A very interesting review by Charles Krauthammer of Mel Gibson's "Passion". He notes that:

In none of the Gospels does the high priest Caiaphas stand there with his cruel, impassive fellow priests witnessing the scourging. In Gibson's movie they do. When it comes to the Jews, Gibson deviates from the Gospels -- glorying in his artistic vision -- time and again. He bends, he stretches, he makes stuff up. And these deviations point overwhelmingly in a single direction -- to the villainy and culpability of the Jews.

The most subtle, and most revolting, of these has to my knowledge not been commented upon. In Gibson's movie, Satan appears four times. Not one of these appearances occurs in the four Gospels. They are pure invention. Twice, this sinister, hooded, androgynous embodiment of evil is found . . . where? Moving among the crowd of Jews. Gibson's camera follows close up, documentary style, as Satan glides among them, his face popping up among theirs -- merging with, indeed, defining the murderous Jewish crowd. After all, a perfect match: Satan's own people.

When I saw the film last week that's one of the things I noticed -- Satan moving among the Jewish crowd. It reminded me of John 8:44. This is part of a long dialogue between Jesus and "the Jews" (as they are styled in this gospel; the other gospels are more nuanced, mentioning the priests, the scribes, or the Pharisees). John 8:42-44 reads, "Jesus said to them, 'If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. Your are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him.'" In John's gospel, unbelieving Jews (as opposed to the Johannine community) are identified with the devil by Jesus' own words. I think it could be argued that this is where Mel Gibson got the idea to have Satan mingling with the Jewish crowd.

I'll be going to see the Passion tomorrow with students from my class on Biblical Interpretation -- it will be interesting to see after all the reviews I've read. I'm curious also to hear what the students' response will be.

Another excellent, and subtle, review of "The Passion" -- The Worship of Blood by Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic.

He says:

In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson's Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images. In this regard, Gibson is most certainly a traditionalist.

....it is plain that the controversy about its inclusion of Matthew 27:25, the infamous cry of the Jews that "his blood be on us and our children," the imprecation that served through the centuries as the warrant for the Christian assault on the Jews, was a fake, a cynical game. When Jewish groups objected to this passage in the script, Gibson expediently deleted the English translation of it. I say expediently, because decency would have prevented him from including it, from shooting it, at all. But he may as well have kept it in, because it is entirely of a piece with the Jews whom he has invented. The figure of Caiaphas, played with disgusting relish by an actor named Mattia Sbragia, is straight out of Oberammergau. Like his fellow priests, he has a graying rabbinical beard and speaks with a gravelly sneer and moves cunningly beneath a tallit-like shawl streaked with threads the color of money. He is gold and cold. All he does is demand an execution. He and his sinister colleagues manipulate the ethically delicate Pilate into acquiescing to the crucifixion. (You would think that Rome was a colony of Judea.) Meanwhile the Jewish mob is regularly braying for blood. It is the Romans who torture Jesus, but it is the Jews who conspire to make them do so. The Romans are brutish, but the Jews are evil.

....his portrayal of the Jews is based on nothing more than his own imagination of what they looked like and sounded like. And Gibson's imagination has offered no resistance to the iconographical inheritance of Western anti-Semitism. Again, these things are not passively received. They are willingly accepted. Gibson created this movie; it was not revealed to him. Like his picture of Jesus, his picture of the Jews is the consequence of certain religious and cinematic decisions for which he must be held accountable. He has chosen to give millions of people the impression that Jews are culpable for the death of Jesus. In making this choice, which defies not only the scruples of scholars but also the teaching of the Catholic Church, Gibson has provided a fine illustration of the cafeteria Catholicism of the right.

An amazing review of "The Passion" by Andrew Sullivan. Here's what he has to say about the film's portrayal of Jews --

