By Karen Matthews
NEW YORK (AP) --A crowd of 20,000 gives the Nazi salute as swastikas flank a giant portrait of George Washington.
Unimaginable to most Americans, the pro-Hitler rally that took place 80 years ago this week inside New York's Madison Square Garden is the subject of a short documentary that's up for an Oscar.
The seven-minute film shows Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the pro-Nazi German American Bund, decrying "the Jewish-controlled press" and demanding "a socially just, white, gentile-ruled United States."
Documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry said that after learning about the 1939 Bund rally, which he could barely believe had happened, he asked a researcher friend to help him locate archival footage of the Feb. 20, 1939, event.
"Once he pulled it all together and I saw it, I thought it was very surreal and frightening, and I wanted to find a way to make something of it and share it with the world," Curry said.
Curry sees parallels to 2019, when Republican President Donald Trump calls news organizations enemies of the people and anti-Jewish attacks are increasing. The anniversary of the rally comes as New York police report a 72 percent increase in hate crimes in the city over the past year, with anti-Semitic crimes making up almost two-thirds of the total of 55.
In "A Night at the Garden," mounted police officers hold back protesters outside the Garden, about a mile north of the arena's present-day location and where the marquee advertises "Pro American Rally" along with a New York Rangers hockey game the following night.
Inside, people in suits and dresses cheer as Kuhn calls for "gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination." A protester rushes the stage and is tackled and beaten by uniformed Bund troops.
The protester, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, was later arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Details including his name and Kuhn's are not spelled out in the documentary, which immerses the viewer in the rally rather than having a narrator explain it.
Curry said he considered using a narrator but "ultimately almost on a whim I edited it together as if it were a verite documentary where you dropped the audience into this rally and you had to figure out what was going on. I found that it was more compelling that way."
Daniel Greene, a Northwestern University historian who curated an exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum on Americans' response to the Holocaust, said the Madison Square Garden rally was one of the most important events in the relatively short life of the German American Bund, which aimed to build support for a fascist America.
"You have about 20,000 people inside, and some people estimate that there were about 100,000 protesters on the street outside," Greene said.
Kuhn's rhetoric, Greene said, was "full of stereotypical lies about Jews, anti-Semitic lies like Jews are secretly controlling international finance, Jews are secretly controlling the American media."
"A Night at the Garden" is one of five films in contention for best documentary, short subject, at Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony.
South Korea fines Meta $15 million for illegally collecting information on Facebook users
South Korea's privacy watchdog on Tuesday fined social media company Meta 21.6 billion won ($15 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with thousands of advertisers.
It was the latest in a series of penalties against Meta by South Korean authorities in recent years as they increase their scrutiny of how the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, handles private information.
Following a four-year investigation, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information about around 980,000 Facebook users, including their religion, political views and whether they were in same-sex unions, from July 2018 to March 2022.
It said the company shared the data with around 4,000 advertisers.
South Korea's privacy law provides strict protection for information related to personal beliefs, political views and sexual behavior, and bars companies from processing or using such data without the specific consent of the person involved.
The commission said Meta amassed sensitive information by analyzing the pages the Facebook users liked or the advertisements they clicked on.
The company categorized ads to identify users interested in themes such as specific religions, same-sex and transgender issues, and issues related to North Korean escapees, said Lee Eun Jung, a director at the commission who led the investigation on Meta.
"While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent," Lee said.
Lee... Read More