Harry Potter has made quite a few appearances on this blog before, and with the opening Wednesday of the latest film in the multibillion-dollar franchise, it seems an appropriate time for everybody’s favorite wizard to reappear.
Over at the Hollywood Jew blog, Naomi Pfefferman has a lengthy post about why the tile of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” resonates with Jews, and why the movie will move them:
In the new film, flashbacks reveal how the evil Lord Voldemort grows from a troubled child into a genocidal maniac bent on annihilating non-magic folk (muggles) and those with mixed heritage. “Voldemort and his followers, the Death Eaters, are obsessed with the preservation of blood purity,” “Potter” producer David Heyman told the Journal last year. (Heyman is the British producer who bought the rights to the “Harry Potter” books in 1997 and steered the film franchise to become the highest grossing in cinematic history.) “They’re not Nazis but they recall the politics and attitudes of Nazi Germany. And aesthetically—although it’s a cliché—the [Death Eater] Lucius Malfoy and his family are blond, like Hitler’s ideal of the quintessential Aryan.“
In the new film, Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is given a potions manual inscribed with spells by the mysterious “Half-Blood Prince;“ it’s well-known that the actor Daniel Radcliffe has a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, and himself identifies as Jewish. Heyman, too, has mixed parentage— his mother is non-Jewish, while his father’s family experienced the racial hatred of the Third Reich. The producer’s Jewish grandfather, Heinz Heyman (the original spelling may have been Heymann), was an economist, newspaperman and broadcaster based in Leipzig, who was one of the last announcers to speak out against Hitler in early 1933.
“He was on the radio, the authorities came for him, and he had to bicycle out of Germany,“ the producer said. “When he arrived in England, he was at first interned in a camp because he was a German citizen.“ Heyman even made a 2008 film set during the Holocaust, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas;” see our interview with him.
Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the deranged Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange, also hails from an interfaith family with roots in Hitler’s Europe. “People think of me as so quintessentially English,“ she told the Journal a few months before we spoke with Heyman last year. “But actually I look just like my mum—[dark-eyed] and very Jewish.“
You can read the rest of “Harry Potter and the ‘Half-Blood’ Jews” here. Like wizards, not everyone believes in the existence of half-Jews. More on that here.
