industry a disservice in having that thought, but it’s worth considering.

Or - and this is possibly the most troubling explanation - maybe the people writing film scripts nowadays just don’t know. Maybe they don’t understand about the centrality of antisemitism to the Nazi worldview. Perhaps in a world where anti-racist politics is all about colour-based racism, the idea that European Jews could have been victims of racial genocide just doesn’t make sense any more. Maybe this downplaying of Jews in Holocaust movies isn’t cynical, but is based on genuine ignorance.

It’s a far cry from Schindler’s List, which was unambiguous about who the Nazis wanted to exterminate, and finished with an unapologetically Zionist ending.

Whatever the reason for it, this is a troubling development. Holocaust education isn’t limited to school classrooms and museum exhibits: it is most powerful of all in popular culture, and Lee is another opportunity missed.