Mary—the Holy Virgin, the Theotokos, the Mother of God—was a Jew. Only a fool or an antisemite could deny this. You can doubt the theological claims made for her role in the drama of salvation, of course, but that she was a daughter of Israel? Don’t be absurd. “Salvation comes from the Jews,” said her son, Jesus of Nazareth, to the Samaritan woman (John 4:22). Well, he would know, wouldn’t he?
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.
I’ve been to Bethlehem, and I’ve visited Checkpoint 300—the crossing that makes daily life very hard for Palestinians who live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority but work inside Israel proper. You would have to have a heart of stone not to pity the honest, decent Palestinians humiliated by these obstacles.
But why does any of this exist? As a response to the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings in the Second Intifada, which killed or wounded thousands of Israeli civilians. The Israeli government began building the barrier in the early 2000s; it dramatically reduced the number of suicide attacks—a fact lamented on Arab television by Ramadan Shallah, former leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.
“There is the separation fence which is an obstacle to the resistance, and if it were not there, the situation would be entirely different,” Shallah said in 2006.
I digress, but this is the kind of thing one can’t let pass in this current propaganda war. The fake controversy over the Mary film is just one more audacious lie told in the service of the anti-Israel cause. The lie about the security barrier and the lie about Mary’s origins are the same kind of falsehood, one that depends on radical decontextualization to advance a pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish narrative.