Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer. Its fans—blond-haired men with beer guts, boys with blue eyes—sing “Hava Nagila” as they cram into the trams taking them to the stadium on the fringes of Amsterdam. Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.   

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.” What followed was a textbook example of a pogrom: mobs chasing Jews down city streets, goons punching and kicking Jews crouched helplessly in corners, an orgy of hate-filled violence.

That this attack transpired on the streets of Amsterdam is beyond ironic. At least 75 percent of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust. But there was an affectionate Yiddish nickname for the city: mokum, “safe place.” After the Spanish Inquisition, Holland absorbed Iberian Jewry, which flourished there. Amsterdam was the city that hid Anne Frank, the most famous example of righteous Gentiles taking risks on behalf of Jewish neighbors. And then there was Ajax.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust in the city supported the team, as they had before the war. No Dutch club had a larger Jewish fan base, because no Dutch city was as Jewish as Amsterdam. They were supporting a club on the brink of glory. Ajax reinvented the global game by introducing a strategic paradigm called total football, a free-flowing style of play that exuded the let-loose spirit of the ’60s. Led by the genius Johan Cruyff, perhaps the most creative player in the history of the game, Ajax became an unexpected European powerhouse.

During those glorious postwar years, Ajax had two Jewish players; three of the club’s presidents were Jews. Before games, the team would order a kosher salami for good luck. Yiddish phrases were part of locker-room banter. In Brilliant Orange, David Winner’s extraordinary book about Dutch soccer, Ajax’s (Jewish) physiotherapist is quoted as saying the players “liked to be Jewish even though they weren’t.” It isn’t hard to see the psychology at work. By embracing Yiddishkeit, Ajax players and fans were telling themselves a soothing story: Their parents might have been Nazi collaborators and bystanders to evil, but they weren’t.

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Israelis took great pleasure in Ajax’s affiliation, and they especially revered Cruyff. His family had Jewish relatives—a connection he honored on a trip to Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. It was said that he once walked down the streets of Tel Aviv wearing a kippah, and was a devoted fan of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. Israelis embraced Cruyff as one of their own.

But Ajax’s rival clubs exploited this history, this strange identity, to taunt its players and fans with anti-Semitic bile. Among the common chants deployed at Ajax games: “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” To taunt Ajax, these fans would make the hissing noise, mimicking the release of Zyklon B. Dutch authorities never effectively cracked down on this omnipresent Jew hatred.

Philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism went hand in hand during the postwar years. It wasn’t so different from the way that American sports franchises turned Indigenous tribes into mascots. Only after Jews or Native Americans have been wiped out by genocide can they become vehicles for the majority population to have some fun at the murdered group’s expense. And behind even Ajax’s nominal expressions of love, there was something profoundly disturbing: Jews barely existed in Holland, yet they remained an outsize obsession.

After videos of the violence emerged from Amsterdam in various media outlets, there could be no denying the global surge of anti-Semitism. But a swath of the press—and an even larger swath of social media—has minimized the assault, sometimes unintentionally. Some headlines described the anti-Semitic nature of the assaults in quotation marks, despite all the conclusive evidence about the motive of the mob. Because some of the Israeli fans ripped Palestinian flags off buildings and chanted bigoted slogans, it was implied, the mob was justified in stabbing and beating Jews. Such widespread ambivalence over the attack reflects a culture that shrugs in the face of anti-Jewish violence, which treats it as an unavoidable facet of life after October 7.

But the most bitter fact of all is that these assaults transpired the same evening that the Dutch commemorated the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht. In the presence of actual Jews, the Dutch failed them again.

The very last shot of Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, A Real Pain, is identical to its first: a close-up of the tortured, weary face of Benji Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin with a frenetic intensity familiar from his work on Succession. That his sad eyes remain static despite all he has seen is significant, because this is, ostensibly, a Holocaust film, and everyone is supposed to be changed by the end of a Holocaust film.

Popular art about the Holocaust has long been a series of lesson plans, a conduit for catharsis. Most directors, by peering into a gas chamber or the maw of an oven, mean to remind us, as the actor-director Roberto Benigni once obscenely put it, that Life Is Beautiful. This pattern was set only a few years after the Holocaust itself, from the moment “Anne Frank” stood on a Broadway stage in 1955 and redeemed her audience by telling them, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart.” Even Schindler’s List, that paradigm of Holocaust movies, is about the moral journey of a non-Jewish savior, Oskar Schindler, who ends the film weeping because “I didn’t do enough!”

This tidy didacticism is perhaps in the nature of narrative and its need for a clean arc—and it’s a good reason the deaths of millions should never have become fodder for blockbusters to begin with. But in A Real Pain, Eisenberg, who wrote and directed the film, manages to tell a story about the Holocaust that doesn’t ask all those dead millions to become its supporting cast. In this film, trauma trickles down through the generations, but not in the obvious or pat ways that descendants of survivors have captured it before.

The story plays out straightforwardly as a travelogue that begins and ends in an airport. A pair of cousins, David (played by Eisenberg) and Benji, are on a Jewish-heritage tour of Poland. Their beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who died recently, set money aside in her will for them to visit her birth country. The cousins are only three weeks apart in age, but their differences could not be more pronounced.

