Three and a Half Hours of Brutal Assimilation
Some thoughts on 'The Brutalist,' assimilation, and American Jewry
Hey everyone,
Last Friday, I decided to go see The Brutalist—Brady Corbet’s nearly four-hour post-Holocaust epic about Bauhaus design, antisemitism, assimilation, and the American Dream—and was ready to grab the popcorn. And I did, for $15 at matinee price, at the East Village Angelika Theater. But then I got norovirus and was down for the count, so consider this a Chrismukwanzukah miracle. Oh, where to start.
On that note, spoilers ahead with probably some triggering references. But honestly, it’s a real commitment of a movie and I wish someone had spoiled it for me.
First, let’s talk about how I heard about the movie, which was via John Waters’ “Best Movies of 2024” list on Vulture and not from any other Jews. Notably, his review mentions nothing about Judaism or antisemitism, even though this basically what the entire film is about more so than “design,” and gives me a tremendous amount of pause and deep disappointment about why he would omit that—as well as all the other reviews that keep labeling this as an “immigrant story” rather than a Jewish one.
I was wondering how I missed this movie that was good enough to win instant unanimous critical acclaim—including from Jewish writers and film organizations—only to discover that it premiered during NYFF and this happened to be opening weekend. Lucky me! On 70mm—and conveniently on Shabbat, too, so that many Jews who partake would probably not be there.
Knowing full well I was going to sit for a long ass time, I opted for the 3:15 p.m. matinee show, just narrowly making it out for Shabbat after 7 p.m.—which I only observe when I feel like it on principle—because the movie started 15 minutes late and there was a half-hour intermission, while flying blind for this whole experience.
Without any context, here is the emotional cadence of the first ten minutes of film: Anxiety, fear, violence, trauma, depression, sex, hope, design, anxiety, fear, violence, trauma, hope, design, sex. Rinse and repeat.
It’s nearly four hours of this, so I couldn’t help but think, “We really could have cut about 20 minutes here” several times during the film. Even Schindler’s List wasn’t that long. Fortunately, there’s that 30-minute bathroom break—I didn’t even expect that after Oppenheimer!
Here’s the gist: Laszlo Toth, a fictitious Hungarian-born Jew and prolific architect, miraculously escapes the Holocaust, arriving on a boat to Ellis Island where he embarks on a Fifel Goes West journey of the American Dream. His first stop: a blowie at a FiDi whorehouse, where we learn that he is definitely straight because the madam makes sure to let him know that there are plenty of other options if he wants to fuck someone else and he says, “Nope! No, siree. Not for me! I’m good!” I think this is supposed to be the introduction of Laszlo’s descent into the godlessness of the new post-war American landscape as a Jew, but who is to say what his proclivities were before this moment (among the numerous creative choices that gave me an eye-raise on second glance).
Moments later, we are reminded that he has no way of knowing if his wife survived the Holocaust. But good news: the wife is not dead, making the back-alley blowjob more of a “We were on a break!” technical indiscretion, which we learn from a cousin (played by Alessandro Nivola) who picks him up from New York City to whisk him away to Pennsylvania to kickstart this new chapter of This American Jew Life. He cries tears of joy at this tremendous news, grateful that he’s finally found safety and hopeful that he and his wife will be reunited soon. However, upon arriving in Pennsylvania, he faces the usual dilemma that Jews have faced time and again for millennia: to assimilate or not to assimilate to survive and be left the fuck alone in hopes of living “a normal life.”
Assimilation has been crucial to Jewish survival throughout the centuries from Greco-Roman persecutions to the Spanish Inquisition to the Bolsheviks to last week and probably next week—but not without a certain amount of resentment for it. If you assimilate, you’re still a Jew; if you don’t, you somehow think you’re different or special. Chosen, even. “One of us, one of us, but also never one of us.”
This is the irony of Jewish culture—we’re firmly anti-assimilationist with a loosely assimilated internal culture—and also the beauty of it. It’s among the infinite reasons I’d never convert, even though many have had the audacity to try: the encouragement to maintain complexity, ask questions, and remain part of a diverse culture filled with differing perspectives that shares certain practices, values, and histories. Also, I just do not have faith in a man ever returning, so that narrative is a little lost on me.
