For each one of us there is that one film that stays with you forever. For me, it was Cabaret, which charted the birth of Nazism in Weimar Berlin. In the role of her lifetime, Liza Minelli played torch singer Sally Bowles. Michael York played her gay boyfriend Brian, and Joel Grey played the master of ceremonies at the magnificently decadent Kit Kat Klub.

I was introduced to Cabaret by an innovative history teacher who used it to help us understand the rise of totalitarianism through mind control. I was so impacted by the film that I wrote to Liza Minelli to thank her for helping me understand history. I still have the yellowing page she wrote back to my incredulous 16 year old self.

This week I googled the scene in which Joel Grey sings “If you could see her.” It’s a plea to the hostile world to understand his love for a woman who appears so repugnant to them: she’s a gorilla. His last, whispered line to the audience cut me as deep as it did the first time I heard it: “If you could see her though my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”

I googled that scene after watching the Royal Commission testimony of Jewish MP Josh Burns about the foul antisemitic, misogynist abuse his non-Jewish partner Georgie Purcell MLC has been experiencing – an ironic flip in the modern age, but an illustration of the same dynamic.

This week it was Purcell to whom I wrote. She sent me her own submission to the Commission, which opens with a description of how totalitarian propaganda still brainwashes the masses:

“Only through being with Josh,” she writes, “did I begin to truly understand the way that antisemitism simply just mutates, the way........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)