DW, Leni and Spike: They Got Shame |
In August 1990, Spike Lee penned a defensive op-ed in The New York Times titled “I Am Not an Anti-Semite,” responding to accusations that his film Mo’ Better Blues peddled antisemitic stereotypes through its portrayal of two Jewish club owners, Moe and Josh Flatbush, as greedy exploiters of Black jazz musicians. Lee insisted he was no bigot, just an artist crafting “honest portraits”. He decried a “double standard” in Hollywood, where Black stereotypes abound without uproar, yet his brief depiction of Jews drew fire. He invoked whataboutism, comparing 10 minutes of screen time to 100 years of racist cinema, and accused detractors of hypocrisy for ignoring D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—a film that glorified the KKK and incited lynchings—while scrutinizing him under a microscope. Ironically, Griffith and Leni Riefenstahl made similar pleas: Griffith denied racism, claiming Birth of a Nation was mere historical art; Riefenstahl swore she wasn’t a Nazi propagandist, insisting Triumph of the Will was aesthetic documentary. All three hid behind “honesty” while mainstreaming hate. Mo’ Better Bigots.
Thirty-six years on, in 2026, Lee no longer seems bothered by the “anti-Semite” label—he wears it like a badge, much like his hero Louis Farrakhan. At the 2026 NBA All-Star Game, Lee strutted courtside in a keffiyeh-patterned hoodie and bag strap with Palestinian flag colors, including the upside-down red triangle—a symbol popularized in Hamas propaganda to mark Israeli targets for destruction. Timed against Deni Avdija’s historic debut as the first Israeli All-Star, it wasn’t subtle solidarity—it was a targeted provocation.
Lee has doubled down on pro-Palestine messaging since Israel’s war on Hamas began in 2023, sharing Palestinian flags on Instagram and railing against accusations: “I just find it insane that if you speak about what’s happening in Gaza…you’re antisemitic.” This echoes Farrakhan’s playbook—framing anti-Israel fervor as anti-racism while dismissing antisemitism charges as smears. Lee’s history with Farrakhan vibes (like in Malcolm X, which nods to Nation of Islam themes) and his refusal to backpedal suggest he’d embrace the label now, not deny it as in 1990.
So the historical parallels sharpen: Griffith revolutionized cinema with The Birth of a Nation, pioneering narrative techniques like cross-cutting and close-ups — using them to rehabilitate the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of white purity against caricatured Black villains, fueling a KKK resurgence. Griffith denied bigotry, calling it “history”. Riefenstahl elevated documentary form in Triumph of the Will, with innovative camera work and mass spectacle to humanize Hitler and glorify Nazism at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. She claimed it was pure art, not propaganda, denying her complicity till death. Lee, like his forebears, denies bias while indulging it: Mo’ Better Blues revives Shylock tropes, and his 2026 All-Star stunt normalizes symbols tied to Hamas, a group whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction.
Lee might consider that history will place him in a ninth circle with Griffith and Riefenstahl—three cultural giants whose genius betrayed their fealty to normalizing eliminationism: Griffith—the KKK; Riefenstahl —the Nazis; Lee—Hamas. In Inside Man, Lee’s heist thriller, Christopher Plummer’s character is the hidden enabler of Nazi Judeocide, profiting from collaboration behind a facade. Perhaps that’s Lee’s subconscious confession: the “inside man” of Hollywood, subtly enabling Judeocidal rhetoric under empowerment’s guise, forever damned in the frozen circle of treachery.