I watched The Passion of the Christ<\/i> the other night. I’m Jewish and I’ve had this itch to see it and judge for myself whether it was anti-semitic.
\nSure enough, most of the non-pre-Christian Jews in the movie are weasels. But then about a third of the way through, we meet the Roman guards. And they’re even worse. Monstrous, in fact. Then a bit later, a few Jewish characters show up who are downright human. So it’s a thick stew.
\nIt seemed to me like Mel was accentuating the evil of all the bad guys and we just got caught up in that multiplier. Jesus’ suffering is the center piece of the movie. The more villainous the villains, the greater the sacrifice. Fagan-like features on some of the Jewish characters aside, I didn’t spot him going out of his way to take it to my peeps. I mean, we don’t come across great. But what are you gonna do, right? It’s no fun being the bad guy in someone else’s liturgy.
\nThinking back on kurfluffle around the film’s release, my theory is that Mel’s sort of the Saddam Hussein of religious-themed movie making. Both he and Saddam had mental issues that caused them to behave as if they’d done something bad that they hadn’t actually done. Oh, maybe they’d thought about doing those bad things. A lot. But the bottom-line is: I found no weapons of mass-anti-semitism in this film.
\nDoes this all mean that if we had left Saddam in power, he would have eventually been pulled over by the LA police? It’s hard to say. But I think yes.
\nA post-script: after watching the film, I had the uncomfortable experience of dreaming that I was a Roman guard, forced to mistreat Jesus who was played (in my dream) by the character Dwight Schrute from The Office.<\/i> That same night, my wife, who opted not to watch the movie, dreamt she could fly with whales.
\nSo while I don’t think the film is anti-semitic, I’m not sure I can recommend it as a rental.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I watched The Passion of the Christ the other night. I’m Jewish and I’ve had this itch to see it and judge for myself whether it was anti-semitic. Sure enough, most of the non-pre-Christian Jews in the movie are weasels. But then about a third of the way through, we meet the Roman guards. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-and-also-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}