Nora Ephron lost her battle with acute myeloid leukemia. She was 71. If you’re not familiar with the name, you might be familiar with some of the films she was involved in writing, producing, and directing:

Heartburn (1986)

When Harry Met Sally (1989)

You’ve Got Mail (1989)

My Blue Heaven (1990)

Sleepless In Seattle (1993)

Julie and Julia (2009)

Most of Ephron’s films were mostly devoid of politics, but she often included some well-placed digs at conservatives. For example, in Julie and Julia there are a few digs at Republicans with the specter of McCarthyism thrown in for good measure. Ephron directed, produced, and wrote the screenplay. Robert Stacy McCain at Anti-Republican Culture found these jabs:

• There is a wedding scene, where Julia’s sister gets married. The obnoxious relative is a Republican.

• Julie Powell, played by Amy Adams, plays hooky from work and is confronted by her boss. He says something to the effect that, “If I were a Republican, I would have to fire you.”

• Paul Child, Julia’s husband (Stanley Tucci), is caught up in the McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s. He faces what appears to be a panel of Republican Congressmen in a windowless room, where they inquire as to whether or not he is “a homosexual.”

These are typical of leftists like Ephron, but there was more to her worldview than most people know.

At the 2006 Aspen Institute panel discussion on “Television, Cinema and American Values,” Ephron was asked if she knew any evangelical Christians and/or Bush supporters, and if she did not then how does she know what she knows about “those kind of folks.” Her response was, simply, “No, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

She had disdain for millions of people with whom she had no knowledge. She admitted that she did not know a single evangelical Christian and was proud of that fact. Can you imagine a conservative saying, “No, I don’t know any Jews, and I’m proud of that”? Ephron was Jewish. Irony of ironies, she died at New York’s Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Also, Rush Limbaugh has raised more than $15 million dollars for leukemia research.

Ephron was an “interloper on God’s territory. Everything she used to construct her system had been stolen from God’s ‘construction site.’ The unbeliever is like the little girl who must climb on her father’s lap to slap his face. . . . [T]he unbeliever must use the world as it has been created by God to try to throw God off His throne.”1

At least Nora Ephron had the good sense to leave most of her left-wing politics on the cutting room floor and not make it the center-piece of her films. It’s too bad other left-wingers don’t follow her example.

1. John A. Fielding III, “The Brute Facts: An Introduction of the Theology and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til,” The Christian Statesman 146:2 (March-April 2003), 30. [↩]