In The Week (December 8, 2006):
“Sacha Baron Cohen is a product of the Holocaust, says Neil Strauss in Rolling Stone. The grandson of a Holocaust surivivor, the British comedian is a devout Jew who keeps kosher and observes the Sabbath. But as the faux Kazakh journalist Borat in the hit movie fo the same name, he’s wildly, even absurdly anti-Semitic—making some viewers and the Anti-Defamation League wonder if he’s taken the joke too far. Not so, says Baron Cohen. “Borat essentially works as a tool,” he says. “By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice.” Baron Cohen first plumbed that prejudice when he led a laughing, raucous crowd at a bar in Tucson in singing “Throw the Jew Down the Well” for a famous segment on this TV show. He found that the audience’s enthusiastic rendering of the chorus spoke volumes. “Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.” That, he says, is a lesson that needs remembering. “When I was in university, there was this major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, who said, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’ I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.”