Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Forward 50 2012

Errol Morris

Errol Morris might just have a genetic predisposition to seek justice. After all, earlier this year, the Academy Award–winning documentary filmmaker and author, who became a bar mitzvah at the Conservative Congregation Sons of Israel in Woodmere, N.Y., revealed to the Forward that he is the great-grandson of a Talmud scholar.

Long before the term “truthiness” was coined, Morris, now 64, was blurring his audience’s sense of truth and certainty in such documentaries as “The Thin Blue Line” (1988), which helped to exonerate a death row prisoner, and “The Fog Of War” (2003), in which Morris pushed former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to question the assumptions on the basis of which the nVietnam war was waged.

This year found Morris, building on his remarkably successful writing for The New York Times, trying to win a new trial for Jeffrey MacDonald, who has spent most of his adult life in jail for the murder in 1970 of his pregnant wife and two daughters.

Morris’s medium this time is not film but prose, and he made this transition with remarkable skill in the book “A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald.” Writing for the Forward, Pamela Cytrynbaum, executive director of the Chicago Innocence Project, declared the book to be “a vibrant addition to the ongoing Jewish ritual rumination on justice.”

Though the jury may be out on MacDonald, the verdict on Morris was established many years ago — he is one of our nation’s greatest truth tellers, even when he is making us question whether such a thing as truth exists at all. No doubt his great-grandfather would be proud.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.