It might just be that Sacha Baron Cohen’s entire career is cover for a secret mission to reveal who among us will be the next Nazis.
The question has been approached with nuance by the writer and now playwright Nathan Englander via the Anne Frank game in his short story and play which Jewish couples imagine who among their gentile friends would hide them in the next Holocaust.
Baron Cohen does not do nuance. But in his 2004 HBO series Da Ali G Show he delivered a memorable answer to the question when, as Kazakstani reporter Borat, he led the audience in an Arizona country music club through a translation of the homespun Kazakh ditty, “Throw The Jew Down the Well”.
Whether this actually revealed a dormant Nazism in those who took part, or merely a moronic suggestibility, is up for discussion. But we might at least assume that they would not be first to hide their Jewish neighbours.
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