(On that note, if I die for refusing to convert, never ever ever ever uplift me as a martyr. Jews do not martyr people; we mourn them—hence why I struggle to get behind society’s current obsession with bloodlust and retribution. Martyrdom is precisely how Jews have been persecuted for centuries, so I’m not particularly interested in maintaining that dynamic post-mortem. Figure I might as well make that crystal clear now since people seem to have a real reading comprehension problem, including a major misread on who I am as a person).
And that is probably the most salient thing on most Jews’ minds post-October 7: how much does our Jewish identity mean to us? Enough to go back to Israel? And should we all return to Israel, are all Evangelicals and Muslims alike waiting with crossed fingers that we all die so they can fight it out over who gets Jerusalem, and everyone lives happily ever after? We didn’t write that story, but people keep trying to stop us on the street to ask us if we’ve heard about it so we can continue to survive by becoming just like them. Even as Qassam rockets are shot over the fence every week, somehow Israel is still a safer environment for Jews than most of the planet.
Notably, in the film, every single Jewish character except Laszlo has converted as part of their new life in America. Historically, this conversion pattern falls into the following categories: Crypto-Jews (publicly living as Catholics but privately maintaining Judaism), full conversion, Holocaust conversion followed by retraction, converting to Reform Judaism, or being poached by the Catholic church.
Laszlo eventually just stops attending synagogue and picks up a heroin habit (alcoholism would actually be the more relevant minority post-Holocaust addiction here), which overlooks the fact he seems to be Orthodox and extremely well-read, but somehow didn’t know about post-Holocaust resettlement services from the United Service for New Americans (USNA) and New York Association for New Americans (NYANA)—a detail that only a non-Jew would have overlooked or intentionally did so because it would ruin this entire plot. But I digress—this is about assimilation!
His cousin, now leading a very assimilated life that includes adopting a gentile furniture store named “Miller & Sons”—as neither a Miller or without any sons—has married a blond Catholic woman (Emma Laird) who lacks any sort of emotional tact when asking him personal questions about escaping the Shoah and letting him know that if he “ever wants to do something about that nose,” she’s got a guy (check and check). “I was kind of hoping no one would notice,” Laszlo says, which everyone laughs at because how could you not notice a schnoz like Brody’s after the Nazis made sure to detail every single type of Semitic nose as a human flaw?
That part is actually pretty spot on, given the enduring popularity of rhinoplasty, particularly among Orthodox women imposing this on their young daughters—even though many people express “buyer’s remorse” later in life, including actress Jennifer Grey, who did so to improve her casting opportunities but mostly erased herself by assimilating into basicness. For my own part, I endured bullying throughout childhood and teen years, and later even as an adult from a child calling me “big nose” then making fun of my teeth. Personally, I like my nose, and if anything, it made me more defiantly Jewish over the years because of this.
Later, the cousin forces him into a weird cuck threesome he has no interest in partaking in but does so anyway because he literally has nowhere to go, then receives a tight-lipped refusal of housing for the rest of his family should they arrive. This scene essentially marks the temptation of evils in the garden of earthly delights of the new world, a more liberated future of under the farce of “freedom of religion” that is not without its continued reminders of history repeating itself.
His cousin gives him a cot in the back, for which he is eternally grateful to not be on the streets after everything he’s been through, and delighted to offer his services in exchange to help his cousin’s cheap, shitty custom furniture store for the kindness. With the understated and meticulous vision of Marcel Breuer, Eames, and Frank Lloyd Wright, he starts designing avant-garde furniture that would make any Midcentury Modern obsessive weep—the under-appreciated value of a man ahead of his time (while conveniently right on time, historically).
That’s when it catches the eye of a wealthy WASP financier, Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), who wants to design a modern reading room for his father, Harrison Lee Van Buren, Sr. (Guy Pearce), as a nice surprise. Laszlo assesses the project, full of inspiration and entranced by the subtle details of possibility, and quotes him a fair price for materials and labor. His cousin congratulates him because he thinks he just fleeced the guy since he was already planning on just exploiting labor to charge half the price, but nope, Laszlo is a Jew of integrity! That just what it costs, and is probably undervalued, even.
Transforming this dark and outdated gothic lair into a stunning modernist library that captures the movement of the sun while smartly protecting this millionaire’s prized collection of first-edition literature, the audience oohs and aahs because it is hard to not be captivated by the design (this is an A24 film after all). Which is why it is so jarring and yet completely expected that the father is livid by this change and the unexpected mess as he arrives home early with his sick and dying mother, screaming at them and running them out of the house.
