Jeffrey Goldberg does a profile on Quentin Tarantino and his new movie Inglourious Basterds.

Hostel director Eli Roth plays a soldier in it:

“It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling,” Roth said. “My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education. My grandparents got out of Poland and Russia and Austria, but their relatives did not.”

Also try to figure out if you understand what Tarantino is saying here. I gave up after re-reading it a few times.

I asked Tarantino if he thought the over-the-top violence of the Basterds might offend people. “Why would they condemn me?” he said. “I was too brutal to the Nazis?”

Well, scalping Nazis is a bit … much.

“One of the things that’s interesting to me is equating the Jews in this case with the Indians in a Western,” he said. “Maybe it’s not nothing that I’m 25percent Cherokee Indian. If I go do a movie of Jewish Americans fighting back in World War II, then I equate them with the other race that I am, and I use the Indian battle plan, their methods, to attack the Nazis.”

Incidentally, the author of this piece, Goldberg, used to be a soldier for the Israeli Defense Forces and later became a journalist at the Atlantic. His interview with a senior Hamas official (yes, an ex-IDF soldier interviewing Hamas) in the NYT a few months back is astonishing.