“Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual by Nathan Abrams”
Book review and response by Rob Ager, March 2021
In late 2020 my attention was drawn to Nathan Abrams’ work by his article titled Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining. I was already aware that there are some who believe Kubrick’s films to be an exposure of supposed Jewish world control (once in a blue moon I’d seen anonymous statements to that effect on forums), though it’s not a view I’ve ever personally agreed with or promoted. In fact Kubrick’s ethnicity is something I’d always considered incidental to the man, being that I personally judge people by their individual character … I’m from Liverpool, but don’t particularly identify with my city of birth (especially after spending a five year chunk of my childhood living abroad) so why should I put anyone else in such a box?
Nathan Abrams’ article enticed me to contact him and start a dialogue. It also got me interested in his book Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, which I’ve since read, almost in full. Being that Nathan is Jewish himself, my assumption was that he would be able to provide a cultural interpretation of Kubrick and his films that otherwise wouldn’t be evident to a non-Jewish researcher such as myself. I’d never personally detected much in the way of Jewish themes in Kubrick’s movies, despite studying their production histories in great depth, but maybe that’s a blind spot for me.
Nathan’s book did partially meet my cultural insight expectation. He has conducted an extensive amount of research on the issue and, while I agree with some of his conclusions and not others, the background information his book provides was worth the read in itself. There are many points in the text in which claims are made about Kubrick’s personal background and the production history of his films, in which the sources of the information aren’t given, but in many of these instances I recognized information previously acquired through my own research and so I was aware that the sources did actually exist. This factor, plus the absence of technical misinformation (to my knowledge) in the text, strongly suggests to me that Nathan has been quite meticulous in his research, even where sources aren’t given. And he certainly drew many factors to my attention that I wasn’t aware of, despite more than a decade of researching and writing about Kubrick’s work myself. Nathan’s book shines on the level of technical research.
On top of this Nathan offers no shortage of interpretation regarding the potential meanings of Kubrick’s movies. Some of it is certainly very interesting. In places he offers what I consider very plausible arguments that Kubrick intended particular characters in his movies to be Jewish at the subtext level.
However, there were as many instances during my read through, in which I felt Nathan was desperately trying to force a Jewish identity interpretation upon specific characters, where none seemed to exist in my view. For example, attributing the presence of both the colours red and yellow as evidence of a reference to Jewishness.
Given what appears to me as Nathan’s strong bias toward interpreting Jewishness in every corner of Kubrick’s films, I quickly came to suspect that the author, despite being academically very intelligent and capable, was compromised in the writing of his book by his own deep identification with ethnicity and faith. In this respect he is remarkably different to Stanley Kubrick, who was not only non-academic, but also a staunch individualist and, according to the evidence I’ve seen, an atheist. Personally I’m agnostic. But, despite my own leanings, Kubrick has always struck me as a man who believes that physical death truly is the end of the line. Consider these interview statements regarding his films Dr Strangelove and The Shining.
“There’s a fatal subconscious attraction in resolving the problem of one’s own death in the thought of the whole world blowing up together.”
SK quoted in the Stanley Kubrick Archives book p365
“As fewer and fewer people find solace in religion … I actually believe that they derive a kind of perverse solace from the idea that in the event of nuclear war; the world dies with them.”
SK interviewed in 1968 by Eric Nordern for Playboy
“I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality. If you can be frightened by a ghost story, then you must accept the possibility that supernatural beings exist. If they do, then there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave.”
SK interview with Michel Ciment about The Shining
However, one area in which I do believe Kubrick and Abrams had strong overlap in their world views is their interest in the anti-Jewish portion of the WW2 holocaust and its implications about history and human nature. Nathan’s article Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining conveys the author’s deep concern that the blame all the world’s problems on Jews mentality of Nazism remains a serious threat to modern day Jews. I certainly agree there are fringe groups promoting those ideas, but the world is psychologically, culturally and technically a very different place today and so the chances of a new Jewish holocaust occurring are, in my view, remote in the extreme. To that effect I’ll quote “Jewish intellectual” Stanley Kubrick himself.
“It can never happen in that way again, which may be true, but it’ll happen differently. Everybody’s convinced they’ll never have another 1914 situation, but they’ll have a 1985 situation they’re not prepared for.”
SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein 1966
Note that Kubrick isn’t talking specifically about a forthcoming new holocaust against Jewish people. He seems to be talking more about holocausts and wars in general. After all, the WW2 holocaust is just one of many throughout history, to which effect Kubrick’s The Shining includes themes of the holocaust of Native Americans. This is one of the most widely accepted interpretations of the film, but I have found no mention of that factor in Nathan’s book about Kubrick. The WW2 holocaust included persecution and genocide of multiple social and ethnic groups. Jews were certainly the prime initial target, to my knowledge, but the Nazis reportedly had plans for a massive expansion of the program that would have seen many millions more, from Slavik countries mainly, executed with a small percentage kept alive as slaves – their Master Plan for the East.
Kubrick was wise enough to recognize the historical patterns of genocide and slavery spanning multiple racial and social contexts. In A Clockwork Orange lead thug character Alex fantasizes about taking part in historical battles going back to Roman times, Dr Strangelove features a great nuclear holocaust of almost the entire world, The Shining has Native American genocide themes, Full Metal Jacket has racial themes regarding the slaughter of Vietnamese, and the Spielberg / Kubrick movie AI: Artificial Intelligence has a scene in which self-aware robots of the future are slaughtered for the entertainment of crowds – a historical parallel with Roman colosseum fights. We could just assume all these examples to be metaphors about the genocide of Jews only, but I think that would be an insult to all those other persecuted groups and an insult to the intelligence of Stanley Kubrick himself. While the genocide of Jews in WW2 is a history lesson that absolutely should not be forgotten, we should also remember that slavery, genocide and holocausts generally are not limited racially. They span the spectrum and we should remain watchful for signs of it occurring in all its potential forms. It can happen to any racial, religious or social group given adequate propaganda and an establishment will to do so.
Unfortunately, when people become preoccupied only with injustices done to a single perceived group, this can ironically sow the seeds for bigotry against other groups. The German people themselves felt victimized after WW1 and so they turned to Hitler and his Nazi Party to address that tunnel vision view – the “victim” becomes the abuser. A modern day example of this, which I presume Nathan Abrams is aware of, is that many African Americans feel (with some historical justification) that they are THE victim group in the US, and yet anti-Semitic views are statistically high among African Americans in the US, assuming the opinion polls are accurate. The ADL has reported on this.
Unfortunately, in reading Nathan’s book I found saddening contradictions that are quite typical of over-identification with the victim group. To put this into context let me first present to you a series of quotes (the source of which I will reveal later in this review) that can be taken as examples of hatred toward Jews. These are real quotes from a published book offering interpretations of Kubrick’s films. I‘ll give you the page number references first then tell you the title of the book afterward, from which all of the quotes have been taken.
Page 87, regarding lead character Humbert in Lolita
“These various traits fitted into the stereotype of the dangerous, predatory, sleazy, sex-obssessed, and sexually deviant Jew who was, simultaneously, a seductive and devilish monster as well as unmanly, weak, effeminate sissy, outside the norm of goyish masculinity.”
Page 202, regarding lead character Jack Torrance in The Shining
“Jack persuades Ullman to give him the job, and, in a display reminiscent of Quilty’s death sequence, he uses his Jewish brains to attempt to wheedle his way out of the walk-in freezer, switching personalities from a hurt little boy to a screaming bully.”
Page 212, regarding lead character Jack Torrance in The Shining
“Ultimately, he’s abandoned like a snowy lamb in this frozen maze. Given that this “snow” consisted of nine hundred tons of dendritic dairy salt, Jack is salted – a piece of kosher sacrificial meat.”
Page 258-260, regarding the character Zeigler in Eyes Wide Shut
“Zeigler is a charming Quilty-like character whose representation draws on some of the oldest stereotypes of Jewish masculinity. Extremely wealthy, he treats other human beings, especially women, as servile objects. He’s sexually deviant with little concern for the women he uses; he almost kills a prostitute but does not worry about her welfare. His bathroom is decorated with very explicit and, arguably, misogynistic artworks of nude women in various sexual poses. He’s powerful, lying, hypocritical, hypersexual, and misogynistic, orchestrating and participating in the sexual corruption (and possible murder) of gentile women.
… Only a stereotypically tasteless Jew has a bathroom as lavishly and decadently decorated, his idea of WASP taste. The bathroom location suggests the dirty Jew doing his business in the conceptually filthiest of places, upstairs and out of sight of the genteel (and gentile) guests downstairs, the culmination of Kubrick’s signature use of bathrooms in his films.
… As the very first item he puts on while getting dressed is his oversized glasses, attention is drawn to them, as well as his nose, thus dominating our image of his face. This is closely aligned with the suggested reference toward his (Jewish) penis by the action of zipping up. He remains shirtless for several minutes, emphasizing his hirsuteness. Hence the stereotypical phenotype elements (body hair, glasses, nose and penis) dominate the image for most of the scene.