Laszlo soon learns that the son has decided he’s not paying after all (look who got Jewed out of their money, ya dumb Jew!), and obviously there’s not much he can do to fight it because he doesn’t have a leg to stand on as a guy who just escaped the Holocaust and is now living on a cot in the back of a furniture store. His cousin tells him that between this and making a pass at his wife (something that did not happen, beyond the forced cuck threesome), that he’s gotta scram. He writes to his wife, desperate to see her, and asks how he can provide for her.
We rejoin Laszlo, now apparently a disheveled heroin addict living in a Catholic shelter (I guess he didn’t know about the Hebrew Young Men's Literary Association) where he befriends a Black man (played by Isaach de Bankolé), also a smack addict, and his young son, and starts toiling away in manual labor. Ashamed for taking a handout, he keeps his head down, until one day, the cranky old father returns with an offer to take him to lunch.
At lunch, we learn the library has received acclaim as a forward-thinking vision for a modern man, which checks because it’s revealed that Laszlo is actually a brilliant and renowned architect trained at Bauhaus whose portfolio includes mostly synagogues, libraries, and institutions. His humility and intellect charm the old millionaire who suffers from a limited emotional vocabulary. He offers him the money he was owed and invites him to dinner, where he learns the real intent of the visit: a job offer for a community center, dedicated to his late wife, and that he will be compensated generously for this project, including housing for himself and the rest of his family upon their arrival.
However, not minutes later, the son pulls him aside to let him know they’ll work out those financial details without dad, and oh, by the way, this will be for the local Protestant community. It will be called “The Margaret Lee Van Buren Center for Creation and Activity,” which will include Protestant chapel, library, and gymnasium. Laszlo doesn’t care—even though the entire ask is kind of a backhanded move to impose this on a person who has not only just escaped the Holocaust, but whose entire cultural history is intertwined in antisemitic hatred and forced conversion—because money is money, and gets to work to earn the bid on merit.
And what does he design? A brutalist masterpiece showcasing the infinite light of Jesus Christ in all its divine glory at all hours of the day. Naturally, the community hates it, and everyone is pissed about the price—even as Laszlo offers to pick up the tab himself. For the church. Because “design.” (Later on, when Laszlo brings Henry Sr. to an Italian quarry where he has a mystical experience with the majesty of pure marble to justify the expense, it is not lost on me that his Italian cohort is both a convert and labels himself as “part of the resistance”).
In an impassioned speech, Laszlo insists that he, a mere “visitor,” wants to create a space part of the future for all, while conveniently avoiding any mention of word, “Jew.” “I am new, but I am part of the new whole,” he says. Eventually people accept this disarming answer because that future is Protestant and he’s not too Jewy about it. He soon learns that all the Jews in the community are actually converts and that’s the American Dream: everyone is free to be a Christian.
Well-compensated and with renewed dignity, he learns his wife (played by Felicity Jones) will soon return home, arriving paralyzed below the waist and aided by their mostly mute niece (Raffey Cassidy), and that’s the first hour of the movie. Then there are like three more hours after that. I know, it was exhausting to recap just that part, too. We didn’t even get to the implied antisemitic sexual assault scene and the actual graphic antisemitic rape scene.
What’s confusing is that the director’s intent is incredibly nebulous, including his implications about making aliyah. When I later learned that almost everyone involved except Adrien Brody—one of the Jew-iest looking Jews with the most religious ambivalence unless it’s grabbing an Oscar for a Holocaust role and a higher paycheck—was not Jewish, a lot of these creative choices started to make more sense. Kind of like the New Testament.
This movie, put together entirely by non-Jews while still being labeled “Zionist propaganda” (lol), really rubs me the wrong way because I don’t get what he’s trying to say, and nobody is asking him because they’re too busy praising him and asking him how he made it under $10 mil. The transitional scenes between the end and the epilogue, for example, centers a giant sunlit crucifix before heading into a 1980s Venice Biennale retrospective celebrating this brutalist church as his ultimate masterpiece—as though the synagogues, libraries, and other projects he completed before and after were nothing (for the record, the exterior of this imaginary brutalist church is objectively ugly, even by brutalist standards).
