“The New York Times says Easter is an anti-Semitic holiday,” a newspaper colleague told me, most likely on April 16, Easter Monday in 1990. I repaired to All The News That’s Fit To Print, and learned that the day before, the NYT had published The Hope of Easter, an editorial that deserves to be recalled, apropos of James Fulford’s annual War on Easter installment.

The editorial placed “anti-Semitism” squarely on the Gospels:

“When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing,” runs the account in Matthew, “but rather that a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.”

This passage, notes the historian Michael Grant, was “written to reassure the Greco-Roman world that the Christians could not possibly have played any part in the recent Jewish revolt. … Yet the words of the Gospel have had terrible, ineffaceable consequences for [Jews] throughout the centuries.”

Or the Greco-Roman world regardless, Matthew wrote those words because that is what happened; i.e., the Jewish authorities wanted to crucify Christ and gladly took upon themselves responsibility for his crucifixion.

But then came the ritual imprecation that the Gospels cause even modern “anti-Semitic incidents”:

Even in modern times, the Gospels’ insistent message of Jewish culpability echoes among the uneducated and where bigotry is rife or bad times foster the search for scapegoats. The resurgent Pamyat movement in the Soviet Union is openly anti-Semitic. Even in the United States, 1,432 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded last year by the Anti-Defamation League.

The Gospels are historical but also sacred texts, and cannot well be amended to suit modern values. …

Routine condemnation by church and political leaders in the United States has not wholly eradicated the ancient animosities unfortunately embedded in the Gospels’ text. …

To distinguish themselves from Jews, the early Christians changed Passover to Easter, with a different day to celebrate it. Steps in history cannot be retraced. But just as Easter is the season for renewal, there is always hope of escaping the past’s legacy. Passover and Easter will always be different, but it is surely time to find a permanent escape from the hatreds that attended their separation two millennia ago.

“Christians changed Passover to Easter”?! Even someone who only casually reads the Gospels knows that statement is galactically stupid. But however stupid it is, the editorial itself was a vicious thing to publish on Easter Sunday.

Yet the War on Easter (and on Christmas) didn’t even begin in 1990, as Michael Feinstein explained in his entry on Irving Berlin at the Great American Songbook Foundation:

In “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade,” [Irving Berlin] secularized the two most important Christian holidays. While the songs are full of sentiment and may be sung with piety, what they truly celebrate is a nondenominational American religion.  In a riff in his novel Operation Shylock, Philip Roth exclaims that Berlin, “The greatest Diasporist of all,” turns Easter into a fashion show (“O, I could write a sonnet / About your Easter bonnet”) and Christmas into a snow holiday on the home front in the bitter December of 1942. “This is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments,” Roth writes. The riff ends with a hearty endorsement of another “Jewish” Christmas song, this one by Jules Styne (music) and Sammy Cahn (lyrics): “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

[Irving Berlin’s America, August 12, 2020]

Whatever Irving Berlin’s intent, the result was obvious.