Posted on 12/08/2004 11:31:33 AM PST by missyme
Anyone who took offense at Mel Gibson’s "The Passion of the Christ", with its depiction of Jewish leaders condemning Jesus, should get ready soon to be offended all over again.
Gibson, it is reported, has his heart set on doing a movie version of the story commemorated by Hanukkah. His text will be the novel "My Glorious Brothers" by Howard Fast.
Ironically, this book is a sentimental favorite with the older-generation Jewish audience that also tends to be the main financial supporter of Gibson’s primary antagonist, the Anti-Defamation League, which led the drive to condemn "The Passion" as anti-Semitic.
The Fast novel tells the story of Jewish heroes, circa 167 B.C.E., who defeat Greek oppressors of the Jewish people, retake the Jerusalem Temple, and relight the great menorah.
So what’s so offensive? If this sounds, on the contrary, like a mollifying gesture to ADL national director Abraham Foxman, you might want to look a little more closely at what Hanukkah is actually about.
Many Jews grew up thinking of Hanukkah (which in 2004 falls on December 8-15) as an innocuous children’s festival. Actually the Maccabean revolt was deadly serious business, and it recalls one of the great tensions in our own modern American society: the conflict was between what today one might call religious fundamentalists and the secular elite.
Here’s what happened. Jewish Palestine had fallen into the clutches of the Greek kingdom of the Seleucids, with their tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes, headquartered in Syria. While the Greeks were not anti-Jewish per se, they had little patience with the perceived particularism and parochialism of Judaism. (I say "perceived" because Judaism’s vision, when properly understood, is in fact highly universal.)
The Greek vision was one of mutual theological acceptance. They were relativists, in the sense we know today, believing that not only the God of Israel but all the gods should be worshipped at the Jerusalem Temple--and believing that dissenters from their “tolerance” deserved to be suppressed.
Religiously committed Jews, however, were less troubled by the Greek Syrians themselves than by Jewish “Hellenists” in Palestine, and in the holy city itself, who had thrown in their lot with the Greeks. This was a way of social climbing. By embracing Greek culture, with its aggressive relativism, ambitious Jewish elites hoped to improve their own social standing in Greek eyes.
They embraced Greek customs that religious Jews found disturbing – exercising naked in the gymnasium, with an emphasis on discus-throwing in the nude, or (far worse) effacing their circumcisions through a surgical operation involving cutting a flap of skin around the penis and letting it hang by weights.
In his standard history of the period, "Alexander to Actium," Professor Peter Green calls this “select club of progressive Hellenizers” a “specially favored cosmopolitan class dedicated to social and political self-advancement,” seeking “sociological privilege and status.”
"I think many of the Nazi's were closet homosexuals...."
Yeah the head of the Brownshirts were homosexual at the minimum and rumors are ripe that many other top NAzis had that inclination also.
No never heard of this film would be interested in seeing it though...
(2) It is impossible to make a film about the Maccabees anti-Semitic unless one films it from the viewpoint of the degenerate pagans whom the Maccabees rebelled against.
I suppose that Mel is not aware Howard Fast was a staunch Communist Party member
Easily the worst movie that I've ever seen.
Was the story in Maccabees of the pious woman and her seven sons of the same period? Yeeeeeeesh.
Indeed it was. Why the "ye . . . esh"? It's a beautiful, inspiring story.
"Gymnasium" means, "Naked training place".
Fast also wrote the novel Spartacus from where the Dalton Trumbo script for the Kirk Douglas film production came from. Fast recorded an audio commnentary that is on the DVD where he talks about his political motives and how those themes were partially diluted in the film.
However, the link you provided also says that "Fast broke with the Party over issues of condition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe." He also wrote "April Morning" and "How the West Was Won", hardly the stuff of "Pravda".
Thanks ZC!
I don't know who wrote this but: #1. I thought "Palestine" was the name the Romans gave Israel, and their occupation of Israel occurred after the Greeks. #2. I seriously doubt there are more than a handful Jews who don't know that Chanukah is about the Chashmonaiim rising up and defeating the Syrian Greeks. #3. I don't get what the writer thinks is controversial about this subject.
I hate it when revisionists call it Palestine. It never was Palestine till the Romans named it that to humiliate the Jews.
You're most welcome! :-)
With a couple hundred million dollars in the bank I think Mel can pretty much make any movie he wants, and the copyright on the Old Testament story of the Maccabees expired quite some time ago. I'll go see it.
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