Seven years after Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians in the cave of the patriarch in Hebron, and less than 5 years after Shahak and Mezvinsky explained how Goldstein was a Jewish Nazi, The Believer, a film written and directed by Henry Bean about an orthodox Jew who becomes a neo-Nazi won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance film festival. The film is based loosely on the life of Daniel Burros, a neo-Nazi who committed suicide in the mid-‘60s after a New York Times reporter wrote an article exposing him as a Jew. According to Bean:

Burros was staying at a camp in the Poconos with the neo-Nazis when the story in the New York Times claiming that he was Jewish came out. The Nazis weren’t upset. They were saying just sit down; we can talk about this. But Burros went up to his room, put on a Wagner record and shot himself. He killed himself within an hour of the story coming out.

Bean began discussing the Danny Burros story in the ‘70s when he was a writer living on the West Coast. He began to see Burros as typifying a particular kind of Jew. “He was a rabbi manque. Antisemitism is a form of practicing Judaism. He’s sort of a rabbi after all. A Jew by day, a Nazi by night. . . . He was desperately hiding something and compulsively trying to bring it out at the same time. People are drawn to contradiction. He undergoes a conversion, but not back to the Torah.” By telling the story of the Jewish Nazi, Bean concluded, “I began to understand what Judaism was.”

When Danny Balint, the character Bean created out of the story of Danny Burros, gets a call from a New York Times reporter, he gives an eloquent articulation of anti-Semitism. Judaism “is a sickness. . . . The real Jew is a nomad and a wanderer. He has no roots and no attachments. He universalizes everything. All he can do is buy and sell and manipulate markets. It’s all mental. Marx, Freud, Einstein: what have they given us? Communism, infantile sexuality and the atom bomb. They want nothing but nothingness, nothing without end.”

The main issue in The Believer is theological. Danny has penetrated to the heart of the Jewish religion by understanding that the Jew worships Nothingness. If Hitler is the biggest Nihilist of the 20th century, he is the chief rabbi in the religion that worships “nothing but nothingness, nothing without end.” He attained that position by default when the Church stopped working for the conversion of the Jews.