Netflix has made a movie about Mary, the mother of Jesus, and they’re getting a lot of heat for it. In light of what Netflix is and the general state of religious awareness these days, it’s likely to be dreadful, but that’s not why it’s getting heat. Leftists are enraged because Noa Cohen, an Israeli actress, has been cast as Mary. Why, how dare those MAGA Republican white supremacists over at Netflix cast a Jewish woman to play…a Jewish woman! It’s an outrage!
The reaction has been the usual spittle-flecked fury we have come to expect from the advocates of peace and tolerance. The Jerusalem Post reported Thursday that “a good chunk of the Internet is melting down, because the actress in the lead role is a Jewish woman from the Middle East.” Some of this is the expected indignation over casting an Israeli at a time when Israel is supposedly engaged in “genocide,” but there is more to it than that, with an even darker edge.
“An X user called America First ZOE (AFZ),” the Post noted, “posted an image of Cohen’s Instagram account, writing, ‘A disgusting Jew got the part. lol.’” Antisemitism has made an ugly reappearance in the mainstream since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis, and so many who were angry at Netflix’s choice seemed to forget that Mary herself was Jewish.
One of them was “Kathy, an X user whose bio reads, ‘It’s Palestine. It will always be Palestine.’” She affected an intriguing tone of wounded piety salted with vulgarity: “F**k you. I’m an offended Catholic. F**king have an Israeli play Mary? May you all be f**king smited. Blasphemous” That’s tellin’ ‘em, all right. In a similar vein, another X user lamented: “a film a bout a palestinian woman played by actors from the settler state that is currently mass slaughtering palestinian women. oh the disgusting audacity.”
Aside from the nonsense about Israel “mass slaughtering palestinian women,” is it really Palestine? Will it always be Palestine? And was Mary really a “Palestinian woman”?
These X posters betray an ignorance of history. It wasn’t actually always Palestine at all. As "The Palestinian Delusion" explains, in the year 134AD, the Romans expelled the Jews from their homeland of Judea (“land of the Jews”) after the Bar Kokhba revolt and renamed the region Palestine. That was 100 years after the time of Mary and Jesus, who lived in Judea, and so there is no legitimate way that Mary can be termed a “Palestinian.” When Jesus was crucified, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate had the charge placed on a sign over his head: “King of the Jews,” that is, a supposed insurrectionist. Pilate did not write “King of the Palestinians,” or “King of Palestine.”
The Forward pointed out Friday that “there was a biblical region in the area called Philistia, but it likely was located where Gaza is today, and did not encompass the inland area where Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem lie. Nevertheless, some scholars argue that the term ‘Palestine’ was a common way to refer to the broader Levantine region as early as the Bronze Age.” Even if that were true, however, it wouldn’t make Jesus and his mother “Palestinians.” There were no Palestinian people at the time of Mary and Jesus. The Romans had plucked the name “Palestine” from the Bible; it was the name of the Israelites’ ancient enemies, the Philistines. But never did the term “Palestinian” refer to anything but a region — not to a people or an ethnicity.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Palestinian people were born, when the KGB and Yasir Arafat created both these allegedly oppressed people and the instrument of their freedom — the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The idea of a “Palestinian people” is one of the most successful propaganda fictions in human history.
Related: ‘International Law Expert’ Calls for New Genocide of the Jews
History is not the strong suit of the outrage mob. The Post reports that one of the people outraged over the casting of Noa Cohen declared: “Mary was not a ‘Jew’.” Another said: “As a muslim you have no right to insult mother Mary, one of the best female figures in Islam.”
An Iranian human rights activist, Elica Le Bon, pinpointed the reason for all this ignorant outrage: “The internet is having a melt down that a Jewish woman of the land 2,000 years ago is being played by a Jewish woman of the land today. Why? Because it reminds us of Jewish indigeneity before conquests & defeats their white colonizer narrative - a lie they’ll die to protect.” Indeed. Leftists insist that the Israelis are “white colonizers”; the Jewishness of Jesus and Mary contradict this claim. The Netflix movie about Mary is almost certainly terrible, but Netflix deserves kudos for at least casting Mary properly.
