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November 16, 2006

Borat, unturned: on the cover of Rolling Stone

Would you like a little more Borat with that? 12478484.jpg RS previews its Sacha Baron Cohen cover story, in which he lifts the mustache for Neil Strauss. "Borat essentially works as a tool... By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' ... was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism... [W]hen I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic."

Posted by Ray Pride at November 16, 2006 05:46 PM

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