PILATE, THE SAINT: Is it anti-Semitic? The question has to be placed in the context of the Gospels and it is hard to reproduce the story without risking such inferences. But in my view, Gibson goes much further than what might be forgivable. The first scene in which Caiphas appears has him relaying to Judas how much money he has agreed to hand over in return for Jesus. The Jew - fussing over money again! There are a few actors in those scenes who look like classic hook-nosed Jews of Nazi imagery, hissing and plotting and fulminating against the Christ. For good measure, Gibson has the Jewish priestly elite beat Jesus up as well, before they hand him over to the Romans; and he has Jesus telling Pilate that he is not responsible - the Jewish elite is. Pilate and his wife are portrayed as saints forced by politics and the Jewish elders to kill a man they know is innocent. Again, this reflects part of the Gospels, but Gibson goes further. He presents Pilate's wife as actually finding Mary, providing towels to wipe up Jesus' blood, arguing for Jesus' release. Yes, the Roman torturers are obviously evil; yes, a few Jews dissent; and, of course, all the disciples are Jewish. I wouldn't say that this movie is motivated by anti-Semitism. It's motivated by psychotic sadism. But Gibson does nothing to mitigate the dangerous anti-Semitic elements of the story and goes some way toward exaggerating and highlighting them. To my mind, that is categorically unforgivable. Anti-Semitism is the original sin of Christianity. Far from expiating it, this movie clearly enjoys taunting those Catholics as well as Jews who are determined to confront that legacy. In that sense alone, it is a deeply immoral work of art.

Emphasis mine. The last two days have really been a blow -- first the President's decision to place himself firmly on the side of bigots by supporting a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and now Mel Gibson's "Passion."

There was a point last year when I actually contemplated voting for Bush for re-election, when I felt that the war in Iraq and the struggle against Islamic terrorism were the most important issues facing this country, and it seemed to me that people on the left and the majority of centrist-liberals viewed the threat of terrorism merely as a law enforcement problem. . . but now I feel completely betrayed by the President. He is not taking our economic problems seriously -- he acts like the over 2 million jobs that have been lost over the last few years are just going to magically return this year in order to re-elect him. It's clear that this administration did very little realistic planning about what to do in Afghanistan and Iraq after invasion. And the administration has refused to deal with David Kay's very courageous statements about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Kay was willing to admit in public to the press and to congressional committees that he was mistaken -- why can't our President and Vice-President act with equal honesty?

And now the President seems to have decided that the way to re-election is to trample on the rights of gay people, to codify into law that gay people should be second-class citizens. It's scary. When was the last time a serious presidential candidate or incumbent president ran on a platform of open bigotry? Strom Thurmond?

This interesting article by Amira Hass asks What scared those who sent the bomber? -- who bombed bus #14 in Jerusalem earlier this week.

This Haaretz article, Wednesday, the Jews go on trial again, details why I've decided to organize a discussion at my college about Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ." While it seems that he has taken out the most inflammatory line (from Matthew: "Then answered all the people, and said, 'His blood be on us, and on our children'"), it seems like the film still places the major blame upon Jews for the death of Jesus (and not the Romans, the ruling colonial authority who had the power of life and death). The film came up in my Judaism class today -- a student asked a question about it, and instead of talking about the meaning of the Sh'ma, which was scheduled for today, we spent 40 minutes talking about the movie, the events leading up to Jesus' death, and the roots of anti-semitism. I was pleased to notice that my Christian students were shocked at the idea that Christians would call Jews "Christkillers" and blame them for the death of Jesus. It seemed apparent from the movie that many students would be seeing the movie, so I think it's important to sponsor an academic discussion of it in addition to all the newspaper articles, television spots, and popular discussion that's going on.

I received a very sad e-mail today from Yedidyah, the synagogue I belonged to in Jerusalem:

Women and mothers, come together to grieve and to cry out in silence during all of the nights of the shiva of the victims of the recent pigua [terrorist attack] - until (and including) Thursday night. We will meet at the site of the pigua, opposite the Liberty Bell Park gas station, at 22:00.

A curious detail in today's New York Times article about this morning's suicide bombing in Jerusalem -- the article stated that the bombing occurred at Liberty Bell Park, close to the intersection of Bethlehem Road and a street named Valley of the Ghosts. This street is usually called by its Hebrew name in English news reports -- Emek Refaim -- but it does literally refer to ghosts. When I lived on Emek Refaim in the late 1980s my friends and I used to joke around about the name.

The street names in Jerusalem generally have some historical significance -- they name famous figures of the Jewish past, events, "friends of the Jews" like Masaryk or Emile Zola, learned rabbis, biblical figures, and wars. On my last visit to Israel I was staying on Ha-Portzim St. -- "those who break through." This was the name of one of the military units that fought in the 1948 war in Jerusalem. A nearby street was named Kovshei Katamon -- "the conquerors of Katamon." Pre-1948 the Katamon neighborhood was Arab, and the Israeli forces fought fiercely to take the area from them. Then there's Kaf-Tet be-November -- "29th of November" St., referring to the date in 1947 when the U.N. voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

Another suicide bombing this morning during the rush hour in Jerusalem -- Palestinian Suicide Bomber Kills 7 Others on Jerusalem Bus. The attack occurred at the Liberty Bell Park, just north of the German Colony.

