Except, no. Cooper sounds like a cad. (“I don’t see myself as a ladies’ man,” he says, “but I love women.” Dude.) And Laurent is too good for this. She is not the equivalent of a 24-year-old back-up dancer. She is an extremely talented actress. She directs. She makes music. She was the official hostess of the last Cannes festival. She … looks like that. And did I mention she’s Jewish? (Ashkenazic and Sephardic!)

A suggestion for Laurent: the guy may be fluent in French, and he may be alright-looking or whatever, but why not ditch him for someone who’s not just trying to get back at the Bronx Bombshell? Someone who really appreciates you? What I mean to say is, once you start seeing an interested nice Jewish boy, you’ll never go back. If I meet any, I’ll introduce you.

And anyway, are you so sure you’re Cooper’s type?

Bradley Cooper Rebounds From Jennifer Lopez to Melanie Laurent? [Page Six]
Related: Bradley Cooper: Sexiest Man Alive 2011 [People]

The real “end of the Holocaust,” he argues, is the transformation of it into a lesson about the “triumph of the human spirit” or some such affirmation. Rosenfeld, the founder and former director of the Jewish studies program at Indiana University, which has made itself a major center of Jewish publishing and learning, is a mainstream scholar who has seen the flaw in mainstream Holocaust discourse. He has made it his mission to rescue the Holocaust from the Faustian bargain Jews have made with history and memory, the Faustian bargain that results when we trade the specifics of memory, the Jewishness of the Holocaust, and the Jew-hatred that gave it its rationale and identity, for the weepy universalism of such phrases as “the long record of man’s inhumanity to man.”

The impulse to find the silver lining is relentless, though. Suffering and grief must be transformed into affirmation, and the bleak irrecoverable fate of the victims must be given a redemptive aspect for those of us alive. In fact it’s an insult to the dead to rob their graves to make ourselves feel better. One recent manifestation Rosenfeld has shrewdly noticed is the way there has been a subtle shift in the popular representation of the Holocaust—a shift in the attention once given to the murdered victims to comparatively uplifting stories of survivors, of the “righteous gentiles,” of the scarce “rescuers,” and the even scarcer “avengers,” e.g., Quentin Tarantino’s fake-glorious fictional crew.

Rosenfeld is not afraid to contend with the fact that, as he writes, “with new atrocities filling the news each day and only so much sympathy to go around, there are people who simply do not want to hear any more about the Jews and their sorrows. There are other dead to be buried, they say.” The sad, deplorable, but, he says, “unavoidable” consequence of what may be the necessary limits of human sympathy is that “the more successfully [the Holocaust] enters the cultural mainstream, the more commonplace it becomes. A less taxing version of a tragic history begins to emerge, still full of suffering, to be sure, but a suffering relieved of many of its weightiest moral and intellectual demands and, consequently easier to be … normalized.”

Normalized? The Holocaust as one more instance in the long chronicle of “man’s inhumanity to man”? Rosenfeld’s book offers a welcome contrarian take on the trend. Yes, we’ve had enough, as Rosenfeld points out, of museums that cumulatively obscure memory in a fog of well-meaning but misleading inspirational brotherhood-of-man rhetoric. We’ve had enough of films like the execrable Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful and the well-intentioned but misguided Schindler’s List, with its sad lack of self-awareness that a happy ending, celebrating a Christian rescuer and some lucky Jewish survivors, is woefully off base. We’ve had enough of phony-memoir love stories, and we’ve had enough of the way a genuine tragic heroine and victim of Nazi death camps like Anne Frank is mendaciously turned into a spokeswoman for the “goodnesss of man.”

What we haven’t had enough of is a careful consideration of the implications of the Holocaust for the nature of human nature. As George Steiner told me (for my book, Explaining Hitler), “the Holocaust removed the re-insurance from human hope”—the psychic safety net we imagine marked the absolute depth of human nature. The Holocaust tore through that net heading for hell. Human nature could be—at the promptings of a charismatic and evil demagogue, religious hate, and so-called “scientific racism”—even worse than we imagined. No one wants to hear that. We want to hear uplifting stories about that nice Mr. Schindler. We want affirmations!