Eisenberg has long perfected a kind of “Woody Allen without the baggage” screen persona, and here again he is that neurotic, twitchy Jewish guy. David is settled into middle age, working at a company that creates ad banners for the internet (a job both detestable and banal), with a wife and young child he adores. But the effort he’s making to tamp down his own sadness and pain makes him look pinched and constipated.

His cousin, Benji, tamps nothing down; he is a charmer with a scruffy beard, loose limbs, and an easy though slightly demonic smile. He’s the kind of person who will suddenly hug you for no reason, who speaks too loudly and overshares, who burps unapologetically among strangers. He ships some marijuana to their first hotel stop in Poland. When he and David join a small heritage-tour group upon arriving in Warsaw, everyone immediately falls for him, even as he instigates one awkward situation after another. “You light up a room and then you shit on everything inside of it,” David tells him—an accurate description. Or as one of the tour-group members, a middle-aged divorcée played by a smoky-voiced Jennifer Grey, says about Benji, “He’s funny and charming, under all the mishegas.”

[Read: How Son of Saul captures the reality of the Holocaust]

The wonder of this film is its smallness—not to mention its admirable shortness (a swift hour and a half)—despite the large historical and emotional backdrop against which it plays out. These characters want their presence in Poland to mean something, to transform them in some way, but it won’t—it is just a place and, as depicted here, an often drab one. All the trip does is foreground the complexity of David and Benji’s relationship as they shuttle through walking tours and nondescript hotels: Benji’s resentment of and reliance on David’s stability; David’s bafflement and envy over Benji’s allure; and the mental illness that keeps Benji, always on the verge of tears or screaming, stuck in his own mind and his mother’s basement.

If this pilgrimage is meant to offer a comeuppance for these two overgrown Millennial boys, to relativize their own pain as small, this reckoning never arrives.

At the end of the tour, they visit the death camp Majdanek. The camera fixes on their faces as they take in the barracks, the blue-stained walls of the gas chamber, the crematoria. And the score, which is heavy on Chopin, goes silent. As they drive away, Benji is weeping. But there is no mistaking this as a reaction to the camp or thoughts of his grandmother; Majdanek only gave him a little shove. When the cousins leave the tour to find the house where their grandmother grew up, they are headed for an anticlimax. “It’s so unremarkable,” Benji says. To make the moment more solemn, David suggests borrowing from the Jewish ritual of laying a stone on top of a grave, and places one near the threshold. But then a Polish neighbor yells at them that this is a tripping hazard, and they scurry off, pocketing their stones. David will eventually rest his on his stoop in New York City, the home that does have meaning to him.

There is an extremely prosaic quality to their encounters with these places of long-ago Jewish life and death; even as they try to squeeze significance out of the experience, Eisenberg makes us aware of their self-awareness. (“We’re on a fucking Holocaust tour,” Benji scolds David at one point. “If now is not the time and place to grieve, to open up, I don’t know what to tell you, man.”) In calling attention to the cliché, Eisenberg is undermining a mini-genre of sorts: books and films about such heritage tours. Earlier this year, Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham starred in the movie Treasure, playing a father and daughter visiting Poland in 1991. Dunham’s character, visibly depressed and recently divorced, is fixated on her father’s experience as a survivor of Auschwitz, so much so that she secretly tattoos his number from the camp on her leg. He is determinedly cut off from his own experience, and thus from her. But during a visit to Auschwitz together, his memories rush in—aided, in a common Holocaust-film trope, by a flashback, this one aural (barking dogs and screeching trains)—and his emotional opening-up begins.

The urtext of such journey stories is probably Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. In the 2005 film adaptation of the novel, a similar transformation occurs at the site of a Jewish massacre: sepia-toned flashbacks of shots fired and piles of bodies. And the eyes of Elijah Wood, playing Foer in the film with a determined blankness, fill with tears behind his coke-bottle glasses.

Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus, once diagnosed this as holo-kitsch, and it now seems to have passed on to a third generation. These grandchildren want to touch the trauma and have some of its meaning rub off. But Eisenberg resists this. He chooses to set the climactic scene of A Real Pain not in a gas chamber but in a Jewish-themed restaurant in Lublin, with a piano player’s treacly rendition of “Hava Nagila” tinkling in the background. The tour group is sitting around a table having dinner and reminiscing about their forebears’ resilience, not their suffering.

Once again, Benji makes a scene. And after he storms off, managing to concern and confuse everyone, David breaks down. He knows he’s “oversharing,” but he can’t help it. His cousin’s troubling behavior is much worse than we’ve already seen, and culminated in a crisis after their grandmother died. She alone was capable of breaking through to Benji by putting his anguish in perspective; she even slapped him once, as if to shock him awake.

Driving Benji’s oversensitivity and instability is a desperate, self-involved desire to feel. But this doesn’t make him an inheritor of trauma. It just exposes his distance from it—the trip’s only real revelation being his own fragility. David, processing aloud at the dinner, himself close to tears, can’t believe the dissonance, all the vulnerability in his generation despite their family’s history: “How did this guy come from the survivors of this place?”