Brody, to his credit, delivers an Oscar-worthy performance, not unlike the other Holocaust movie he earned an Oscar for in 2002, The Pianist. But while Roman Polanski might be a noted child rapist in exile, he at least had some direct contact with the subject matter he was directing as a descendent of Holocaust survivors; I am still unclear about Corbet’s relationship or interest with Judaism and antisemitism. In part, because no one is asking him.
From what I’ve gathered, a lot of the perspective seems to be coming someone with a deeper understanding of why people hate Jews, and maybe that’s why I wanted to throw up during the triggering antisemitic rape scene I was unprepared for after two hours of non-stop antisemitism, where Guy Pearce whispers in Brody’s ear, “You think you’re so special. You’re wasting your potential.” The gentile misinterpretation of Jewish exceptionalism being among “The Chosen” is both fetishized and hated, which nobody ever wants to talk about, acknowledge, or prevent because it’s “negative” or makes people feel uncomfy, so they keep letting it happen to us—but are surprised and disappointed in us when we stand up for ourselves or fight back because no one else does it.
Within my community and the greater mainstream non-Jewish culture, I was already an outlier as a fourth generation, highly assimilated, American Jew. I’ve never quite fit in my own culture or outside of it. I’m not a Gold Star Jew by any means. In fact, I might even be considered a “bad” one. I don’t have any dietary restrictions beyond the ones I’ve set for myself, and I traveled with the National Pork Board more than once. I never had a bat mitzvah, don’t speak Hebrew, am not part of a synagogue, have tattoos (though the rabbi at my grandma’s funeral assured me that I shouldn’t worry so much because that’s becoming less of a thing re: burials), and dated mostly non-Jews. I’m not even a good Jew stoner that anyone would want to amplify because I do not give a fuck about Phish. Assimilated AF.
And yet, I am still a Jew, with two Jewish parents, and a baseline understanding of my ancestry, history, and cultural attachments. According to many communities that make up Judaism, that’s more of a technicality because of how assimilated I am—but still a Jew. To outsiders, I’m still a Jew, but “not like those other Jews,” which has mostly pushed me to surround myself with more Jews in response. Good work!
My experiences with antisemitism—particularly over the past year and a half—have felt amplified as I find myself at a crossroads about my identity and what that means within the larger context of cultural, historical, and existential preservation of Jewry.
This past week, actor Liev Schreiber gave a powerful speech at the Magen David Adom gala that really resonated with me because he talks about how he never really considered himself “a big Jew” and how life and perspective about our culture, traditions, and identity changed for him after October 7. Like him, I also grew up in diverse neighborhoods among other cultures where Jewish life was not the center of my existence but was not removed from it, and October 7 changed a lot for me, too.
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In fact, October 7 forced almost every Jew to do a little self-examination. Our identity suddenly became a litmus test not only for our own relationship with spirituality, religion, and identity, but our relationships with our friends, colleagues, and associates.
We all watched as countless people started celebrating the massacre of civilians at music festival and a kibbutz, then gaslit us as it became apparent that feminism does not apply to Israeli women and antisemitism is to be tolerated—if not defended—American Jewish-owned businesses and public institutions were defaced with antisemitic graffiti, students were physically and verbally assaulted, and then spent the next year and a half serving as dehumanized political pawns, blamed for things we had no part in, and then expected to provide the emotional labor to defend and explain abstract concepts to people who won’t use the gift of Google and couldn’t even ask “Are you OK?” but think we still want to get lunch with them.
For others, I can only assume they were in such denial about the antisemitic backlash in the U.S. and operating under the delusion that by being a “good Jew” to the non-Jews by diminishing our own pain that it somehow alleviates the suffering of others. Or I guess that they were incapable of advocating for more than one person because why else would you shoot yourself in the foot?
From the very beginning, I have said that I completely support Palestinian self-determination, just like I support Jewish self-determination, and that I will absolutely never join any organization that uses the rhetoric “from the River to the Sea” because if they want unwavering Jewish support, they should probably come up with a new slogan that doesn’t align with terrorist organizations that start the day shouting “Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to the Jews!” This is a complex issue for me, not a reductive concept, otherwise it would have only taken a paragraph and I’m sure more people would have read this far—which is unfortunate because the majority of Jews feel this way and just want the hostages back and the violence to stop.
