Larry David's Piss Christ
In last Sunday's Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David accidentally urinates on a picture of Jesus. One splash remains in the form of a tear under the image's eye. When the homeowners, devout believers, see the "tear," they imagine they have witnessed a miracle. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League understandably takes offense.
Was Larry David always this crude? Would he think it comedic if someone urinated on a picture of his mother? This might be fun to watch, but since HBO only likes to dump on Catholics (it was just a couple of weeks ago that Sarah Silverman insulted Catholics on “Real Time with Bill Maher”), and David is Jewish, we’ll never know.
Meanwhile, in other interfaith news, there's this:
Political observers across New York are asking today whether Erie County Executive Chris Collins has irreparably damaged his prospects for statewide office after he compared Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to Adolf Hitler and an Antichrist during a Saturday speech in Buffalo.
Collins has already apologized for what he called "a poor joke," delivered during a speech at the county Republican Party's annual fundraiser in the Adam's Mark Hotel.
That's when the county executive referred to French seer Nostradamus' prediction that the world would experience three Antichrists in conjunction with the Apocalypse, whose origin is the New Testament's Book of Revelation.
Collins then said it's generally accepted that the first was Napoleon, the second Hitler, and that he was "pretty sure" the third is Silver, an orthodox Jew from Manhattan.
The county executive said this in the context of Silver as part of Albany's "three men in a room" budget process, in which the Assembly speaker, the State Senate majority leader and the governor make most budgetary decisions.
Chris Collins probably should have resisted the urge to compare his political opponents to the Antichrist. But the idea that this statement represents some kind of antisemitic outrage is crazy. (Would he have resisted the urge if the Assembly Speaker had been named Silvio Argento?) Really - as a tribe, we Jews have to learn either to be more polite or less sensitive.