Hunters season 2 spoilers follow.
There is an analogous relationship between Jews and survival; our ability to survive, our longevity, is often quoted as our biggest strength. As one critic wrote (in an otherwise apt review): "Hunters is a compelling action-packed drama about the resilience of a people that stared down pure evil and refused to do anything but endure."
At first, the line reads like a compliment, but the more one thinks about it the more it feels like damning with faint praise (or worse). "Refused to do anything but endure" implies passivity in the Jewish people. We endure, but we do not act.
The idea of passivity-linked survival has permeated Jewishness for centuries and is a trait that has been manipulated by both sides. It compels us to do nothing (keep your head down, you'll survive) and gives antisemites fuel: Jews are like the cockroach, able to survive anything.
Flying in the face of this assessment of our character, Hunters arms Jews with agency and weapons. In this way, it is actually a 'compelling action-packed drama about the resilience of a people that stared down pure evil' and, in fact, decided to do something about it.
Plenty of people have drawn comparisons between Hunters and Inglorious Basterds, and even we would agree that the latter balances the shifting tones better than the Amazon Prime TV series. Still, there is substance woven into the fibres of Hunters, and season two teases those threads out even more deliberately.
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Both of them imagine a world in which vengeance against the embodiment of evil — Adolf Hilter — is exacted. In Tarantino's film, Hitler is machine-gunned into mince by Jewish American soldiers then burned to ash in a movie theatre by the French holocaust survivor Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent).
Hunters takes a more measured approach and delves into its themes of vengeance and justice further: Jonah doesn't kill Hitler but instead brings him to the International Criminal Court to stand trial for crimes against humanity. The question this poses is: what is justice?
In episode one, Jennifer Jason Leigh's Chava tells an Austrian shop owner that God gave him eyes so he could see wrong and do something about it. By averting his gaze as Jews in his town were rounded up, and then taking over one of their stores, he has lost the right to his eyes. Chava gouges them out (off screen), and places them in a butter statue in the square.
This campy moment of violence is vindicating on a visceral level, and while tonally it may not fit with the rest of the show's more serious ponderings on the nature of justice and morality, it provides a glorious moment of schadenfreude: victory in debasing our tormentors.
Hunters season two isn't perfect (though the penultimate episode is one of the best on television this year), but it does something unique: affording Jewish characters a wealth of nuance, including being the hero. As star Logan Lerman told Esquire: "I think it says a lot for the symbolism of it, a young Jewish character kicking ass and being the action hero. I thought that was really cool."
Importantly, while dealing with the fallout of the holocaust, both seasons of Hunters deal with the legacy of antisemitism and the way it is perpetuated. Hitler may have had his comeuppance, but neo-Nazism is still on the rise: Travis has escaped, and Jonah's struggle is eternal. Evil lives on.
For season two's flaws — its jarring time jumps and tonal whiplash — it has as many strengths, particularly thanks to its ensemble cast. Each is another shifting tile in the kaleidoscope lens through which we see the impacts of racism and antisemitism (and their intersection). Sometimes the view is perplexing, but often it's breathtaking.
So many stories of Jewish trauma and subsequent survival are told with a beginning, middle, and end – particularly holocaust stories. We start with being rounded up, in the middle some of us are murdered and some of us survive, and at the end, we are liberated.
Showrunner David Weil seems to know that this is a sanitised, gentile-saviour narrative, a mode of storytelling that boxes Jews into the passive-survivor category, helpless and hapless. Hunters is the antidote to this narrative and a welcome one.
Hunters season 1 and 2 are available to watch on Amazon Prime Video
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Gabriella Geisinger is a freelance film critic and journalist, with a focus on J-drama & film, and the Japanese production industry. She was previously Locations Editor at Screen International and Deputy Movies Editor at Digital Spy. Her writing can also befound in Curzon, 1883, and more. A born and raised New Yorker, she loves coffee and the colour black, obviously.
