Looking and sounding like a Sandy Koufax who did not abandon New York with O’Malley, documentarian Marc Levin takes to the streets in Protocols of Zion -- as moderator, guide and gadfly -- to examine for himself the surfaces of a resurgence of the old, familiar manifestations of anti-Semitism.

Grandson of Eastern European immigrants who opened some of the first movie houses in Flatbush, the Manhattan-dwelling Levin seems a “secular Jew,” that is, ethnically and culturally so rather than practicing. This odyssey of his begins four years ago, when a cabbie, an Egyptian immigrant, voiced the occasionally heard allegation that four thousand of the director’s coreligionists had prior knowledge not to work at the World Trade Center that September 11. Ergo, the attack was their doing, consistent with Hebrew plotting for world domination as proved in print exactly a hundred years ago in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Informally sharing with us his New Jersey childhood memorabilia, Levin refreshes himself about this forgery of the Tsar’s secret police, modeled on an 1864 French political satire and outlining “protocols” for subverting Christiandom through divide-and-conquer sabotage. Pushed by the likes of Canada’s Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, ultra-right FDR critics, and Adolf Hitler, the book was discredited but is currently resurfacing in strength.

The relaxed director/co-producer’s narrational presence and voice trace the omnipresence of this dangerous work he at first thought an impossible joke, “like a Japanese sci-fi comic.” But it is available at Gotham newsstands -- not Gotham City -- Wal-Marts, or online with a disclaimer but at no charge as part of Amazon.com’s First Amendment stance. Additional Protocols copies have had to be ordered by the Hillsboro, West Virginia, National Alliance, as Cat. #756 is sold out from the shelves alongside swastika flags and Mein Kampf.

Levin includes clips from Germany’s The Eternal Jew (1940), Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and, featuring bloodletting of Christian children, a mini-series dramatization produced for Egyptian television and aired in the Middle East during Ramadan of 2003. There is footage of Coughlin, Ford, ‘sixties American Nazi Party founder-Commander George Lincoln Rockwell, a former Cairo University humanities dean, Mel Gibson on ABC Primetime and his father elsewhere; Israeli TV interviews with five of that country’s citizens detained in Weehawken following 9/11, and Elie Wiesel and Kofi Annan condemning anti-Semitism before the UN General Assembly.

To cracker-accented readings of individual Protocols, the heart, however, lies in the director’s discussions, question-and-answers, with the not-famous: the New York kiosk owners who claim no idea of what they sell, and others who do; a New Jersey publisher whose weekly The Arab Voice is serializing Protocols, with an editorial caution not to appear until the last number; young African-Americans who harp on their own genocide and believe it fostered by “Jews” like “Jew-liani,” “Bloom-berg” and Pepsi -- “Pay Every Penny, Support Israel”; angry Palestinian-Americans mourning at Widdi Hall in Sunset Park, who don’t see “the difference between a suicide bomber and an F-15 bomber”; a Holocaust survivor, a rabbi in a synagogue and celebrants at a Downtown Passover seder; anti-war marchers, black and white inmates at Trenton State Prison, an ultra-conservative businessman; the host of Talkline radio and, “keeping a close watch,” the creator of online New Jersey Jew Watch.

Sometimes accompanied by his also documentarian, also soft-voiced (if more ironic) father, Al, who supplies memories, advice and a cemetery coda, Levin is followed by shaky handhelds on this quest to learn that, among other things, Jews are less aware of the infamous document than Gentiles. A heated post-screening argument about the use of (presumably free) interns, however, indicates the film’s failure to touch the intended nerve. If the purpose is only to show opinions, Protocols of Zion does so, but it fails to go further, and true success would have lain below surfaces, in analyses as to causes. In this, it is like medicine that would treat, but not forestall, the disease, aiming at symptoms but not prevention.

(Released by THINKFilm; not rated by MPAA.)