Spielberg Talks To `List' Incident Kids

OAKLAND, Calif. - Saying he bore no hard feelings and asking them to fight racial intolerance, Oscar-winning film director Steven Spielberg yesterday faced students who had laughed during his epic Holocaust movie "Schindler's List" in January.

Outside the high school, however, protesters assailed his appearance, saying that black Americans were suffering their own holocaust and that their history was not being taught.

Speaking to about 900 Castlemont High School students, most of them black, gathered in the auditorium, Spielberg declared: "Racial hatred is a state of mind that attacks us as people. Slavery and the Holocaust are just as important now as they were horrible in the past."

Castlemont made national news after a group of students viewing "Schindler's List" began giggling during a gruesome murder scene. Several patrons complained, and the theater operator stopped the film and evicted the students.

In response to the highly publicized incident, Spielberg made the rare appearance yesterday and seemed to want to quell the furor.

"Castlemont High School has received a very bad rap for what happened," he said. "I bore and bear no ill will. I was thrown out of `Ben Hur' when I was a kid, for talking. I chalk it up to one of the privileges of youth."

The moviemaker drew standing ovations, laughter and wild applause from the students.

As Spielberg spoke inside, a crowd outside of about 100 marchers, many of them black Muslims, denounced him as a Zionist seeking to engender sympathy in the black community for Jews.

"He thinks he can teach us about genocide?" asked Abdel Malik Ali, one of the protest leaders. "It's like going to an Indian reservation and telling Indians we want to teach them about genocide. We (blacks) are living it every day."

Spielberg later told reporters that the criticisms sound like those leveled by black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan. "It smacks of the Farrakhan camp," he said. " `Schindler's List' doesn't represent a Jewish lobby. It doesn't represent a German lobby. It is a story about tolerance and remembering."

Several students said they resented efforts to teach them about the Holocaust before first enhancing black-history lessons at their school.

Spielberg was joined by Gov. Pete Wilson as part of a new Holocaust education program in which California schoolchildren will view his movie free of charge.

Under the program, which begins Thursday, an estimated 16,000 students a week will watch "Schindler's List," the story of German businessman Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jews by employing them in his factory.