And the fact that it was not just one man but an entire continent that enthusiastically pitched in or stood by while 6 million were murdered: Doesn’t that call for us to spend a little time re-thinking what we still reverently speak of as “European civilization”? Or to investigate the roots of that European hatred? How much weight do the Holocaust museums give to the two millennia of Christian Jew-hatred, murderous pogroms, blood libels, and other degradations? Or do they prefer to focus on “righteous gentiles” in order to avoid offending their gentile hosts?

And for all their “reaching out” and “teachable moments,” how much do the Holocaust museums and Holocaust curricula connect the hatred of the recent past with contemporary exterminationist Jew-hatred, the vast numbers of people who deny the first, but hunger for a second, Holocaust? It’s a threat some fear even to contemplate—the potential destruction of the 5 million Jews of Israel with a single well-placed nuclear blast—a nightmarish but not unforseeable possibility to which Rosenfeld is unafraid to devote the final section of his book.

It’s something I speculated about in the Tablet Magazine excerpt from my book How the End Begins. It’s something spoken of eloquently by Imre Kertész, one of the writers Rosenfeld wishes to rescue from the “end of the Holocaust.” (Only two novels by this Hungarian survivor of Nazism and Stalinist oppression, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner, have been translated, a situation I would like to formally petition some serious-minded publisher to remedy forthwith.)

“Before Auschwitz,” Kertesz writes, “Auschwitz was unimaginable. That is no longer so today. Because Auschwitz in fact occurred, it has now been established in our imaginations as a firm possibility. What we are able to imagine, especially because it once was, can be again.” I wonder what our dedicated affirmationists who once disdainfully mocked concerns about a second Holocaust would say to Kertesz.

• Norman Finkelstein, the notorious writer (his prime shtick is, he’s the son of survivors who compares Israel to the Nazis), has been trying to secure speaking venues in Germany. [JPost]

• Long Island’s Holocaust Museum and Tolerance Center reopened (after over a year of renovations) with powerful new exhibits. [NYT]

• An interesting feature on how Orthodox students at secular colleges compromise among religious strictures and the reigning hook-up culture. [New Voices]

• At the Jewish Council of Public Affairs Plenum in Dallas, Ambassador Michael Oren called for “compromise” regarding the controversy over mixed gender prayers at the Western Wall. [JCPA]

• Get prepared for the Zaretskys’ ice dancing performance tonight with this (unrelated) clip, which is also set to the Schindler’s List theme music.

The masterful 1969 film Army of Shadows, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, follows Philippe, a decent and brave civil engineer, as he becomes one of the leaders of the French resistance to the Nazis. In one of its first scenes, Philippe, portrayed by the Lino Ventura, is arrested by the Vichy police and driven to prison. The paddywagon makes a quick stop along the way, and an officer runs out to a nearby farmhouse and returns with some fresh produce. This moment passes quickly and without commentary, but it nonetheless reveals an entire world: the hungry officer pulling rank, the reluctant farmer forced to part with his precious goods, and Philippe, the man of principle, looking from the side in disgust at the whole tableau. All of the horrors and complexity of Vichy are there, in under a minute, without many words.

Inglourious Basterds begins in the same Vichy countryside, in the same year, 1941. It features the same stock characters—the officer, this time not a French policeman but a Nazi colonel, and the diffident farmer, in whose basement a Jewish family of five is hiding. Unlike Melville, however, Tarantino lets the scene stretch on for many long minutes. It’s a set piece, and it’s there to feature the Nazi officer, Hans Landa, nicknamed the Jew Hunter and played with elegance and joy by the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz.

Take away the shiny boots and crisp uniform, and Landa is every other memorable Tarantino character. His speech is the same torrent of brio that flows with hilarious eloquence only to shift suddenly into a menacing growl. Think Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. Think Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs. Think, in other words, of the quintessential film psychopath stripped of all refinement and meaning. More than an obedient servant of a specific ideology, Landa is bad for badness’s sake.

