Ladies, Gentlemen, and Jews:
Welcome to beautiful Los Angeles! I write to you from the set of my new Ismar Schorsch biopic starring Danny Glover as Mordecai Kaplan and Jim Caviezel as Ismar Schorsch himself!
Letters to the Editor.
Can an alcoholic who was poisoned with his father\’s anti-Semitism use a moment of naked exposure to confront his bigotry? Can he ever hope to cleanse himself of this deeply-seated hatred or is he forever doomed?
Mel Gibson has easily disposed of his legal problems, but whether, when and how he will personally appear before a Jewish audience is very much up in the air. When the actor-director was stopped on suspicion of drunk driving by a Jewish sheriff\’s deputy in the early hours of July 28, Gibson began cursing the \”F*****g Jews … responsible for all the wars in the world.\”\n
In anticipation of Easter, a slightly modified version of \”The Passion of the Christ,\” the film by actor and director Mel Gibson, and screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald, has been re-released. The second coming if you will. This re-cut version is widely available in a DVD gift format.
Mel Gibson\’s \”The Passion of the Christ\” was the most important American religious event of the past year. For Christians, its effects were quite positive, as viewers already committed to belief in Jesus were roused to renew their faith through the heartrending story of the Crucifixion. For America\’s Jewish community, the effects of the film can also be positive, if we draw the right retrospective lessons not from the movie itself but from the controversy that still surrounds it.
There\’s nothing as risky as end-of-year predictions, as 2004 so painfully demonstrated.
When the controversy over Mel Gibson\’s \”The Passion of the Christ\” first erupted, Jewish leaders like Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League angered Christians by coming out forcefully against the movie.\n\nWilliam Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, took umbrage. \”A lot of Catholics in this town are saying, \’Is that how Jews are looking at us,\’\” he told The Jewish Week, \”\’that you scratch a Catholic and out comes a latent anti-Semite?\’\”\n\nLast week, Donohue provided the answer to his rhetorical question. And the answer is, in his case, yes.
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