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Replacing Christmas with the culture of the Holocaust
Finally, this brings us to Christmas this year. More than ever, the focus will be on Jewish themes rather than Christian. As a recent New York Times article admitted, Holocaust-themed Christmas releases have been the norm for years. Sophie’s Choice, for example, debuted in December 1982, Schindler’s List was released in the same month in 1993, and The Pianist opened two days after Christmas in 2002.
This year is no different: On Christmas Day the new Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie will debut. This film features Cruise as a German officer who plots to kill Hitler, prompting Cruise to joke in an interview, “Go kill Hitler on Christmas!” We will also have Defiance and Good, two more Nazi-oriented films, which will premier a week after Christmas. Then there is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, “which tells the story of a forbidden friendship between the son of a Nazi officer and a Jewish boy imprisoned in a concentration camp.” And don’t miss The Reader, which features Kate Winslet being tried for her years as a concentration-camp guard. Finally, there is Adam Resurrected, starring Jeff Goldblum as a Holocaust survivor living in a mental institution. The title seems to posit the death of Jesus at Christmastime and his replacement with a Jewish resurrection.
Out with the old religion, in with the new. A friend wrote: “I’ve seen the previews for Valkyrie. Good grief! And to release it on Christmas Day — it really doesn’t get more obvious than this. Sort of like saying, ‘Don’t you realize, THIS is your new religion, not all this Jesus business!’”
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