Mick Hartley

Rod Dreher at the Free Press on the backlash to the new Netflix film about Mary, mother of Jesus: an attempt to de-Judaize Christianity.

Let us stop and consider what a stupid time we live in. It’s an era when people are losing their minds with hatred over the fact that a Jewish actress was cast to play a Jewish woman. Think about that. Then again, antisemitism has never been about actual Jews, has it?

Like a boil on the backside of the body politic, there has been an ugly irruption of Jew-hating foolishness over casting in the upcoming Netflix film Mary, about the life of Jesus’s mother. People are outraged—outraged!—that director D.J. Caruso cast an Israeli Jew, Noa Cohen, to play the title character.

“First Netflix taking all Palestinian content down and now they stream a movie about Mary with an all Israeli cast whilst those same people are bombing the birthplace of Christ? Boycott that shit,” said a Muslim woman in an X post. She added video commentary noting that the choice to film the movie in Morocco and not in Bethlehem—the actual birthplace of Christ—was “diabolical.”

The filmmakers could have shot in Bethlehem had the Palestinian Authority, which controls the town, given their permission. Then again, Israeli citizens like Noa Cohen, who plays Mary, are not allowed into Bethlehem.

…what all authoritative Christian traditions share is an irrevocable, undeniable testimony that God chose the Jewish people to make Himself known to all of humanity, and that without Hebrew Scripture and tradition, the Christian faith would make no sense at all.

So why the controversy over the Mary movie? Why are so many people eager, even desperate, to deny Mary’s Jewishness?

It is clear that partisans for the Palestinian side in the current war wish to do anything they can to delegitimize Israel and Judaism in order to gain credibility for their cause. They understand well that many American Christians, especially evangelicals, sympathize with the Israelis in part because they know their Bible. If they can sever Christianity’s roots from Judaism in the Christian imagination, they reason, they can gain sympathy among followers of Jesus. But to claim the historical Mary as a “Palestinian”—a people and a concept that did not exist at the time of Jesus’s birth—is a malicious anachronism.