… Zeigler is seemingly responsible for orchestrating the orgy, which further underlines negative Jewish associations. Anti-semites regularly pointed to Jewish cabals and satanic worship among Jews, who were the Devil’s Earthly representatives. Since the exterior shots of Somerton are of Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, built in 1855 for the Jewish Rothschild family, the place invokes anti-Semitic notions of an all-powerful cabal serviced by covertly manipulative court Jews as embodied by the Rothschilds.
… Zeigler is mimicking the concept of a Christian mass. Arguably, only Jews could conceive of such a Catholic ritual, and, of course, it was the product of the Jewish imagination: Schnitzler as refracted through Raphael and Kubrick’s screenplay and ultimately the latter’s research.”
Several of those quotes I found incredibly shocking and one would expect the author of such content to be singled out publicly and branded as anti-Semitic. Those interpretations never crossed my mind during the hundreds of hours I’ve spent producing many articles and videos on the works of Kubrick. In fact I found these descriptions more shocking than near enough any anti-Semitic interpretation of Kubrick that I’ve ever come across online. Equally shocking to me, in fact downright astounding, is that the author of these quotes is none other than Nathan Abrams – they were published in his own book Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual. They’re not quotes from other sources that have been included in his book. These are his personal published descriptions. It’s an aspect of his book that I dislike having to report on because it tarnishes an otherwise fascinating study of Kubrick, but to omit these factors in this review would be an exercise in dishonesty.
It’s a great contradiction that Nathan tries to attribute Kubrick’s talents to his race and religious background (that’s how his book reads to me) and yet his interpretation of Kubrick films veers off into the very thing he objected to in his article Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining, the belief that Kubrick was making a grand negative statement about Jews. It’s a dead certainty that Kubrick’s films carry a consistent theme of anti-pedophilia, but to attribute those pedophile characters as being symbolically Jewish … could there be a more anti-Semitic interpretation? If the interpretation is true to Kubrick’s intentions then Nathan’s book is self-defeating. If it’s misinterpretation then it’s self-defeating, hypocritical and an insult to Kubrick himself. Toward the end of the book, Nathan seems to acknowledge this contradiction.
Page 264
“Kubrick lived as the lone American, a stranger in a strange land, living in rural England, and Eyes Wide Shut tapped into themes that have dominated his films, that unconscious Jewish desire, as social pariah’s, to unmask the respectability of European society by exposing its sordid, sexual goyim naches. But at the same time, the person seemingly organizing this goyishness, is a Crypto-Jew, a matrix of anti-semitic attitudes, who becomes a stand-in for the director himself. Kubrick, it seemed, remained ambivalent about his Jewishness to the end.”
A further aspect of the book that I found distasteful and contradictory, but not nearly to the same level, is the strand of racial and religious superiority displayed by the author. It’s not blatant, but in my view appears to be there. In fact it’s present in some of the quotes I’ve already given from the book, but there are many more examples I haven’t quoted.
To be fair to Nathan, I personally believe that there is an element of self-serving bigotry present in most human beings whether they’re plumbers, farmers, nurses, academics or politicians. But most of the time it isn’t particularly dangerous. It’s just standard human group-identity bias. As a white European male, I’m subconsciously primed to pay more attention to instances of anti-white male bigotry, just as Nathan Abrams does the same regarding anti-Semitism.
Being conscious of these kinds of self-interest biases, I’ve always sought to publish my own film reviews in a way that incorporates multiple perspectives on any given issue. I’ve written about Native American genocide themes in The Shining, but also challenged harshly anti-American reviews of the John Milius movie Red Dawn. I’ve written about a theme of racism against African Americans in the horror movie Creepshow, yet have also written about the demonization of young white male “jocks” and Jews in the movie Revenge of the Nerds. I’ve written about the demonization of German foot soldiers in the movie Saving Private Ryan, but have also written about the warnings of Nazi-style fascism re-emergence in movies like Starship Troopers, Dr Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange.
And yet, despite this wide selection of racial viewpoints present in my publications, Nathan Abrams appears to have mistook part of my analysis of The Shining as being potentially anti-Semitic and made reference to that effect in his article Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining. In approximately fourteen years of posting film reviews online, not once has a published author interpreted my work as anti-Semitic that I’m aware of. In thousands of emails I’ve received about my work, not once have I been accused of anti-Semitism. This is despite me having published hundreds of articles and videos, some of them hundreds of pages or several hours in length.