As soon as the lengthy vignette ends, another one begins. This one, too, features a charming, murderous, and vacuous movie trope: it is Brad Pitt’s lieutenant Aldo Raine, a sadistic and callous soldier leading a small gang of American-Jewish soldiers behind enemy lines on a mission to kill as many Nazis as possible. Each of his men, Raine insists, must bring him back the scalps of 100 Nazis, and most of the long sequence that follows focuses on the various methods of obtaining said scalps. We meet Raine’s men, known as the Basterds: there’s Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), a baseball enthusiast who puts his Louisville Slugger to anatomically innovative use; Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), who never met a knife he didn’t like; and so on. The Basterds are given no back story, and there’s little that sets them apart from each other save for their favored method of murder. When we see them on screen, they are usually elbow-deep in Teutonic brain matter.

All this bloodletting leads the Basterds to Paris, where a gala screening of a new film is held in a small cinema, with the Nazi top brass, including the Führer himself, all in attendance. As they watch the film-within-a-film—a Riefenstahl-inspired propaganda piece titled A Nation’s Pride—the Germans get the kind of comeuppance that makes all the previous displays of torture and violence seem tame.

Still, with all the gunned-down, burned, and exploded Nazis scattered on the screen, it is the cinema itself that takes center stage. The theater is burnt down using highly flammable film reels. The movies kill Hitler, literally. Tarantino says so himself, in the film’s production notes: “I like that it’s the power of the cinema that fights the Nazis,” he quips. “But not just as a metaphor, as a literal reality.”

The sentence is indicative of both Tarantino’s failure as a filmmaker and Inglourious Basterds‘ failure as a film. It is a failure not only of imagination, but also of morality. The desire to turn film into a literal, blunt instrument of revenge drains it of the terrific power it has as a sharp and precise tool with which to cut through myopia, forgetfulness, ignorance, and denial. When in the hands of intelligent and sensitive directors, the results are shocking, evocative, world-changing. Consider Melville’s Army of Shadows, or Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, or Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. All three directors cover the same territorial and historical ground as Inglourious Basterds. But they use film not in order to set ablaze heaping mounds of flesh, but in order to try and understand the malice and complicity that led Europe to its benighted state. They do so because they realize that understanding—an act that requires us to learn and see evil not as a black monolith but as a gray composite of many small and often insufferable nuances—is our best claim to humanity, our last chance at grace.

It’s no coincidence that all three of those filmmakers are Jewish. Theirs is the Jewish way. Rather than burn film, they develop it into art. They are talmudic, offering endless interpretations to the fundamental question of our species, the question of our seemingly endless capacity for evil. Tarantino, however, is not interested in such trifles. He doesn’t see cinema as a way to look at reality, but—ever the child abandoned in front of the television set, ever the video-store geek—as an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichean world where we needn’t worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat.

Eerily, that is precisely the point that the film’s impressive marketing blitzkrieg tried to promote. The film, its producers reminded us again and again, is a fantasy, a fanciful flight of Jewish revenge. To that end, Tarantino called on Eli Roth—who is not only an actor but also a director of popular and particularly gory horror films—to helm A Nation’s Pride, the fake propaganda film whose premiere the Basterds crash.

“It was perfect that he had the Jewish guy do it,” Roth said in a recent interview, “because I knew that the more authentic [A Nation’s Pride] was, the more ridiculous it would make Hitler and Goebbels look.” But watch that film-within-a-film closely—a rapid-fire collection of bullets and anguish and explosions—and you realize it’s not that different from Inglourious Basterds. Both are empty cinematic spools of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Like A Nation’s Pride, Tarantino’s film is a bit of shallow propaganda, promoting not some totalitarian ideology but a worldview in which cool trumps consequence, nothing is real, and everything is permitted. If there’s any justice in the world, it’s a vision viewers everywhere will vehemently reject.