I struggled to find something to say on this topic. That is to say, Valerie did a very good job of addressing all the points of my question/comment from the previous post.
Then it dawned on me to share my own fleeting brush with the Passion play.

A few years back I went to a bookstore with a friend. There was a church group walking a picket line, protesting the bookstores sale of pornography. I need to say that this is a mainstream bookstore, and the porn the church people were protesting is Penthouse, Playboy, Oui, magazines. We are not talking little booths in the back corner for veiwing Debbie Does Dallas, just a small rack of skin mags, in a massive magazine section devoted to a wide range of topics.

I had never seen a protest march in person before. They aren't really all that common in America. I guess our need to protest is blunted by the works of our forefathers, who have set up a rather nice arrangement here. We can get rid of political hacks at the voting booth. Most people have a job or easy access to get a job. Stores are full. Life is good. All the big problems have been addressed in past years.

So this is what protest has evolved to in America. A church group of 200, marching on a sidewalk in the heat of summer, protesting against playboy.

As I looked on this spectacle, my eyes were drawn to one of the protestors who was dressed as Jesus.
He had a life sized replica of the Cross which had a set of roller skate wheels on the dragging end. He had wheeled it through a turn around the block, and was half way through the second loop, when my friend Don, made the suggestion "Why don't you go and help him carry it?"

This suggestion caused considerable inner turmoil for me. I am not overtly religious, but am aware that the crux of Christianity is best exemplified by Simon of Cyrene, the man who sprang from the crowd during Jesus' march to Golgotha, to take up the Lord's burden. The thought of me reinacting this pivotal event of the Passion, in such a spotaneous way, terrified and allured me all at once. Reason and Religion grappled in my heart. I was checking my nerve, actually considering how many loops around the block this would obligate me too.

Don interrupted by offering me a $5 if I would do it.
This dragged me back to reality, and tipped the scale in my mind.

All at once I thought, this isn't Jerusalem, he isn't being marched to his death, and I like skin mags.

We went in to shop.

My formative years were spent surrounded by bankers, lawyers, physicians, architects, etc. All very highly paid, all very successful. At least a quarter of the adults I knew during that time had Ivy League degrees. You learned elitism as you learned to talk.

There was a good deal of "anti-semitism" among these adults, but "jew" was a label applied more broadly than to actual jews. It was applied to any clique (and there was more than one) which stuck together and gave each other preferential treatment to the detriment of others. The actual use of the word "jew" was somewhat rare, but everyone understood it's meaning, and the inter-clique warfare was common among adults.

The actual Jews themselves sometimes objected to this use, but also used the word the same way. I would say those who objected were about as common as those who used the word the same way. I could never decide (and I don't think they could, either) if the jews themselves were more offended at having their name applied as a perjorative, or at having other people who were not Jewish grouped with them.

As one of them explained to me in HS (this is nearly verbatim), "Look, I am an arrogant corrupt elitist bastard, and so are all my friends. I happen to be Jewish, and so are most of my friends. But those two facts are separate. I hear what you are saying, I agree with you, and I like it that way. You are saying you will never be as good as me, and I agree. But he's not jewish." The entire thing wasn't a matter of being offended, but of catching me in a technicality during a debate.

[Note: What I had said was, "But he's just another jew," in reference to a third party when the guy I was speaking with said, "Go ask [name of a friend], and he'll tell you the same thing." There followed some debate over semantic responsibility: the speaker being less obliged to be correct when the listener is assumed to be smart enough to understand the intent. The third party coincidentally wasn't jewish, a fact I didn't know. My objection to using him as an independent reference was entirely justified, since those two were as peas in a pod.]

More recently (but not very), during my stint on Wall St. I had an extremely senior underwriter explain to me that he'd once submitted a list of people to be canned to his boss (who was jewish). That his boss proceeded to cross every jewish sounding name off the list. Whether or not the story is true, the underwriter who told it to me certainly believed it was true. You can read that at least three different ways. It's either a sign of his entrenched anti-semitism that he assumed I would take the story at face value, a sign that the jews kind of deserve their reputation, or a sign of the lengths they have been driven to in the face of rampant anti-semitism. I saw it a fourth way: that his boss was a screwed up individual who should himself have been canned. The actual list itself would have been indictment enough.

JM,

I know you asked the question in another thread and I wanted to answer but since I'm late and this thread is related to your previous questions (sorry Valerie, I really don't mean to hijack your post):

Indeed, chances are we won't be able to see Gibson's movie any time soon. I intend to see it when I'm in the US, pretty soon. So I'd rather not talk about it before seeing it. So I can get back to you then if you still want to hear my two cents.
All in all, compared to the stuff I've often heard, I doubt Gibson's movie would be the worse piece of anti-Semitism one could hear or see in France though.

As for freedom of religion and state censorship, were you refering to the head-scarf ban?

Valerie,

There's something that has always puzzled me regarding religion and the difference between the US and France.

I have never had any problem talking about religion with anyone in the US, whether of the same or from a different confession.

In France, it's rather difficult to talk about it. The subject seems to be taboo: people are generally reluctant to tell you their confession (and don't you dare ask in most cases, for fear of being thought of as judgmental), if you mention yours most people either react aggressively, as if you were about to try to convert them by force, or simply change subject.

Same problem with nationality and/or origins. I remember one teacher at university who started his first class by asking everyone to introduce themselves and tell everyone what our origins were (there were many foreigners in the class). One French-Arab girl told me afterwards that she didn't like what he had done and she knew that he would use this info against us.

And I really have the impression that it's often what people think you have in mind when you ask about their origins. But I'm off-topic here. Sorry.

So little time, so many threads....

First, I liked the story about the Jesus with his cross on skates, Paper. I'm not sure how I feel about your immortal soul now that I know you like 'skin mags', as you call them, but, hey, I'm just trying to live up to my reputation as a very prudish, hung-up American.

The story about your high school conversations is telling, Scum, in that I just can't imagine ANY of my friends at that age having that kind of conversation! And your classmate spouting off that whole spiel about being corrupt and elitist...? Not many in my school would have know what 'elitist' meant!

Insults do take on a certain 'color' (no pun intended) depending on who is spouting them. I remember many black people I knew calling other black people 'niggers', but if you were WHITE and did the same, you were meat. Many black people I knew worried about the tone of their skin a lot, not wanting to get darker in the sun, for example, but calling one classmate who had very light skin an 'Uncle Tom'.

I did have a very scary black girl in high school come up to me after hearing me sing once and telling me that I sang like I was black. Of course, I took it as a compliment, which is how she meant it.

My high school was chock full of rednecks, blacks, Asians (Korean, Vietnamese)and a few hispanics and the worst I ever heard was the occasional 'nigger' or 'white boy' but it never escalated beyond that. As far as wondering who was what religion, man, we never had time to worry about it. We were too busy just getting through the halls and to class on time.

Carine, I see why you were confused. In my experience, Americans WILL talk to you openly about their beliefs if you ask, especially those who would love to see you join their numbers. I was always told that until you know people well, don't ask. Perhaps this was something we did only in the southern part of the US, I can't say. The idea is to let friendships develop first. Then, once you are friends, it's much easier to accept, for instance, that your new best friend is a satan worshipper. What should it matter - she is you best friend, after all! I'm exaggerating, but I think you see what I mean.

My high school was very redneck. So much so that when it was known that I was coming to France during summer vacation, the idiot dime-store cowboy slash jocks decided that I was in fact doing so to have an abortion.

And yet, despite this backwardness, we went to school in a very tolerant atmosphere. Carine, you don't say, but DID the teacher somehow use this information against your classmate or was she just being paranoid?

Not that I know.

We were studying foreign languages - okay, this one was a marketing class, but you know how different it is in France from the US: we're not following several, different classes, but a whole cursus and this one was, to spare you an acronym, international business classes - so my guess is that she was paranoid, and the teacher was just trying to get us to know one another.

Carine. I just saw the Passion. and I promise I wont ruin the ending for you. Still I am curious what sort of upbringing you had that kept you in suspence of this particular story?
Um never mind. It's not polite to ask.

There seems to be a running presumption, an accepted presumption, that Mr. Gibson's "Passion" is, if not yet in fact, since few of its detractors seem to actually have seen it, very probably anti-Semitic.

Mr. Gibson's movie depicts Jesus the Christ, a Jew, killed at the insistence of local authorites, Jewish, with the connivance of a foreign power.

Then there is Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jean d'Arc, which strangely has never been considered anti-French (hardly, it was commissioned by the Société Général de Films to commemorate the recent canonization of la Pucelle). Yet here we have a movie where the French heroine is condemned and killed by French authorites with the connivance of a foreign power.

The greatest offense in Mr. Gibson's movie seems to be centered on MT 27:25, where Mr. Gibson has Caiaphas appropriate the cry of the people. This is mistaken, by those disposed to mistake it, as a malicious invocation of a blood curse. Not so. This is a quasi-legal Jewish formulation affirming innocence in justice, i.e., that the punishment is mete and hence confidence no deleterious effects would obtain.

All that is neither here nor there, the Christian message is not that Jews killed the Christ -- the historical narrative shell -- but that the Christ died for all -- the abiding soteriologic truth.

Whether Mr. Gibson's movie views in France or not won't change French dispositions one way or the other. I laugh at how the French dish it up both ways with a straight face: no anti-Semitism in France, no Mr. Gibson movie in France to inflame the anti-Semitism that isn't there.

I'll wait to see Mr.Gibson's movie before weighing in on whether it is anti-Semitic or a depiction of the Christ and His crowded moment.

DGB

I read this article. Its not about the Passion of Christ. Rather it is the personal feelings of an American woman who's grandparents were forced to flee Europe during world war one.

She chose to return to Europe to live in France during the 70's and dreads the thought of being forced to flee to America again.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11703023_1

After reading it, I tend to agree with the decision to ban the Passion in France. I don't think the French are adult enough for this movie.