The statement of mine, made in my interpretation of The Shining, which Nathan objected to, was my statement about the Rothschild family.
“In particular ‘Orders from the house’ could be a reference to Colonel Mandell House, the personal advisor who guided Wilson in surrendering the US government’s right to issue currency to the private bankers. Another possibility is that ‘Orders from the house’ could be referring to the European-based House of Rothschild, a banking dynasty which had dominated and controlled the majority of Europe’s central banks for hundreds of years and which was also rumoured to be the behind-the-scenes controlling force of the Federal Reserve System.”
For the full context of the above quote read the full chapter from my analysis here
Upon reading Nathan’s article, and the fact that Nathan had never contacted me to ask for clarification about what I meant by that statement, I was initially insulted. So I contacted Sense of Cinema, the blog under which Nathan’s article was published. Following this I received responses from Bradley Dixon and Jeremi Marek Szaniawski (editors at Sense of Cinema), the latter of whom assured me that he knew that I wasn’t anti-Semitic, but contradicted that view by claiming that my work on The Shining promoted a trope that encourages anti-Semitism. I asked for evidence that my work had had this effect. None was provided. So I asked for a statement of mine about the nature of my work to be included in Nathan’s article so as to inform the reader of my position. But rather than placing my requested statement in the article where my work was mentioned, it was hidden in the footnotes where nobody would be likely to read it. My name was removed from the main text of the article and a begrudging alteration of wording instead insinuated unconscious bias in what I’d written.
Interpreting these responses as somewhat disingenuous, I eventually I got a response from Nathan Abrams himself. We were very civil with each other and exchanged multiple emails. Nathan did not commit to accusing me of anti-Semitism, nor would he concede that there was actually no evidence of me being anti-Semitic at all. I responded by pointing out the many instances in which I had published material that was critical of the Nazi regime, but it seemed Nathan had already decided his narrative and was sticking to it regardless of evidence, claiming that the “tropes” in my analysis of The Shining act as a “dog whistle” to anti-Semites, whether I intended them to or not. Ironically, he does not apply that logic to the far more anti-Semitic descriptions published in his own book on Kubrick. When I asked for evidence of my working having a “dog whistle” effect Nathan waited several weeks then sent me a report (published after my enquiry) about anti-Semitic rhetoric in the Labour Party, a party of which I’ve never been a member and haven’t voted for since the early 1990’s. The report was irrelevant to my own publication on The Shining, which hadn’t made any mention of Jews.
In response to this lack of reason, I offered my opinions regarding the contradictions contained in Nathan’s book Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, including the key point that his own interpretation of pedophile characters in Kubrick films being subtextually Jewish was likely a far greater anti-Semitic “dog whistle” than anything I’ve published. I received no response to this argument. Another page in his book (quoted earlier in this review) even outlined that the Mentmore Towers filming location in Eyes Wide Shut was formerly owned by the Rothschild family, yet Nathan objected to me citing a possible similar reference in The Shining.
I believe a key word in all this is projection. Nathan’s book claims that Kubrick was internally conflicted over his Jewish roots, but Nathan also seems to attribute Kubrick’s success to those roots. In my view, this is classic projection – Nathan himself seems conflicted over his racial and religious identity and this has surfaced in his interpretation of Kubrick and his films. His publications citing anti-Semitic writings by others and the inclusion of Jewish pedophile character interpretations of Kubrick’s films in his own book, also suggests internal conflict on Nathan’s part. In my view, Kubrick wasn’t conflicted in this way because he was an individualist who recognized that the victim / perpetrator relationship between different social groups has continually changed across history and across the globe. And being an atheist almost certainly freed him spiritually from the confines of tradition.
At many points in Nathan’s book I detected an apparent frustration on the author’s part regarding Kubrick’s attitude to Jewishness and the afterlife. It’s clear that Nathan has great respect for Kubrick’s achievements and talents, but his reflex seems to be to attribute those qualities as being the direct result of Kubrick’s ethnicity and religious family background rather than being traits of Stanley Kubrick as a unique individual. This seems to be the central motivation of his book. In my read through of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual this was a disappointment because I think Nathan Abrams is a remarkably capable researcher and writer. And I attribute this quality to him as an individual, not as just another “Jewish intellectual”. He is much more than a product of genetics and cultural / religious background influences … as was Kubrick.
In summary, I do recommend Nathan’s book. The two thirds worth of it that I liked was worth the asking price. The parts which I disagreed with were certainly interesting enough that I found them worthwhile too. After all, if you can’t read things you disagree with and at least acknowledge the writer’s right to say them … then you’re something of a closed book.