Frankly, and thank you for asking, I'm sick of seeing Steven Spielberg put down for at least trying to say and do provocative things. I didn't think Munich's tale of Jew-versus-Arab revenge was particularly effective, and, in fact, I find even the best of his efforts to be tainted by overreach and sentimentality. But come on, people, the guy takes a lot more risks than your average Danish cartoonist.

In a way, Spielberg is a sore spot for me. His particular upbringing and world-view, not to mention the beard and baseball cap, are uncomfortably familiar to me-not counting the money, of course. He grew up in a secular household in suburban Arizona; mine was in suburban California. As has been surmised many times already, the cookie-cutter tract homes of E.T. were just the sort of "normal" that made little Stevie wonder how he got plunked down in such an alien landscape. I can relate.

Of course, the relationship between Hollywood and Jewishness-as opposed to Judaism, which enters into the mix when you get into the more Kabalistic aspects (although Louis B. Mayer was a fairly Old Testament figure)-is as old as American show business itself. As documented thoroughly by writer Neal Gabler in 1989's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (Anchor), immigrants from the poorer eastern quarters of Europe got into the movieola biz mostly as an adjunct to vending and sideshow hustling-areas where polite company feared to tread and where a man, as well as gals in the typing pool (who turned into the first and most poorly paid screenwriters), could learn a white-collar trade without passing a eugenics test.

On the business and creative sides, Jews had the chutzpah to document life as it was or make up fantasies about how it should be, thereby codifying the language by which cinema itself would grow. Much the same thing happened in pre-Hitler Germany and postrevolutionary Russia, with purges to follow everywhere but in Los Angeles, where the very concept of entertainment turned into a religion with its own gods and goddesses.

Eventually, Anglo faces like those of Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed would become icons of conformity as America settled into its own increasingly self-absorbed identity, but images of the white picket fence and the ol' swimmin' hole were made universal by the likes of Sam Goldwyn, Irving Thalberg, and Adolph Zukor, alongside strong-willed immigrants from other ethnic groups, such as Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin.

The sense of being outside looking in is common to all social newcomers, but the potency of modern media, combined with the intense introspection and passion for scholarship peculiar to the wandering Ashkenazim, allowed a cultural centrality that could be unique in human history. A new national identity, based on shared myths and boffo box office, was both forged and subverted by transplanted directors like Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. And with name-adjusted actors like John Garfield, Kirk Douglas, and Lauren Bacall, personal histories were lost. (It's taken until the era of Jerry Seinfeld and new Oscar host Jon Stewart to find an in-your-face Jewishness.)

Spielberg himself, 60 later this year, is old enough to remember the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the 1950s, in which aging studio bosses sold their left-leaning filmmakers down the assimilationist river. And his efforts have dealt with people in precarious situations-whether facing Nazis or sharks or confronting more benign strangers, as in E.T. and Close Encounters, or children surrounded by more ambiguously drawn forces, such as the small boy and Japanese soldiers of Empire of the Sun.

His humanitarian concerns have become more explicit since Schindler's List in 1993, and the work has gradually grown more dark-hearted. Now, after Munich, he is accused of being insufficiently Jewish to pass judgment on the violent acts of Israeli agents after the Olympic massacre. This is, of course, absurd-not just because of the notion of free speech worshipped by all lovers of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington but also due to the dialectical nature of Judaism itself, in which every moral standing is subject to endless debate.

"The people who attack the movie based on 'moral equivalence' are some of the same people who say diplomacy itself is an exercise in moral equivalence, and that war is the only answer," Spielberg recently told Roger Ebert, speaking of Munich's critics. "Understanding is a very muscular act. If I'm endorsing understanding and being attacked for that, then I am almost flattered."

Moreover, one doesn't have to search very far to find Israeli films even more critical of that government's handling of the Palestinian people, such as last year's Walk on Water. Israel's Ushpizin, Hungary's Fateless, the upcoming Live and Become, and the Arab-language Paradise Now-this last made with Israeli money and expertise-suggest that a sense of one's place in the world is a very fluid thing, subject to the same scrutiny as everything else alive on the planet. No longer driven by biblical directives or bland dreams of assimilated safety, the Jewish filmmaker, like the Jewish filmgoer, is neither victim nor villain but an actor in events-not the kind that gets awards, maybe, but the sort that takes chances and would rather confront a demon than become one.