Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting, though you will want time at the end to discuss what it means that a film about the moral cost of vengeance was made from a book whose central source may have invented his own story, and whether that changes the film’s argument or only its factual foundation.

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GEORGE JONAS AND THE BOOK: A SOURCE WITH A DISPUTED FOUNDATION
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  1. Vengeance: The Book and Its Controversial Source
    George Jonas’s 1984 book Vengeance is based primarily on the account of a man Jonas calls ‘Avner’ — a Mossad agent who claims to have led the Israeli assassination campaign known as Operation Wrath of God following the 1972 Munich massacre. The problem is that the Israeli government has consistently denied that Avner’s account is accurate, several named targets dispute the book’s account of their roles, and some researchers have raised serious questions about whether Avner’s story is substantially true or substantially fabricated. The film is ‘inspired by’ rather than ‘based on’ the book, in part for this reason. Did the disputed foundation of Jonas’s book change how you read or watched the story? And does a film or book that presents contested events as historical narrative have an obligation to signal its own uncertainty more clearly?
  2. Jonas’s Narrative Approach: Thriller Form for Moral Argument
    Jonas wrote Vengeance as a narrative non-fiction thriller — fast-moving, dramatically organized, written with the pacing and texture of a spy novel. This form serves the argument: the thriller conventions make the moral discomfort feel immediate and visceral rather than abstract. Did the thriller form feel like the right vehicle for Jonas’s argument about vengeance and its costs, or like a genre register that occasionally made the moral weight feel like drama rather than genuine ethical reckoning? And which version — the book’s thriller narrative or Spielberg’s more meditative film — made the moral argument feel most genuinely pressured?
  3. What Vengeance Argues: Avner’s Disillusionment as the Book’s Spine
    Jonas’s book is not a celebration of the assassination campaign — it is the story of how Avner, who believed in the justice of the mission, gradually loses faith in both the mission and the state that sent him on it. The disillusionment is the book’s moral argument: vengeance extracts a cost from the people who pursue it that the people who ordered it never pay. Did the book make Avner’s disillusionment feel like a genuine moral reckoning rather than a convenient narrative arc? And which version — the book’s account or Spielberg’s film — made the cost of the mission feel most fully present in the body and mind of the person carrying it out?
  4. The Munich Massacre as Context: What Each Version Shows
    Both the book and the film begin with the Munich massacre — the murder of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches by the Palestinian group Black September during the 1972 Olympics. Spielberg opens the film with a re-creation of the massacre that is among cinema’s most harrowing sequences. Did the film’s decision to re-create the massacre as an extended opening sequence feel like the right formal choice — grounding the audience in the horror that the assassination campaign was a response to? And does showing the massacre at the outset change how you evaluate the campaign that follows, or did it feel like an attempt to pre-emptively justify what comes next?

