David Hosley thinks a scene in which a group of devious Jews slash the throat of a young boy in a ritual slaughter to cull his blood for Passover matzah is not the type of thing that should be shown on television.
Yitzhak Santis thinks it’s exactly what we should be seeing.
Santis is the director of Middle Eastern affairs for the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council.
But Hosley is the general manager of a TV station, PBS affiliate KVIE in Sacramento.
So his word goes.
Hosley passed on running the documentary “Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence,” which most Public Broadcasting System stations ran in early January. He defended the decision, which he says was a difficult one and came only after input from a board of station employees, professors and local religious leaders including a rabbi, imam and Christian ministers.
“I am interested in the topic, but I’m looking for a program that lives up to its title and is well made,” said Hosley, a documentary filmmaker himself and the station’s GM for the past eight years.
Hosley said the film, produced by Andrew Goldberg and moderated by Judy Woodruff, was journalistically problematic. He claimed that its rapid cuts and interviews with unseen, off-screen questioners left it unclear if the young Arabs being questioned were stating their heartfelt opinions or repeating stories they’d heard.
He also said the film spent far too long revisiting the history of European anti-Semitism in the 20th century (a criticism shared by j. ‘s Dan Pine, who reviewed the film in our Jan. 5 edition).
As for the ritual slaughter scene — an excerpt from a Syrian TV drama — Hosley and his panel felt it was blunt, gory and the message could have been made without the depiction of a boy’s throat being slashed. Hosley said his panel told him the film would do “more harm than good” for the relationships between Sacramento’s various religious groups.
Santis thinks otherwise. “I’m very familiar with this program and I couldn’t disagree more,” he said of Hosley’s argument.
“If you really want to understand the incitement that is being made in Arab and Muslim media, the fact that it is so dramatic and gruesome really demonstrates the level of demonization of Jews that’s going on. I have a copy of that [clip] and I’ve shown it to audiences here and people do close their eyes and I have heard gasps.
“I use it as a wake-up call. This is using 21st-century technology to perpetuate the blood libel, and people should be made aware of that.”
Along with a bevy of letters both supporting and denouncing the documentary, PBS ombudsman Michael Getler wrote a largely supportive entry on behalf of “Anti-Semitism” on the station’s Web site.
“This struck me as just the thing public TV ought to be doing,” he wrote in a Thursday, Jan. 11 posting on PBS.org.
“It is unlikely that any diverse audience will ever say that you got this subject just right, but producers need to take a shot at it. Its value, I thought, was in explaining the evolution of anti-Semitism, the original Christian and European role and the differences with Islam, and in exposing to American audiences the kind of hate-filled imagery about Jews that is broadcast and publicly stated in many Arab counties that Americans are unaware of and that the American media rarely captures and broadcasts if they see it.”
Hosley explains it was a far from rebellious act to not run the documentary.
Contrary to popular belief, the affiliates own PBS and not the other way around. The documentary was not “required programming” and Hosley estimates he’s rejected well over 100 hours of non-required programming during the past year.
Of the roughly 50 largest PBS affiliates, 18 did not run “Anti-Semitism” in the time slot PBS central had earmarked for it. But only KVIE did not run it at all.
In place of “Anti-Semitism” Hosley ran a documentary about America’s oil dependence and the nation’s relationship with oil-producing nations.