Naturally, when you can’t trust the people outside, you start to reach within. The silver lining is that I did make so many new Jewish friends. Some of those relationships dissolved because that’s the nature of relationships, but I’d still have any one of their backs if anyone tried to fuck with them for being Jewish. Again, that's the problem with antisemitism and the beauty of Judaism: we often side with people that we may not even like or agree with simply because our collective identities recognize nuance and that if we don’t stand up for Jews, no one else will.
The fact people don’t get that tells you everything you need to know about their passive antisemitism rooted in indifference, and why so many Jews cannot handle the hypocrisy after how many years of DEI training—many of those sessions we were involved with because if the Holocaust taught us anything, it’s about showing up for people.
I lost so many non-Jewish friends in the past year who seem completely unbothered that they allegedly want to live in a diverse society as long as everyone thinks and acts the same way, and are fine with learning about every single culture except yours. Everyone loves a bagel and a polio vaccine, but no one wants anyone to be too Jewy about it, and this is why everyone made us even more Jewish in response. I’m not even going to touch on the complexity of addressing the generational problems with intermarriage assimilation and the cherrypicking of cultural attributes because it would take too long.
In some ways, assimilation has been helpful in exposing me to diversity—among my favorite parts of Judaism that unfortunately a lot of people don’t get because they take one part and make a sweeping judgment on the whole. On the other hand, it made me turn a blind eye to a lifetime of constant antisemitism, which no one wants to talk about because requires effort—mostly on my end to explain things to people who are uninterested in the minimum amount of legwork to Google something where there are countless resources that have been written for them.
More so, it puts people on the defense so that you must delicately consider these fragile feelings, and the emotional labor inevitably falls on us to make people stop hating us who genuinely do not give a shit. “Allies” become mostly useless with their hands in their pockets and mouths shut, followed by the excessive guilt and shame for their “ignorance” that we’re expected to absolve, even though many of these people happily adopted Nazi inversion theory, blindly co-opted hate symbols, participated in the spread of antisemitic misinformation, and think we can just shake hands and go about business as usual.
Likewise, I lost several friends because I expressed frustration about being bothered on Yom Kippur or Passover—both clearly marked on most U.S. calendars—even though it would be unacceptable to do this to someone on Christmas. As someone assimilated in a Christian-based society, I recognize that social norm and simply wanted to illuminate friends on how important those days are for me and why—especially post-October 7. In both cases, it was instantly dismissed as “religion,” even though I’ve never forced Torah on anyone ever, and by that point I no longer gave a shit. It’s not surprising that I’m fed up, and so are a lot of Jews. We’re not your saviors, and that’s why we hate getting lumped into “whiteness” because we don’t participate in “white saviorism” even if we sometimes benefit from perceived whiteness and assimilation.
It dawned on me that the downside of assimilation is reducing your Jewish identity so much that it’s non-existent, and this is why Orthodox communities are pissed about the threat of assimilation. What’s the point of breaking down the nuances of Jewish culture and identity to people who can’t do the bare minimum to understand why I want to be left the fuck alone a couple calendar days a year?
And the answer is this: the rest of the performative world does not give a shit about “listening. learning, and unlearning” on this particular subject that is as old as time, nor understanding why horseshoe theory always fucks over Jews from the left and right alike. If you are Jewish, that is the lesson and why we learn it over and over and over and over again: “They tried to kill us, but we survived.” Everyone else sees it as a victimization narrative rather than one of resiliency.
I kept going back and forth about whether I should really address my perspective as part of the ongoing cultural conversation about Judaism, Zionism, antisemitism, assimilation, culture, and identity. But this week was particularly trying for me between dealing with discord within my “community” (I really hate that term) over the fear of assimilation, while simultaneously being shoved right back into it as swastikas were painted around the Hamptons (not a new issue), Jewish authors had to deal with antisemitic (cough “anti-Zionist”) graffiti in the bathrooms at Los Angeles bookstores being run by intellectual frauds while they’re having a book launch (also not a new issue), and closer to home, I sat through this three and a half hour epic leaving me with a lot to think about.
I recognize very few people made it this far, but still might sit through a non-Jewish production goysplaining antisemitism that reduces it to an “immigrant story about design,” and ironically, that’s also why antisemitism continues to prevail: when we assimilate so hard that no one even notices when Jews aren’t the ones speaking for themselves.
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