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AN OPEN LETTER TO THE JEWISH COMMUNITY
February 4, 2004
I have seen the Mel Gibson
movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” on two
occasions and consider it to be the most moving
dramatization of the death of Jesus Christ ever
made. It is magnificent beyond words. I stand
with those Catholics, Protestants and Jews who
have seen the film and do not find it to be
anti-Semitic. If I thought it were, I would not
hesitate to condemn it. Not everyone has, or
will, agree with this assessment. That’s fine.
What is not fine is the sheer demagoguery that has
accompanied some of the criticism.
Last summer, Boston
University theology professor Paula Fredriksen
said in The New Republic, “When violence
breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher
authority than professors and bishops to answer
to.” Fredriksen is a self-described
“raised-Catholic, Marxist-feminist convert to
Orthodox Judaism.” She did not say “if violence
breaks out”—but “when.”
More disturbing than
Fredriksen has been Abraham Foxman, national
director of the ADL. Foxman recently gained
admission to the film when it was previewed in
Orlando; he did so by identifying himself as
executive director of The Church of the Truth. In
a news release, he wrote, “Will the film trigger
pogroms against Jews? Our answer is probably
not.” Which means it may.
And who exactly is it that
Foxman has in mind? On January 23, he was quoted
in the Los Angeles Times saying, “[Gibson
is] hawking it on a commercial crusade to the
churches of this country. That’s what makes it
dangerous.” I wrote to him on January 26 asking
for an apology, but none has been forthcoming.
“To say the film is dangerous because the people
who are previewing it are church-going
Christians,” I wrote, “is an insult to practicing
Christians.” I added, “The subtext of this remark
is that church-going Christians are latent
anti-Semitic bigots ready to lash out at Jews at
any given moment.”
This is not an unusual
reaction for the ADL. In 1993, when the Passion
Play “Jesus Was His Name” was performed in 23
American cities, Rabbi Leon Klenicki, director of
the ADL’s interfaith department, warned that the
“presentation does not contribute to peace.” The
record will show that not one act of violence
occurred in any city.
If history is any guide,
there will be no pogroms of any sort following the
release of the movie. Leonard Dinnerstein, author
of Antisemitism in America, has said,
“There never have been pogroms in America; there
never have been respectable antisemitic political
parties in America; and there never have been any
federal laws curtailing Jewish opportunities in
America.” Indeed, Dinnerstein says that “in no
Christian country has antisemitism been weaker
than it has been in the United States.”
This is not to suggest that
Jews haven’t been the subject of violence in the
U.S. Historically, groups like the Ku Klux Klan
targeted Jews. It also targeted Catholics and, of
course, African Americans. But the claim that
Jews need to be especially on guard against roving
bands of thugs cannot be sustained.
In the late 1960s, a report
was submitted to the National Commission on the
Causes and Prevention of Violence. The
commission, headed by Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower,
released its findings in a book titled, The
History of Violence in America; it was edited
by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr. The
principal victims of violence identified in the
book are Native Americans, African Americans,
Roman Catholics and labor.
The worst urban riots
occurred in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. “Among
the most important types of riots,” the report
says, “were labor riots, election riots,
antiabolitionist riots, anti-Negro riots,
anti-Catholic riots, and riots of various sorts
involving the turbulent volunteer firemen’s
units.” Except for the Civil War draft riots,
things settled down after this period. But the
point to be made is that the Jewish community,
albeit small, was not then, or later, among the
most likely to be victimized.
Violence against Jews in more
recent times has either been waged, or encouraged,
by such groups as the Aryan Nation, Christian
Identity, National Alliance, National Socialists,
Posse Comitatus and Church of the Creator. None
of these organizations is remotely Christian and
many are indeed hostile to Christians (e.g.
Christian Identity and Church of the Creator).
The Nation of Islam is another group that is
hostile to Jews; it is also hostile to Catholics.
Arguably the worst anti-Semitic violence ever to
occur—it was certainly in the worst in New York
City’s history—was the Crown Heights riots of
1991. That this riot had absolutely nothing to do
with a Christian animus toward Jews is disputed by
no one.
The idea that Christians will
attack Jews in the streets after seeing “The
Passion of the Christ” is pernicious. Ken
Jacobson, associate national director of the ADL,
has said, “We have good reason to be seriously
concerned about Gibson’s plans to retell the
Passion. Historically, the Passion—the story of
the killing of Jesus—has resulted in the death of
Jews.” Not in this country it hasn’t, and if the
ADL wants to qualify its charge by citing examples
from the Middle Ages, then it should do so.
Some critics of the film cite
concerns stemming from the Holocaust and beyond.
Harold Brackman, consultant to the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, has said, “It is Christians who
bear the responsibility, after 2000 years of
religious-inspired anti-Semitism, to inhibit
rather than inflame the excesses of their own
haters. When filmmakers with a Christological
agenda fail to accept this responsibility, the
blood that may result is indeed on their hands.”
Not only is this kind of inflammatory rhetoric
destructive of good Christian-Jewish relations, it
makes one wonder—if Christian hatred of Jews is so
visceral—why have there been no pogroms in the
U.S. in over 200 years?
