Sasha Baron Cohen: Rare Interview from Jewish Comedy Phenom

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In this clip from the BBC, actor Sasha Baron Cohen (who has recently released the film, “The Dictator”) talks about why Jews do comedy, his films, and why he has not normally done interviews as himself.  In the film “The Dictator” Cohen plays a fictional tyrant of a made up North African country who occasionally bursts into rants in Hebrew at various points in the film  – a sort of inside joke for Jewish viewers.   Sasha’s mother was born in Israel and his grandmother still lives in Haifa.  Cohen uses comedy and media to attract attention to the outrageous behavior of people who become “unquestioned” (such as Qadaffi who is largely the basis of the character in “The Dictator”).  Cohen’s Borat character and his song “Throw the Jew Down the Well” illustrate a core problem of anti-semitism that Sasha describes as widespread indifference to anti-semitic attitudes and actions. He spoke about this in an interview in Rolling Stone, “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.”