Richard Brody writes in the New Yorker about Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy film:
Daniel Mendelsohn’s book “The Lost” is already, justifiably, one of the classics of Holocaust literature. (I say this with a sort of fraternal pride; we’ve known each other since the Ford Administration.) In it, he describes crimes perpetrated by Nazis and their collaborators which must have caused his hand and soul to tremble as he wrote of them. That’s why I don’t agree with him when, writing in Newsweek, he criticizes Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” for “turning Jews into Nazis.” There’s nothing in the film that suggests that the Basterds or Shoshanna, the Jewish proprietor of a movie theatre who takes her own action against the German high command, would slaughter German children, would tear German fetuses from the womb, would, in short, seek to exterminate the entire German people. And this desire to exterminate an entire people—plus the careful marshalling of vast resources to do so—is the Nazis’ distinctive, odious mark on history; Tarantino’s Jewish characters have no such desire or intention.