In this New York Daily News article, Furor just before Gibson's 'The Passion' opens, Hutton Gibson, Mel's father, rants about how the evil the Jews are: "Is the Jew still actively anti-Christian? He is, for by being a Jew, he is anti-everyone else."

I've been reading a lot about the Gibson's "Passion" (there's even a special section in this week's Forward about it), and I will be curious to see the film myself -- whether the problematic lines from Matthew have been retained (in which the Jewish crowd says "His blood be on us and our children"), and how the Jews are characterized. It's not a cinematic experience I'm exactly looking forward to, since I don't enjoy gory movies and I prefer to enjoy movies rather than watch them with a close eye for anti-semitism.

Some fun news from Israel -- Snow falls in Jerusalem. Good pictures also at the Jerusalem Post. I have been in Israel many times in January and have never yet enjoyed a good snowfall there.... On the other hand, since I live in Ithaca, NY, I'm certainly not deprived of snow (especially this year).

In my search for Talmudic references to the tumtum (an intersexed person), I came across a web site, "Come and See," that published significant parts of the Soncino Press's English translation of the Talmud. When I first found it I was grateful to be able to get fairly complete quotations (rather than the brief mentions from the other articles on the web--see previous entry). Then I delved a bit deeper to find out whether the Soncino Press had given permission to put their translation on line. I discovered through reading the page on copyright issues that Come and Hear had taken the Talmudic texts from a book called The Plot Against Christianity by Elizabeth Dilling, which apparently had published hundreds of pages from the Soncino Press edition. The Plot Against Christianity appears to be an anti-semitic screed containing many classic anti-Jewish tropes.

Elizabeth Dilling's book was published by Noontide Books, which has published David Duke's autobiography, My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding. David Duke is a former Ku Klux Klan leader who has attempted to make white supremacy and anti-semitism respectable.

The Come and Hear web site, aside from its on-line Talmudic publication, has many essays written by the web site owner, Carol A. Valentine, and others, under the heading of America under the Talmud. From the examination of one essay, Holy Atrocities and Judaism, it appears that the author examines the Talmud and other Jewish writings through a hostile, anti-semitic lens designed to see the worst in anything Jewish. Her primary worry seems to be that the United States is quickly becoming a nation governed by Talmudic law.

The author, Carol A. Valentine, owns another web site called Public Action, Inc.. One of the key topics on the web site is Waco and the Branch Davidians, an issue that galvanized the extreme right in this country in the 1990s. There are also articles by her and others that claim that the September 11 attacks were carried by NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command), remotely controlling the planes. The site also contains a listing of Holocaust Revisionist web sites.

When I started my research on the Come and Hear site, I thought I had found something very useful -- a web site that offered search capabilities for a significant part of the English translation of the Babylonian Talmud. Upon discovering, however, that the web publication of the Soncino Talmud translation was certainly not authorized by the Soncino Press, and in addition that the web master who put up this site uses it to attack Jews and Judaism, this web publication seems to me to be very much like the free or for-sale term paper sites -- it purports to present legitimately publicly available information in an easy-to-access form, but actually perpetrates a malicious fraud.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Internet to see if I could find talmudic references to the tumtum and the androgynos (people with indeterminate sexual organs and hermaphrodites). When I put "Talmud" and "tumtum" into Google I came up with a number of web sites. Some of these web sites provide a cautionary tale for anyone using the web for research.

A very interesting and learned essay by Rabbi Alfred Cohen of Congregation Ohaiv Yisrael of Monsey, NY, was published in the Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society 38 (Fall 1999).

An interesting site called "Born Eunuchs" has an extensive list of sources on eunuchs, including a selection from BT Yebamoth ch. 8 that mentions the tumtum. The translation is taken from the Soncino English translation of the Talmud.

Another site mentioned the tumtum as part of an extensive discussion of circumcision on JewishGates.org.

There was also a brief discussion of the talmudic passages on the tumtum on a site for transgender people of different religions, Forge Forward.

Another was an essay on intersexuality written by a Sally Gross on a site called Free Essays. The intent of this site seems to be to provide resources for students who wish to plagiarize papers or to buy term papers from them. Interestingly enough, this same essay is present on another free term paper site, Hot Papers.

And in turn, this essay seems to have formed part of a longer essay written by Sally Gross, with the same title, on another web site. This web site is called Blackfriars Publications, which calls itself the "House Imprint of the English Dominicans." My guess is that Sally Gross has no idea that part of her essay appears on the term papers sites.

