Gregg Easterbrook - Kill Bill Controversy

Kill Bill Controversy

Easterbrook also had a blog at The New Republic Online, until mid-2004. In October 2003, in a column critical of what he considered to be the senseless violence in the Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill, Easterbrook wrote the following:

Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice.

This caused an uproar and accusations that Easterbrook and The New Republic were anti-semitic. Easterbrook wrote that he "mangled" his own ideas by his choice of words and wrote the following to explain his thought process and to apologize:

Twenty minutes after I pressed "send," the entire world had read it. When I reread my own words and beheld how I'd written things that could be misunderstood, I felt awful. To anyone who was offended I offer my apology, because offense was not my intent. But it was 20 minutes later, and already the whole world had seen it... My attempt to connect my perfectly justified horror at an ugly and corrupting movie to the religious faith and ethnic identity of certain executives was hopelessly clumsy...accusing a Christian of adoring money above all else does not engage any history of ugly stereotypes. Accuse a Jewish person of this and you invoke a thousand years of stereotypes about that which Jews have specific historical reasons to fear. What I wrote here was simply wrong, and for being wrong, I apologize.

He further explained that he worships at Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church, one of the handful of joint Christian-Jewish congregations in the United States. Easterbrook had previously written in a column that "one of the shortcomings of Christianity is that most adherents downplay the faith's interweaving with Judaism" and indicated that he and his family sought out a place where Christians and Jews express their faith cooperatively. The New Republic accepted blame for the piece in an apology and denied that his comments were intentionally anti-semitic. Easterbrook continued to blog for them, and still writes articles on environmentalism (especially the damage caused by sport utility vehicles), religion and other subjects.