More sensible were those
American Jews who signed the 2000 statement,
“Dabru Emet.” Although they properly noted that
Christianity has at times fueled anti-Semitism,
they nonetheless concluded, “Nazism was not a
Christian phenomenon.” Former New York City Mayor
Ed Koch said it best: “It should never be said
that Christians were responsible for the
Holocaust—Nazis were. Blaming Christians would be
as unjustified as holding Jews accountable for the
death of Jesus. Individuals were responsible in
both situations.”
Moreover, Christians are no
strangers to violence, either. Yehuda Bauer,
former director of the Holocaust Research
Institute at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and retired
professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew
University, estimates that 25 million non-Jews
died in the Holocaust. I hasten to add that these
victims, most of whom were Christians, were not
selected for death because of their ethnic or
religious status. This makes what happened to
Jews of unique and surpassing importance. But it
is wrong to discount the suffering of Christians.
Furthermore, it is estimated that 70 million
Christians have been murdered in the past 2000
years, 45 million of which occurred in the last
century alone!
If “The Passion of the
Christ” is so troubling, then why hasn’t there
been an uproar over the recent film, “The Gospel
of John”? After all, it uses virtually every word
of the Gospel, including words deemed offensive by
critics of the Gibson film. Why was there no big
hullabaloo over “Jesus Christ Superstar”?; it
depicted what one reviewer called a “demonic
Caiaphas.” Is it because Mel Gibson is a
so-called traditional Catholic? And if so, what
exactly does this have to do with proclamations of
violence? For Foxman, it is not hard to connect
the dots: “I think he’s [Gibson]
infected—seriously infected—with some very, very
serious anti-Semitic views. [Gibson’s] got
classical anti-Semitic views.”
If the movie is likely to
engender violence, then we should expect that when
people finish watching it, they will be in a
rage. But no one who has seen the film has
experienced anything like anger. Even Foxman has
acknowledged as much: “As the lights came up, the
silence was etched with stifled sobs and tears.
The 3,000 Christian pastors, leaders, students and
others who attended the preview of the film’s
graphic portrayal of the events leading up to the
Crucifixion were visibly moved by the images that
brought them closer than they may ever have been
to bearing witness to the Passion of Jesus.” Not
exactly the kind of sentiment we would expect from
Christians ready to act on their latent
anti-Semitism.
Some, like Rabbi Marvin Hier
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, have said the
movie has already provoked anti-Semitism; he cites
bigoted phone calls and letters. But it must also
be said that hate speech has been directed at the
Catholic League as well. Indeed, at a rally
against the movie, I had a Brooklyn rabbi tell me
to my face that “your gospels are pornographic.”
Now I would no more blame Jews for this
anti-Catholic outburst than Jews victimized by
Catholic bigots should blame Catholics.
No doubt there will be
anti-Semitic bigots in the Christian community who
will like “The Passion of the Christ.” But they
will like it for all the wrong reasons, none of
which finds support in contemporary Christian
thought. The idea that all Jews at the time of
Christ’s death clamored for his crucifixion is
historically wrong and patently bigoted: those who
ascribe to notions of collective guilt are
demented. The idea that any Jew today is somehow
responsible for the behavior of some Jews 2000
years ago is even more insane.
Foxman, along with ADL
consultant Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, said
after viewing the film, “What we saw makes a
mockery of the teachings of the Second Vatican
Council.” I will stand with Catholic theologian
Michael Novak: “Gibson’s film is wholly consistent
with the Second Vatican Council’s presentation of
the relations of Judaism and the Christian
Church.” Let it be said that reasonable people
can disagree about this, but what cannot be
tolerated is casting aspersions on “church-going
Christians.”
I am no stranger to the fight
against anti-Semitism. I have joined with the ADL
in publicly denouncing Louis Farrakhan; I have
gone to Harlem at the request of the Jewish Action
Alliance to condemn the hatred of the late Nation
of Islam official, Khalid Muhammad; I have joined
Norman Siegel, previously of the New York Civil
Liberties Union, in denouncing the anti-Semitism
that occurred during the controversy over the
Brooklyn Museum of Art (he denounced the
anti-Catholicism that took place); when a
Jewish-led boycott of the Jewish Museum was
organized to protest art trivializing the
Holocaust, I asked Catholics to support it; in
December I joined with Norm Siegel and others to
publicly condemn a rash of violence against
synagogues in Brooklyn and Queens. And on January
20, at the behest of Americans for a Safe Israel,
I wrote a letter to Israeli Knesset members
pledging support for “a safe and secure Israel.”
Before closing, please
understand that many Christians deeply resent the
kinds of movies Hollywood has been releasing over
the last few decades. They especially resent the
long list of anti-Christian films that have been
made (most of which have been explicitly
anti-Catholic). And now that they finally have a
film they can be proud of, some are calling them
bigots, if not thugs.
Christian-Jewish relations
have improved markedly over the past few decades,
and in this regard no one has been more
influential than Pope John Paul II. It would not
only be unfortunate—it would be a travesty—if the
reaction to a film about the death of Jesus were
to undo the good that has been done. I pray it
will not.
Sincerely,
William A. Donohue, Ph.D.
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