Some good news from Iraq: Fewer Attacks Since Saddam Capture.

While looking through the referrers to my blog, I came across a referral from Rua da Judiaria, a Jewish blog in Portuguese. It looks very interesting -- and would be even more interesting if I knew Portuguese!

More on Lilith (I was reminded by Jim Davila's kind reference to my recent post on Lilith). Yesterday afternoon, as I was returning home from a visit to downtown Jerusalem (where I bought some interesting books -- one a fairly new biography of Shabbetai Zevi, aimed at a popular audience, another one a book in Hebrew on the Ba'al Shem Tov, entitled "Ba'al Shem -- the Besht: Magic, Mysticism, and Leadership," by Immanuel Etkes), I went one stop too far on my bus and ended up right in front of a bookstore that I've been wanting to go into. It is a bookstore for "sifre kodesh" (holy books) and "tashmishei kedushah" (religious articles would be the best English translation I think). I found another interesting book there, and a printed amulet against Lilith. It's based on earlier amulet texts.

On top it says "Protection for the child and the mother." It includes Psalm 121, an adjuration against the evil eye, and the story of Elijah's encounter with Lilith and her promise to flee when her names are inscribed on an amulet or recited. In the middle between these two texts there is a hand inscribed with divine names. Below that is another diagram with names, and an eye. Around the diagram it says, "Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah." On the right is written under that the names of the three protective angels, "Sani, Sansani, and Semangelof inside." On the left is written, "Lilith and all her band outside." Under both of these sayings is written, "You shall not permit a sorceress to live" three times.

When I was writing my article on Lilith I wanted to include in it that it was still possible to purchase these amulets, and lo and behold, I found one. It's on laminated paper with a hole in the top so that one can hang it over the baby's crib.

I just watched an almost two-hour report on Channel One ("Mabat Sheni") on the checkpoints (called "Tarbut ha-Machsomim"), both those on the Green Line and those between various places on the West Bank. Part of the program was a first-person report by a woman reporter from the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv who volunteered to serve reserve duty at the Kalandiya checkpoint between the Kalandiya refugee camp and Ramallah. She interviewed other soldiers and observed what happened at the checkpoint itself, both when Palestinians were permitted to cross and when they were not allowed to cross because for some reason there was a "seger" -- a closure. It was horrible to watch. I felt like crying, especially when watching children not being permitted to cross or seeing their elders humiliated at the checkpoint. She also interviewed a young Israeli woman soldier who was serving her regular army duty at this checkpoint -- and this woman felt awful about what she was doing at the checkpoint, and at the same time seemed to express the feeling that it was necessary.

Another part of the program was devoted to a report on an attack on soldiers and civilians that happened at another checkpoint, where eleven people were killed by Palestinian terrorists (about two years ago). They interviewed the mother of the Israeli commander at the checkpoint, who had been killed in the attack, his friends, and also a member of Knesset who was a friend of the family and was bringing the issue before the Knesset. This report was very sympathetic to the soldiers and the untenable position they had been placed in by the location of the checkpoint -- in a valley, where they were exposed to fire from above.

There was more on the program, but let me say that one of the things that impressed me was that this was made by, and shown on, Israeli Channel One, which is owned by the Israel Broadcasting Authority, a government agency. The wide-ranging nature of the debate in Israel about the morality of the occupation, about what to do with the settlements, about how to respond to Palestinian terrorism, about the need for a Palestinian state, etc., is quite refreshing to see here.

On Shabbat afternoon, I walked to East Talpiot to visit friends for Shabbat lunch. On my way, I walked across the Haas Tayelet -- a promenade that goes across the ridge that links East Talpiot with the older Talpiot neighborhood. The Tayelet looks down on the deep valley that contains many Arab villages, including Silwan right next to the Old City. To the north one can see the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Dome of the Rock with its golden dome. As I looked across the valley towards the east, I saw a huge wall rising -- in the village of Abu Dis. This was the much discussed "separation fence," which in some places is a high concrete wall. Apparently the very next day, on Sunday, the workers continued to build the wall, which splits Abu Dis into two parts and prevents those on the outside of the wall from entering their shops, schools, and health clinics on the inside of the wall.

As James Bennet writes in today's New York times, Overnight, a Towering Divide Rises in Jerusalem.

On the slope of the Mount of Olives, Abu Dis sits partly within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, and negotiators once saw it as the possible capital of a Palestinian state.

