Mr. Green's Treatment of His Secretary

I see your point. However, I think it was the strongest scene of the movie. And he may have deliberately been very critical to guage her reaction as part of his exploration of the issue. In fact, he seemed to be seeking out confrontations to gain the experience more quickly. I don't think he was tryijg to convey he was an expert on prejudice.

It is funny...I have seen this movie many times since I was a child, and I always thought the scene with the secretary was rather a powerful and thought provoking scene. I still think it is, but I never thought about it from the secretary's point of view before. Who knows what anyone would do when born into the receiving end of prejudice. She was a product of racism. She could obviously be reeducated, as could we all, but her actions leading up to that point in time, were actions she had chosen, to survive amidst ignorance. Very good point atlantajoseph.

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Good point -- I can see how a Gentile lecturing a Jew about how to be appropriately Jewish could be perceived as arrogant -- she is the one who has to live with reality of anti-Semitism the best way she knows how. But her attitudes are really pretty reprehensible and just feed into the stereotype she's trying to hide from.

I TOTALLY agree with you. You are right, he made some very good points, but the manner in which he spoke to her was very demeaning and un-necesarry. I think she would have understood had he just talked to her normally, but it seemed like he couldn't ever talk to her without shouting at her and shaking her.

I saw the movie quite a while ago. One point hardly mentioned above is that she deserved to be upbraided. What she was doing was more than passing as non-Jewish; she was also adopting an anti-Semitic attitude/outlook. She objected to the firm's new policy of advertising that they were non-prejudiced in hiring because, she said, it would attract loud, wrong "kikey" types who would adversely reflect on "nice" ones like her and Mr. Green.

I liked the scenes with the secretary, and also the scene with the Jewish scientist. The movie showed many aspects of anti-Semitism.

I understand your point BUT... I think his point could be related to black people that use the "n word" these days. They say that it's okay because they're black but don't think about how it does nothing to discourage racism overall and probably makes it even worse

I agree with you completely. It's a bit presumptuous for a non-Jew to lecture a Jew on what it's like to be Jewish. So what if he pretended to be a Jew for 8 weeks. He knew the whole time the little experiment would end and he would go on with his life. He really had no right to talk to her like that. (For that matter, he had no right to sit in on his boss chewing out the HR guy either.)

But this scene, like so many others in the movie, was just a broad brush stroke and a bit like a caricature. It was almost as if every scene was set up to teach us another lesson, as if it were an after school special. There is only so much you can cover in a movie, but watching it I felt as if they were trying to jam a little too much sanctimony in there.

I think he was being a tad harsh, but it also fits in with the style of the movie to be a bit didactic. As for the arrogance of a gentile telling a Jew how to behave, I think you have to consider How DEEPLY ingrained her prejudice is. The thing I like most about this movie is the fact that it goes after the "nice" version of anti-semitic thinking, because having a problem with the Klan is easy, but pointing out the subtle ways that prejudice lives on is a harder fight. Green's secretary passing herself of as a shiksa is a classic example of internalized oppression, when prejudicial thinking becomes so ingrained that even the people suffering under it start believing it. It's like when Chastity Bono became the spokeswoman for GLAAD but said Ellen DeGeneres was being "too gay" because Ellen was calling attention to it. Thurgood Marshall demonstrated the effects on segregation on black children to the Supreme Court by showing that a black girl raised in a segregated community thinks white babies are prettier and better than black babies. The fact that the prejudice comes from within makes it even more important to stamp out, not less so. Pride movements are less about changing external opinion than about changing self-perception so that a community can become strong enough within to take on the rest of the world.

Maybe Green was being a bit arrogant in that scene, but on the other hand, if he was attacking anti-semitic behavior from everyone else--including his own fiancé--wouldn't it be wrong to let it pass just because the perpetrator in that case was Jewish?