Head first into the controversial

''You believe in a monolithic Jewish conspiracy?" says Marc Levin. ''Spend a week with me."

Most people recognize the lunacy in contending there exists a single, coherent Jewish voice on anything. The veteran filmmaker proved this once more with ''Protocols of Zion," his new documentary about anti-Semitism since 9/11, which opens Friday.

''I've received as much criticism from the Jewish community as from Palestinians and African-Americans," he says.

What Levin did was tackle the subject at the street level. What he did not do was round up the usual suspects to orate about the evils of anti-Semitism. ''I wanted to make it accessible," he says. ''But the intellectual community still comes expecting historic intellectual analysis."

Instead, Levin went for gritty realism by wading into a crowd of young Arab-Americans in Paterson, N.J., who shouted that Jews were warned to stay home on Sept. 11, 2001, and therefore no Jews were killed in the World Trade Center attacks. He talked to black nationalists, white racists, convicts, and moviegoers of all persuasions after they had seen Mel Gibson's ''The Passion of the Christ."

Levin was born to make trouble. He is hopelessly mired in curiosity. He made ''Protocols of Zion" as much for his own edification as anything else. ''If this is a new world, where do I fit in?" he asks. ''I need a new road map. I made this film because I'm trying to get my bearings."

He kicked up much dust along the way. While the response to a recent screening at the Boston Jewish Film Festival was positive, Mark Urman, head of the US theatrical division for TH!NKFilm, which is distributing the movie, had a different experience.

''We assumed that Jewish groups and organizations of most stripes would be very supportive of the film," says Urman, himself the son of Holocaust survivors. ''I was shocked to learn we were met with a staggering indifference as well as argumentativeness, like 'How could you give a microphone to a Palestinian?' " Urman would not name specific organizations.

Levin recalls the reaction from a staffer at American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, after the man saw the film. ''I'm really disappointed in you, Marc, for using the term 'cycle of violence,' " he recalls the man saying. ''You've created a moral equivalence between suicide bombers and the state of Israel."

The New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz also weighed in. ''He said, 'You're just talking to street trash and thugs. Who cares what they think?' " says Levin. ''That attack surprised me."

Asked about a New Republic cover story in 2002 by Leon Wieseltier in which the author charged American Jews with overheated rhetoric about anti-Semitic threats, Levin replies, ''It's a matter of tone. That's why I chose another style. I'm not here to make another victim film. I don't want this film to be ghettoized as a Jewish film. There are fanatics of all faiths. We're all potential Jews in an open society."

The title of Levin's documentary, in which he appears as primary interlocutor, refers to ''The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," a scurrilous anti-Semitic tract believed to have been concocted by the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, in late 19th century Russia. This fiction purports to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish elders plotting world domination.

Levin says when he first read the Protocols years ago, ''I thought it was like a Japanese sci-fi comic." But then he learned that an Arab-American newspaper in Patterson had recently been serializing the book in its pages, and he realized it had gained new traction after 9/11. A television series based on the Protocols appeared in Arabic in 2002 on Egyptian television. One white racist Levin interviews calls it ''a timeless book" that always sells out.

''I've been surprised by the number of people who feel that to talk about Jew hatred is 'something we do at home but not in public,' " he says. ''That silence troubles me. I see it as a great threat, and an opportunity."

Levin, a Jewish New Yorker who grew up in northern New Jersey, wants a new way to discuss anti-Semitism. ''We need a new style, a new vocabulary, to talk about it," he maintains. ''We don't live in the shtetl anymore. It's no longer 'The brownshirts are coming.' And it's not just from the Muslim world. It's more that fundamentalists of all faiths are converging with attacks on secular, tolerant, multicultural society."

Sept. 11, after all, was not a Jewish event. It was an American one. The terrorist target was the United States. But it took place in New York, which in an interview he calls ''Jew York," in the manner of bigots.

Levin has made more than 20 films, moving between features like ''SLAM," which won the top prize at Sundance in 1998, and documentaries like ''Twilight: Los Angeles," which he made in 2000 about Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show on the LA riots.

Warm and fuzzy the man is not. He is drawn to controversy like a moth to a back porch light.

Yet he never planned to put himself on-screen. Executive producer Sheila Nevins, the head of documentaries for HBO, insisted he belonged there. ''She said, 'You need to be in the movie,' " he recalls. ''You're not just a reporter. There's a subtext. They need to know they're talking to a Jew."

So off he went in jeans with a camera crew. Levin carries the feisty mien of a natural street reporter who swims fearlessly in crowds of hostile voices. The people he confronted were, generally, the opposite of the articulate, measured talking heads who populate documentaries -- and, in this case, more piercing.

And as a Jew, Levin found this odyssey hit close to home. When he lived in Israel in 1974, he got his first glimpse of the raw power of the far right there, and it scared him. It was at an early rally for Menachem Begin, who went on to be prime minister of the country. ''I was stunned by the passion for blood, the hysteria, that I saw at that rally," he recalls. ''I said to myself, 'Jews don't do this.' What an eye-opener."

Yet Levin returned there this year for the first time in 30 years and was astonished by the ignorance among Israeli youth about anti-Semitism elsewhere. ''Of course, they understand the Arab-Israeli conflict. But they've never gotten into a cab and been told by the driver that Jews were behind 9/11."

For the sake of argument -- and he loves an argument -- Levin says that the Jewish neoconservatives are the real elders of Zion today. He means the perceived ''Jewish cabal" in the Bush administration, including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, who pushed hard for the US invasion of Iraq, so the theory goes, to benefit Israel.

But, he points out, this bypasses the reality of Bush himself, vice president Dick Cheney, and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, all gentiles with far more power than all of the Jewish neo-cons combined.

Levin looked forward to the opening of his film in Paris last week. He was also interested in screening it in some of the immigrant, largely Arab neighborhoods outside of Paris, but the riots broke out there and ruined his plans.

Too bad. The reaction would have been wild.