EXTREMISMTaking Fresh Shot, Again, at Debunking Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories
“The Conspiracy,” which premiered in New York in November, traces the origins of one of the world’s oldest and most persistent, dangerous, anti-Semitic theories, and the impact these myths had on three prominent families caught in these theories’ web during the past 200 years.
For the last three years Dasha Bough ’23 has taken on her biggest challenge as a young artist: to create an animated documentary challenging one of the world’s oldest and most dangerous and persistent conspiracy theories — that Jews have a secret plot for global domination.
“The Conspiracy,” which premiered in New York in November, traces the origins of that myth and three prominent families caught in its dangerous web during the past 200 years, including the influential Warburg banking family of Germany and the U.S., the Bronsteins of Ukraine, whose son Leon later changed his name to Trotsky, and the Dreyfuses of France, whose name became synonymous with the infamous treason case against son Alfred, an affair that widely divided France and exposed a deep vein of anti-Semitism.
While work on the documentary is done, the conspiracy theories targeting Jewish people have continued. Discussions about the centuries-old myth have once again been pushed to the fore in the wake of recent comments and controversies involving rapper Kanye West, conservative TV personality Tucker Carlson, and comedian Dave Chapelle.
Bough expressed cautious optimism about the project’s ability to make a difference.
“Conspiracy theories, especially today, are so seductive in the way that they’re told in modern media, comedy, and Twitter. They’re so easy to take in. It’s harder to do the work of sitting down and watching an entire documentary that traces the roots of the conspiracy. My hope is that the work we’ve done is different. Aesthetically, thematically, and narratively different enough from anything that’s out there to be as seductive as the conspiracy theories,” Bough said.
Originally, the film was slated to be a “talking heads”-style documentary, but the pandemic prompted director Maxim Pozdorovkin ’12 to pivot and make it fully animated. Bough, who has animated since she was in high school, took a leave from Harvard and was put in charge of a team that included a compositor, 3D artists, and a group of illustrators.
“The process was crazy. It’s totally insane to do a fully animated feature-length film with such a small team,” the 23-year-old said. “We had 100 different characters that we needed to show on screen, and they were all based off of real historical figures.”
