DOES “AN EDUCATION” DABBLE IN ANTI-SEMITIC ARCHTYPES?

You wouldn’t think so to see the film. Yes, there are jarring moments surounding the film’s main villain played by Peter Saarsgard — but he appears as someone who in no way looks Jewish, is not in any fashion observant, and therefore it seems is a bad person who happens to be Jewish — any anti-Semtism expressed in the film seems to be very much of the times in the early 1960s in England — Besides if one canards of anti-Semitism has to do with money — it is pointedly the heroine’s father played by Alfred Molina who is money-concerned.

OR SO I THOUGHT…… until I read Irina Bragin’s elucidating essay in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, which speaks to European Anti_semtic archtypes very much present in “An Education.” Bragin (who I must disclose, I’ve never met but is the aunt and sister-in-law of my friends and their children), argues, effectively I think, that we have come so far from the most traditional tropes of European Anti-Semitism that we don’t even recognize them anymore.

Here’s the link.http://www.jewishjournal.com/film/article/british_film_gives_an_education_in_anti-semitism_20091201/

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