WOW!

While it may be true that Nazerman says something like this- about money- the question is does he really believe it? The answer is certainly not; he has sunk into a depression so profound that he is here just parrot-like giving back what others have thought of Jews through the ages. As for Lumet trashing Jews? I don't think royal vaccine and I saw the same film. Lumet is deeply sympathetic towards Nazerman, despite his coldness. Lumet in the film is trying to wake Nazerman up, to make him alive again, to make him connect. He didn't completely succeed but it's a great performance.

geoff@greenmarble.ca

I think you might be missing the point.
It's about a soul-less, empty man and what brought him to that state.

Remember the scene where he skewers his own hand? That's just so he can feel something... Anything again.

Don't view everything on face value. Some things actually require thought.


I AM THE THREAD KILLER.

I think you missed the point slightly, the reason he loves money is because he has lost everything and has nothing else to love (children and wife being dead). This film is certainly not an attack on Jews, its showing how the horrors of the holocaust have changed a loving family man to nothing more than a shallow, selfish one.

There's also a more profound point: He's become exactly what destroyed him.

The Nazi's took property away from others and dehumanized them. He robotically takes objects from Harlem residents—black/white/young/old—and gives them money and that’s it. His story is filled with the hopes and dreams that have been distilled to a price and base value devoid of emotion.

It's a pretty poignant study as to how a man with all in the world can become a caricature of a human living a life he wishes he didn't have.

And in the end, money was the only thing he cared about because that was all he was left with.

As a Jew, it's not a scathing indigent of the Jewish people as much as it is a look at survivors guilt and psychology. Look at his friends and relatives? They are all Jewish and have some joy in their lives. Some even still religious. Outside of his name, does he have any Jewish identity.

He's the walking dead. Trapped by his own fears and horrors but shaped by the abuse of others. And in the end when he walks morosely alone, nobody knows/cares for him.

Oh come on, he became this way as a result of his past and because of what`s expected of him. It isn`t an attack.

Nazerman says, "money", I believe, out of sarcasm and frustration because he's given up on life and is simply conceding, half-heartedly, to the stereotype that he assumes Jesus Ortiz, and the rest of the world, for that matter, has of Jews.

Nazerman is merely a shell of what he had been in his youth before the Nazi atrocities, and in that shell resides a PPTSD, i.e. a case of "Perpetual Post Traumatic Stress Disorder", which he knows is destroying him from within, and from which he wants to be relieved (I think he seriously invites Brock Peters & Co. to put him out of his misery by virtually daring them to kill him), but it is not within his power to remedy.

Ortiz asked Nazerman a dumb question, so Nazerman responded with sarcasm & stereotypes.