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SPIELBERG AND KUSHNER’S FILM: MORAL SERIOUSNESS AT MAXIMUM SCALE
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  1. Spielberg’s Direction: The Hollywood Mainstream Engages the Hardest Questions
    Spielberg — who also made Schindler’s List — makes Munich a mainstream Hollywood film about subjects that mainstream Hollywood usually avoids: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the moral cost of state-sanctioned assassination, the way that cycles of violence perpetuate rather than resolve themselves. Did the film feel like a genuinely brave formal and political choice, or like a director occasionally retreating to Hollywood conventions at moments when the material demanded something more uncomfortable? And would a less mainstream director have pushed harder on what Spielberg pulls back from?
  2. Kushner and Roth’s Screenplay: The Playwright’s Touch on a Spy Thriller
    Kushner brings his characteristic political intelligence and moral seriousness to Munich. The screenplay is notable for its willingness to give the Palestinian characters genuine interiority and argument rather than making them simple antagonists. Did the screenplay feel like it made a genuinely even-handed argument—taking the political claims of both sides seriously—or like a film that tried for balance and occasionally felt unsettled by what that required? And where did Kushner’s theatrical sensibility most clearly serve the film?
  3. Eric Bana’s Avner: The Cost Written on a Body
    Bana’s Avner is the film’s moral center and its most demanding performance — a man who begins the film as a believer and ends it as someone who cannot sleep, cannot return home, and cannot trust the state that sent him. Did Bana find the right arc for Avner’s deterioration — making each stage of his disillusionment feel earned rather than schematic? And which version — Jonas’s prose account of Avner’s psychology or Bana’s performed embodiment of it — made the mission’s cost feel most fully present?
  4. The Team: Five Men and What They Become
    Avner’s assassination team — the toymaker, the document forger, the cleaner, the driver — are one of the film’s great ensemble achievements: five men who are also five different responses to the same moral situation, five different ways of carrying or refusing or rationalizing what they have been asked to do. Jonas’s book gives the team similar variety. Did each version give the team members sufficient individuality to feel like full people rather than functions? And which team member — in either version — felt most like the story’s most honest accounting of what the mission did to the people who carried it out?
  5. John Williams’s Score: Music for an Impossible Subject
    Williams’s score for Munich is one of his most restrained and most debated — some critics found it appropriately subdued; others felt it occasionally provided emotional direction that the film’s moral ambiguity was trying to resist. Did the score feel like the right emotional architecture for a film that is trying to hold its moral judgments in suspension, or did it occasionally tell you what to feel at moments when the film’s argument required you to feel nothing settled?

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THE MORAL ARGUMENT: WHAT BOTH VERSIONS ARE ACTUALLY SAYING
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  1. Vengeance and Its Logic: Does the Campaign Make Sense?
    Both versions present the Israeli assassination campaign as a response to Munich that is both understandable and ultimately self-defeating — the targets are replaced, the violence continues, and the people carrying out the mission are destroyed by it. Did each version engage honestly with the case for the campaign as well as the case against it, or did the focus on Avner’s disillusionment load the moral dice in ways that the opposite argument was never quite given space to make? And is there a reading of the story in which the campaign was the right response — one that neither version fully allows?
  2. The Palestinian Characters: The Conversation That Almost Never Happens
    One of the film’s most discussed scenes is a lengthy conversation between Avner and a Palestinian operative (Ali) in a European safehouse — a scene in which both men articulate their positions, acknowledge each other’s humanity, and reach an impasse that the film presents as the conflict’s essential structure. This scene has no equivalent in Jonas’s book. Did it feel like the film’s most important addition — the moment where Kushner’s political intelligence most clearly transformed the source? Or did it feel like a filmmaker trying too hard to balance the story’s events?
  3. The Cycle of Violence: The Film’s Central Argument and Its Critics
    Munich’s governing argument—that the assassination campaign perpetuated rather than ended the cycle of violence, and that vengeance without justice resolves nothing—was criticized by some reviewers as historically naive and by others as a legitimate moral position the film earned through Avner’s experience. Did the film feel like it genuinely earned its argument through the story it told, or like a filmmaker applying a pre-existing conclusion to material more complicated than the conclusion allowed? And does Jonas’s book make the same argument more or less honestly than the film?
  4. The Final Image: New York, 1973, and the Twin Towers
    The film ends in New York in 1973, with the Twin Towers visible in the background as Avner and his Mossad handler stand in Brooklyn. This final image — September 11 present in the background of a film about the long consequences of political violence — has been the film’s most discussed formal choice, praised by some as the most honest statement of the film’s contemporary argument and criticized by others as exploitation. Did the final image feel like a legitimate and earned formal statement, or like a director reaching for a contemporary resonance that the historical story had not quite earned? And does Jonas’s book, written in 1984, make the same implicit argument about the continuing cycle of violence in different terms?

