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.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO