Newsflash: Artist Suggests Jesus Was a Jew

[morgan_dhu]

I am totally boggle-minded. The paintings of an American artist, Clara Maria Goldstein, have been labeled controversial because they depict Jesus as a Jew.

Goldstein has created a series of paintings showing such "controversial" images as: Jesus as a baby, being lovingly prepared for circumcision by Mary; Jesus as a boy, reading from the Torah; Jesus dressed as and in poses associated with being a rabbi; Jesus wearing a yarmulke pictured next to a menorah. Now I know that the contemporary evidence (outside of Biblical texts themselves) on Jesus is rather slim, but all the sources I know of seem to agree that Jesus was a Jew. Apparently it's even in the Bible, what with the whole being descended from the House of David, and debating with the wise men in synagogue as a child, and calling the Temple "my Father's house" when he was doing that bit of housecleaning, and other such events.

However, these paintings are being denied display because "Gundersen Lutheran [the hospital] is trying to be more patient-friendly and it doesn't want anything controversial to potentially upset patients."

Let me get this right - portraying Jesus as what he actually was, a Jew, is controversial and might upset people?


The stupid. It burns.

Comments

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Thank you, my friend, for the gentle call-out on privilege in this exchange.

As I wrote below in response to someone else, I reacted to this story without analysing it. I knew there was something very wrong about it. It made me angry, whereas many other examples of idiotic thinking just make me either sad or amused. I just didn't think very hard about why.

What I didn't see immediately was just how many different levels of anti-semitism there were in the article, starting with the reasons behind the refusal by the hospital in the first place and going on to the construction of the story - the inclusion of the information about the Holocaust symposium, I have realised, is there to deliberately defuse any idea that the reactions to the paintings might be based inanti-semitism: "how can not wanting to show these paintings be anti-semetic when Jews don't want to show them either." It's a deliberate diversion, and I walked right into it.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. (-: Thanks for listening.

That's a really clear analysis.