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THE DISPUTED SOURCE AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FILM
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  1. Making a Film from a Disputed Account: The Ethical Question
    Spielberg and Kushner were aware of the disputes around Jonas’s source material — the ‘inspired by’ credit rather than ‘based on’ is partly an acknowledgment of this. But the film still presents its events as historical, its characters as based on real people, its argument as grounded in what actually happened. Did the film manage its relationship to its disputed source honestly, or did the ‘inspired by’ credit function as a disclaimer that the film’s presentation then ignored? And can a film that makes a serious moral argument about real events sustain that argument if the factual foundation is unreliable?
  2. What the Dispute Changes and What It Doesn’t
    If Avner’s account is substantially fabricated — if the specific events Jonas describes did not happen as described, if the team members are invented or composite, if the operation unfolded differently from what the book claims — what does that mean for the film’s argument? The assassination campaign itself is historical fact; the moral argument about vengeance and its costs has its own validity regardless of the specific details; the suffering of the Munich athletes is real. Did the disputed source make you evaluate the film differently, or did you find that the film’s moral argument was independent of whether its specific events were accurately reported?

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PAGE VS. SCREEN: WHOSE VENGEANCE WAS MORE COSTLY?
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  1. What Jonas’s Book Gives You That the Film Can’t
    Jonas’s book gives you Avner’s account in something closer to his own voice — the specific way he describes the missions, the specific quality of his rationalizations and his doubts, the texture of a man telling his own story. Were there passages in the book where Avner’s interior gave you something the film’s more external rendering couldn’t replicate? Name one dimension of the book’s account that the film’s adaptation set aside.
  2. Scenes the Film Staged Better Than the Book Described
    Name one moment where Spielberg’s direction gave you something Jonas’s prose couldn’t: the Munich opening, an assassination sequence, the safehouse conversation, the final Brooklyn image. Which cinematic moment felt like the film doing something with the moral argument that the book’s thriller narrative couldn’t quite manage?
  3. Munich and Lincoln: Two Spielberg-Kushner collaborations
    Munich and Lincoln are both Spielberg-Kushner collaborations about difficult political subjects requiring moral seriousness. Did Munich feel like a different kind of Spielberg film from Lincoln — less certain of its moral ground, more willing to leave the audience in discomfort? And which collaboration felt like it most fully achieved what Spielberg and Kushner were reaching for?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: WHAT DID THE VENGEANCE COST THE STORY?
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  1. A Film That Divided Opinion and Deserved To
    Munich received respectful but divided reviews on its release — praised for its ambition and seriousness, criticized for its length, its occasional conventionality, and its relationship to its disputed source. Does the film deserve a clearer legacy than this ambivalent reception allowed? And is Munich one of those films that is most interesting precisely because it is not entirely successful — that its failures are as revealing as its achievements?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    One gold star for the book, one for the film. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best Thriller Narrative Structure Applied to a Genuine Moral Dilemma; Best Opening Re-Creation of a Historical Atrocity That Grounds Everything That Follows; Best Scene That Gives Political Antagonists Equal Humanity and Equal Argument; Best Film That Makes a Serious Argument About the Cycle of Violence Without Pretending to Have the Answer; Best Final Image That Places a Historical Story in Contemporary Context at the Risk of Overreach.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
    If a friend had time for only one version — book or film — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they want Avner’s own account in Jonas’s thriller form? If they want Spielberg’s moral seriousness and Kushner’s political intelligence? If they’re interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and want the version that most seriously engages with both sides? And given the disputed status of Jonas’s source, is there a case that neither version should be approached as historical record but only as moral argument?
  4. Final Club Gut Check
    On the dial from “perfect page-to-screen translation” to “a Spielberg-Kushner film that took a disputed account and used it as the foundation for a serious moral argument that transcends its questionable source,” where does Munich land? And the question both versions keep asking, fifty years after Munich and across every subsequent cycle of political violence: does killing the people responsible for an atrocity end the atrocity, or perpetuate it — and did either version give you an answer that you believed, or just the cost written on Avner’s face as he asks his handler, one more time, to confirm that what he did was right?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your target.