Lawyer Explains Claim That Film Is Anti-Semitic

By Renee Ghert-Zand October 21, 2011

To help us better understand the merits of the ridiculous lawsuit Michigan resident Sarah Deming is filing against the producers of the new film “Drive” — which stars Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan and Bryan Cranston — her lawyer has decided to spell out its bizarre logic in the comments section of a movie blog.

In addition to complaining about what she perceives as a bait-and-switch scheme whereby the film’s trailer was deceptive about the amount of action-packed driving there actually is in the movie, Deming claims that “Drive” is anti-Semitic. Gawker quotes the suit as stating that the movie had “extreme gratuitous defamatory dehumanizing racism directed against members of the Jewish faith, and thereby promoted criminal violence against members of the Jewish faith.”

Deming’s lawyer, Martin H. Leaf, mentioned he himself was Jewish in responding to a comment on The Candler blog questioning the validity of the suit. Calling the movie racist, he wrote:

Your immature pride in Jewish criminals is an obscenity. But even in the genre of gangster movies, these Jews are portrayed in an unequivocal racist way. Compare that with Bugsey [sic] Siegel, a criminal, who was portrayed as a sympathetic, human, empathetic character. He was a good father, a visionary, and was loyal. Same thing with Mickey Cohen, and Meyer Lansky: All real characters. Not so with the cartoon one dimensional Jews in Drive, right down to the gold pinkey [sic] rings, gold watch, and thick gold chains, that only a “senior citizen Jew stereotype” department could have come up with.

Ryan Gosling played two Jews before: In all good things [sic] as a Jewish murderer, and in The Believer: Neither was Jew hating as I recall.

If pinky rings and thick gold chains are what Leaf thinks are racist, then The Shmooze doesn’t understand why he is not bringing a suit on behalf of Italians portrayed by Hollywood, as well.

And the attorney might want to watch “The Believer” again. It seems he missed the parts where “Gosling is a neo-Nazi for the entire movie who spits on Torahs and plants bombs in synagogues,” as Gawker points out.

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