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Study in Self-Hatred

Screenwriter Henry Bean was riveted by the story the instant he heard it 25 years ago.
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January 25, 2001

Screenwriter Henry Bean was riveted by the story the instant he heard it 25 years ago.

Back in the 1960s, The New York Times received a tip that a kid arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally at a White Castle restaurant was, in fact, Jewish. The editors sent a reporter to interview Daniel Burros, who spewed an elaborate, anti-Semitic rap. The journalist patiently listened to Burros, then suddenly interrupted him saying that he’d interviewed the Queens rabbi who’d conducted Burros’ Bar Mitzvah. How come Burros believed this stuff if he was Jewish?

“If you print that, I’ll kill myself,” replied the racist, who took action an hour after the Sunday Times story hit the streets. He put Wagner on the record player, placed a gun to his head and shot himself in a barracks at his Nazi headquarters in Pennsylvania.

Bean (“Mulholland Falls,” “Enemy of the State”) studied the book journalists Abe Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb wrote to exonerate The Times but found nothing surprising save one detail. Burros “would bring knishes back to the Nazi headquarters and hang out with girls who looked obviously Jewish,” said the writer-director of “The Believer,” inspired by Burros’ story. “The notion of somebody hiding something and revealing it at the same time fascinated me.”

The film, which is getting buzz at Sundance this week, isn’t so much about self-hatred as an odd truth about human psychology pushed to the extreme. “The sense of being pulled in opposite directions is something I’ve always felt,” said Bean, 55, who has degrees from Yale and Stanford. “That urge is in everyone. It’s universal.”

Parents both love and resent their children, he notes. Spouses adore and reject each other. “I love my wife,” he told The Journal, “but these feelings make me vulnerable to her, and I have to push her away so I can recover myself and remember my identity. As a result, I’m in torment and I want to merge with her again.”

Then there was the relationship Bean had with his Judaism. Raised in a “very, very Reform” Philadelphia home, he attended a Quaker day school and a Jewish Sunday school that did not teach Hebrew. “My Bar Mitzvah was so rinky-dink, I not only read the Haftarah portion in English, I didn’t even realize that people did it any other way until I was an adult,” he says. As a boy, he discerned that most people “were all gentiles and that I was Jewish, an outsider.” His parents, who possessed a strong cultural Jewish identity, were also careful not to “act Jewish” in ways they thought unattractive, like being too loud or vulgar.

By the time Bean was an adult, he no longer attended synagogue on Yom Kippur. “I had this immense consciousness of being Jewish, and yet I had no idea what being Jewish was,” he recalls. “I was obsessed with who was Jewish, and with the fact that I was Jewish. … And at the same time, I felt, ‘Forget it. I don’t want to live it. I’m not even interested in it.”

Enter his wife-to-be, Leora Barish, the screenwriter of “Desperately Seeking Susan” and the daughter of a Conservative rabbi who’d spent his career as an Army chaplain. Early in their relationship, Bean picked fights about religion.”In some way, I was asking her to beat me up and knock out of me the sort of smug, aesthetic or agnostic or indifferent or contemptuous stuffing [I had],” he said. Barish helped him to learn a little Hebrew and to read the Chumash.

Some years later, Bean, who now attends a Conservative minyan and keeps a kosher home, envisioned the pivotal scene of “The Believer,” in which the protagonist is renamed Danny Balint. “The [character] goes into a synagogue as a Nazi and realizes he’s really a rabbi-manqué,” he said. “He begins to hear the things he’s kept himself from hearing. And yet he’s unwilling to give up his Nazism, so he decides to practice both as if they were contradictory religions…. The idea that you could try, however futilely and catastrophically, to be two things at once, a living contradiction, a thing and its opposite, was a magical moment in my life. I had found the conceit for some deep, visceral thought I had never been able to express before.”

Bean was so obsessed with the idea that he put up $500,000 of his own money to make the movie, his directorial debut, with most of the funds gleaned from rewriting scripts for director Jerry Bruckheimer. Yet while actors Billy Zane and Theresa Russell agreed to appear in the film, one prominent young thespian declined the role of Danny after his mother advised that the content was inflammatory; the role went to up-and-comer Ryan Gosling. A script supervisor and a gaffer also declined to participate in the project. And Bean changed the title to “The Believer” after he discerned it would be difficult to rent locations for a movie called “The Jewish Nazi.”

When a friend wondered if the film could appear to sympathize with a racist — even be used as ammunition by anti-Semites — Bean was quick to reply. “To sympathize with something, to understand it is not to advocate it,” he said. “We look at the suffering self-hatred inflicts on [this character]. We see his efforts to escape this. We see his destruction. … In one way or another, all his anti-Semitic diatribes turn against himself.”

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