A new film about a Jewish boy persecuted at an elite prep school is a rare Hollywood attempt to tackle anti-Semitism. But by making its hero about as Jewish as a ham sandwich, School Ties' only proves that the film industry's ability to deal with the oldest hatred hasn't come very far since Gregory Peck masqueraded as a Jew in 1947's Gentleman's Agreement.' David Greene has a problem. A star high-school quarterback from Scranton, Pennsylvania, he's won a football scholarship to St. Matthew's, an elite New England prep school with a direct pipeline to the Ivy League. Greene is a superb athlete and an engaging young man bright, handsome and ambitious and his classmates are drawn to his courage and vigor both on and off the playing field. But this is 1956, and Greene, a Jew, must hide his Star of David in a Band-Aid box because his preppy WASP pals are also vicious anti-Semites. That's the premise of the film "School Ties," co-produced by Paramount CEO Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, and directed by Robert ("F/X") Mandel. Slated for a September 18 release in the United States, it clearly seems intended to cash in on the nostalgia-steeped atmosphere of the 1990 hit "Dead Poets Society." The movie has been nine years in the making, a "passion" of Jaffe's since he first commissioned the screenplay from writer Dick Wolf, Lansing told The Jerusalem Report. Jaffe had sent his own son to Taft, an elite East Coast prep school.
Although this was long after Jews had penetrated this and other former bastions of WASP power, Jaffe, a child of the 50s who never attended such a school himself, came of age during an earlier, darker time when Jews were openly reviled. The same goes for Lansing. "God," she says, "I remember my mother driving me by the South Shore Country Club when I was nine and telling me, Don't look at it because Jews aren't even allowed in for lunch.' In the years it took to get this movie made, it became even more timely. There's been more anti-Semitism in the last three years than anyone can remember for decades. I encounter anti-Semitism all the time." "School Ties" is well-shot, deftly paced and expertly performed by a cast of young newcomers, headed by Brendan Fraser as David. It is also laudable for grappling with a theme that Hollywood's largely Jewish moguls and moviemakers have rarely dealt with since "Gentleman's Agreement," the 1947 Oscar-winning film in which Gregory Peck plays a journalist posing as a Jew todo a series on anti-Semitism. The film abounds in references part and parcel of the vocabulary of American anti-Semitism, to Jewish penuriousness, perfidy, pushiness and prominent proboscises. There is talk of crafty Jew lawyers, of Jewish Communists and Jewish domination at Harvard, and of the absence among Jews of such Christian virtues as meekness. But for all its bluntness, "School Ties" is also deeply flawed by its makers' restricted sense of Jewish identity, and their depiction of anti-Semitism merely as an unpleasant form of snobbery which can be quickly discarded rather than as a deep-rooted pathology borne of complex theological, historical and sociological factors. " School Ties' shows you must never, ever deny what or who you are," says Lansing. "It's not worth losing your identity to be accepted by the group." True enough, but before one risks losing one's identity in pursuit of group acceptance, one must have an identity to lose and the film never makes clear what David Greene's Jewish identity consists of. There is no direct reference to Israel or the Holocaust, a decade after the war (although at one point a swastika is painted over Greene's bed). Greene is shown at a Rosh Hashanah service, but director Mandel asserts that "David is not a deeply practicing Jew. He wasn't brought up that way. A lot of that is the experience of the filmmakers. All of us were brought up in culturally Jewish homes. We went to temple on the High Holidays, but we weren't practicing Jews. "For David, the thrust is to fit in that's what he wants to do. It comes out of my own life. I have experienced wanting to do anything to join the fraternity of my dreams." David Greene has no trouble fitting in; he is exactly like his schoolmates, only more natural, more vital and more talented. The filmmakers seem to have bent over backwards to give him a background and characteristics rarely associated with Jews; his father is a coal miner, and Greene himself is a star athlete. Mandel defends the authenticity of the character. "Just as these boys have no idea that David is Jewish, I think that the movie is trying to break down all generalizations. How many Jewish boys come from coal-mining towns? Not many, but there are some. After extensive research I can tell you there were also a ton of Jewish athletes. I even got a call from a Jewish boy from Scranton who was a football player at Choate (a prestigious New England prep school) in 1956 and whose father was a coal miner. That's my life you're shooting,' he told me. "With 90 percent of the anti-Semitism in the film," says Mandel, "these kids don't even know they'd be hurting a Jewish boy's feelings by talking this way. Sure it's vicious if you're Jewish. But I've been with Jews sitting around the table talking about goys' and shiksas,' and they can be just as vicious. They… I… we do it in the same way. In the most uninformed way, we can hurt somebody, which is the tremendous cruelty that this movie exposes." At the movie's end, when the entire class is threatened with suspension because one of the boys cheated on a final exam, the guilty party tries to frame David for the act. But most of the class decides to stand by David; one of the boys asked to denounce Greene in an attempt to save "one of their own" from expulsion says of him, "He was a good guy. A guy who wouldn't cheat." But what if David Greene wasn't such a good guy? What if, like a fair number of Jewish-American kids of that day, he was not quite so athletic, or he was unmistakably ethnic either in appearance or mannerisms? What if he lacked charisma or couldn't handle himself in a fight? What if like many people, he was tempted to sometimes cheat a little? What if he really was different; then it would be okay to hate him as a Jew? That's one cruelty that the makers of "School Ties" have chosen not to expose. Jewish student David Greene (Brendan Fraser, center) battles anti-Semitism in School Ties'