How Should the Jewish Community Have Responded?
Clearly the concerns about the film expressed by Jewish defense organizations over the last year were well founded. Long before the film opened, the warning lights were already flashing. “Passion plays” have a long history of stirring up anti-Semitic violence. Hitler, yemach shemo, recommended that all Germans attend the traditional passion play at Oberammergau to understand his hatred of Jews. Then there was the matter of Gibson’s membership in a renegade sect of Catholic “traditionalists.” Traditionalists reject the legitimacy of Vatican II, which absolved the Jewish people as a whole from the charge of “deicide.” Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson, dismisses Vatican II as a conspiracy of “Freemasons and Jews.” (For good measure, the elder Gibson is also a Holocaust-denier.2 ) Mel Gibson proudly affirms that his father’s faith is his own: “The man never lied to me in his life,” he told one interviewer. Of additional concern was Gibson’s admission that he had drawn inspiration for his scr
