Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] FATHERS AND SONS 339
holder because he has accomplished much—but absolutely not in the right
ways. Eliezer would not be a probable Israel Prize holder, either, because
though he toiled in the right ways, he accomplished next to nothing. In fact,
just as he thought he had achieved an important breakthrough, Grossman
beat him to the punch on the same research topic. To rub it in, he cited
Eliezer’s work as a minor footnote.
Grossman waits long enough for elation to take hold of Eliezer and the
Shkolnik family before he calls Uriel in for a meeting with the Israel Prize
committee, to watch him squirm after telling him there was a mix-up, that
he, not his father, won the prize, and that he must tell that to his father.
Uriel, no idiot, understands what Grossman is doing, and why, and confronts
him about it, even drawing some blood from Grossman in a physical
assault, yet it is too late for Uriel to stop Grossman from pointlessly
inflicting more pain on his family. That Grossman—this latter-day Iago—
intended to hurt the Shkolnik family is highlighted in a scene in which Uriel
begs Grossman to allow the Israel Prize to go to his father, so he will not be
forced to tell Eliezer the nightmare truth. “There are more important things
than truth,” Uriel says, giving the supercilious Grossman an opening to
twist the knife in the wound by asking, “Like what—family?”
Grossman winds up agreeing to allow Uriel to let Eliezer have the
Israel Prize on two conditions: that Uriel write the fraudulent committee
recommendations himself, and agree that he may never have his own name
submitted for the prize. Out of love and consideration for his father, Uriel
agrees, only to have his father, the presumed Israel Prize winner, give a
journalist a devastating, no-holds-barred condemnation of Uriel’s popularization
of scholarly materials. Subsequently, Uriel—contaminated by what
psychiatrists call “identification with the aggressor”—acts out angrily in
turn against his own son. By the film’s end, the whole Shkolnik clan realizes
that the committee had designated Uriel, not Eliezer, for the Israel
Prize, but we are never unambiguously shown which of the two wound up
accepting the honor.
The performances in the movie are superb. Cedar won the Best Screenplay
Award at Cannes, Footnote was nominated for an Oscar, and much ink
has been engagingly spilled over the film elsewhere.
Tribute must be paid here to a great man who is but a footnote within
Footnote. Menahem Stern was a giant of Jewish studies and the 1977 Israel
Prize winner. Among Stern’s works is Greek and Latin Authors on Jews
and Judaism, an annotated compilation of references to Jews, Judaism, and
the area of Israel found in ancient Greek and Latin texts. Aristotle, it turns
out, wrote something about the Dead Sea in his treatise Meteorologica.
Megasthenes, a Greek ethnographer who lived between 350 and 290 BCE,
included Jews in his comparisons of the philosophies of ancient peoples. On