The idea was that Abu Dis could do politically what it had already done socially and commercially: smudge the line between Jerusalem and the West Bank.

But distinctions are getting sharper here, not blurrier. As he often does, Mr. Sharon referred to Jerusalem on Sunday as "the eternal, united, and undivided capital of the Jewish people."

The new wall will actually divide Abu Dis, keeping part of it on the Jerusalem side, separating neighbors and relatives who live just blocks or even a street apart.

Since I came to Israel the weather has been beautiful -- clear blue skies, warm days, cool nights here in Jerusalem, but today the rain blew in. I was sitting in a cafe on Palmach St. today around noon watching the hail pile up on the sidewalk. Israel always needs rain, but the warm days have been a nice interlude, especially since I'll be returning to cold, snowy, gray Ithaca next week.

I've been writing an article on Lilith for the new Historical Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, being published by Shalvi Publishers on CD-ROM. It's been fun doing the research. If you are looking for a strange and amusing (and also misogynist) work of Hebrew literature, I recommend the Alphabet of Ben Sira, usually dated to somewhere from the 8th to the 10th century C.E. The historical Ben Sira (from 2d century B.C.E. Jerusalem) has nothing to do with the Alphabet named for him, but he appears in the work in a very strange context. The Alphabet is the first place that the tale of Lilith as the first wife of Adam appears. She, like him, was created from earth, and she and Adam quarreled over who would be on top. He said that he was superior to her, and she said that they were equal. She pronounced the name of God and flew away to the Red Sea. Adam complained to God, who sent three angels to bring her back. She refused, and said that she had been created only to kill newborn babies. The angels made a deal with her that they would not bring her back to Adam, if she agreed not to attack children who were protected by an amulet with the angels' names and forms on it.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira is published in English translation in Rabbinic Fantasies,, edited by David Stern and Mark Mirsky, along with many other interesting works of Jewish literature, such as the "Tale of the Jerusalemite," about a man who ends up married to the daughter of Ashmedai, the king of the demons.

Today I went up on the Temple Mount (called by Muslims the Haram al-Sharif), which has been opened for brief visits by tourists in the last few months. It used to be possible to enter the Al-Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, as well as the Islamic Museum, by buying a ticket for all three sites, but the Wakf (Islamic trust) is not permitting non-Muslims into the mosques now. A fairly long line of people waited at the bottom of the ramp leading up to the Maghrebi Gate, until at 12:30 p.m. the Israeli police permitted us to go up (after going through a metal detector and opening our bags to the guards). I wandered around the vast plaza by myself -- first going over to the Al-Aksa Mosque and trying to look inside through the open door, but people were coming out after prayers and it was impossible to see anything. Then I went up the steps to the plaza that surrounds the Dome of the Rock and walked around and looked at the beautiful tiles on the outside of the building. There were not very many people around -- mostly women with children, or children playing (several boys kicking around balls). In addition to the mosques, wide stairs, and smaller buildings whose names I didn't know, there are also parklike areas with trees on the plaza, where small groups of people gathered.

I encountered a pair of girls who, as I was leaning against the wall looking at the Dome of the Rock, looked at me shyly. We started to talk, but very haltingly, since my Arabic is minimal, as was their English. One of them seemed to disapprove of our conversation, and left her friend (she pointed to the Dome of the Rock and "that's ours -- it belongs to the Arabs"). Nadine and I tried to talk for a few minutes. She said she was in 7th grade, and was studying some English. I told her I knew English and Hebrew. She wanted to know where I was staying -- I tried to say "West Jerusalem" in Arabic but I don't think she understood me (I was probably saying it wrong). She smiled a lot and seemed to be enjoying talking to me. I was too, but I was also nervous, so I eventually ended the conversation and continued wandering around the plaza. I left the Mount by a different gate (the gate of the Chain) and then made my way back to the Western Wall plaza.

I had conflicting feelings about going up to the Temple Mount. On the one hand, I felt sad that there was no sign of the Temple that had once stood there (destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E.), and that it's not possible to pray there as a Jew. It felt like a place to which Jews were not welcome. On the other hand, it felt like a place of safety for the Muslims who were there -- a place where women and children could gather without being disturbed. In some ways, it felt like the Western Wall -- people could enter and linger with the secure feeling that this holy place was theirs, and that this was the place to go to speak to God. I wish that it were not the locus of so much conflict, and that anyone who wished could go there to pray or speak with God without creating an international incident.