Uncategorized
Weinstein approached me ‘Jew to Jew’: Jodi Kantor opens up on the ‘She Said’ movie’s Jewish moments
(JTA) — When the New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor was reporting the 2017 Harvey Weinstein sexual assault story that earned her a Pulitzer prize, the powerful Hollywood producer and his team tried to influence her by using something they had in common: They are both Jewish.
“Weinstein put [Jewishness] on the table and seemed to expect that I was going to have some sort of tribal loyalty to him,” Kantor told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on a video call from the New York Times newsroom. “And that was just not going to be the case.”
Now, that exchange has been immortalized in “She Said,” a new film adaptation of the nonfiction book of the same name by Kantor and her collaborator Megan Twohey that details their investigation into Weinstein’s conduct, which helped launch the #MeToo movement.
The film, directed by Maria Schrader with stars Zoe Kazan as Kantor and Carey Mulligan as Twohey, is an understated thriller that has drawn comparisons to “All the President’s Men” — and multiple subtle but powerful Jewish-themed subplots reveal the way Kantor’s Jewishness arose during and at times intersected with the investigation.
In one scene, the Kantor character notes that a Jewish member of Weinstein’s team tried to appeal to her “Jew to Jew.” In another, Kantor shares a moving moment with Weinstein’s longtime accountant, the child of Holocaust survivors, as they discuss the importance of speaking up about wrongdoing.
Kantor, 47, grew up between New York and New Jersey, the first grandchild of Holocaust survivors — born “almost 30 years to the day after my grandparents were liberated,” she notes. She calls her grandmother Hana Kantor, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor, her “lodestar.” Kantor — who doesn’t often speak publicly about her personal life, including her Jewish background, which involved some education in Jewish schools — led a segment for CBS in May 2021 on her grandmother and their relationship. Before her journalism career, she spent a year in Israel on a Dorot Fellowship, working with Israeli and Palestinian organizations. She’s now a “proud member” of a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn.
Kantor spoke with JTA about the film’s Jewish threads, the portrayal of the New York Times newsroom and what Zoe Kazan’s performance captures about journalism.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
JTA: How did you feel having Zoe Kazan, who is not Jewish, play you? Kazan has played some notably Jewish characters before, for example in the HBO miniseries “The Plot Against America.”
JK: I feel Zoe’s performance is so sensitive and so layered. What I really appreciate about her performance is that she captures so many of the emotions I was feeling under the surface in the investigation. You know, when you’re a reporter and especially a reporter handling that sensitive a story, it’s your responsibility to present a really smooth professional exterior to the world. At the end of the investigation, I had the job of reading Harvey Weinstein some of the allegations and really confronting him. And in dealing with the victims, I wanted to be a rock for them and it was my job to get them to believe in the investigation. And so on the one hand, you have that smooth, professional exterior, but then below that, of course you’re feeling all the feelings. You’re feeling the power of the material, you’re feeling the urgency of getting the story, you’re feeling the fear that Weinstein could hurt somebody else. You’re feeling the loss that these women are expressing, including over their careers. And so I think Zoe’s performance just communicates that so beautifully.
What Zoe says about the character is that there are elements of me, there are elements of herself, and then there are elements of pure invention because she’s an artist, and that’s what she does.
I think the screenplay gets at a small but significant line of Jewish sub-drama that ran through the investigation. It went like this: Harvey Weinstein and his representatives were constantly trying to approach me as a Jew. And they’ve done this more recently, as well. There have been times when Harvey Weinstein was trying to approach me “Jew to Jew,” like almost in a tone of “you and I are the same, we understand each other.” We found dossiers later that they had compiled on me and it was clear that they knew that I was the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and they tried to sort of deploy that. So speaking of keeping things under the surface, I privately thought that was offensive, that he was citing that. But your job as a reporter is to be completely professional. And I wasn’t looking to get into a fight with Weinstein. I just wanted to find out the truth and I actually wanted to be fair to the guy. Anyway, even as he was approaching me “Jew to Jew” in private, he was hiring Black Cube — sort of Israeli private intelligence agents — to try to dupe me. And they actually sent an agent to me, and she posed as a women’s rights advocate. And she was intimating that they were going to pay me a lot of money to appear at a conference in London. Luckily I shooed her away.
To some degree I can’t explain why private Israeli intelligence agents were hired to try to dupe the Hebrew speaking, yeshiva-educated, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. But it’s not my job to explain that! It’s their job to explain why they did that.
Then the theme reappeared with Irwin Reiter, Weinstein’s accountant of 30 years, who kind of became the Deep Throat of the investigation. I quickly figured out that Irwin and I were from the same small world. He was the child of survivors, and had also spent his summers at bungalow colonies in the Catskills just down the road from mine. I don’t bring up the Holocaust a lot. It’s a sacred matter for me, and I didn’t do it lightly. But once I discovered that we did in fact have this really powerful connection in our backgrounds, I did gently sound it with him – I felt that was sincere and real. Because he was making such a critical decision: Weinstein’s accountant of 30 years is still working for the guy by day and he’s meeting with me at night. And I felt like I did need to go to that place with him, saying, “Okay, Irwin, we both know that there are people who talk and there are people who don’t. And we both grew up around that mix of people and what do we think is the difference? And also if you know if you have the chance to act and intervene in a bad situation, are you going to take it?”
We didn’t talk a lot about it, because I raised it and he didn’t want to fully engage. But I always felt like that was under the surface of our conversations, and he made a very brave decision to help us.
That was a very powerful scene in the film, and it felt like a turning point in the movie that kind of got at the ethical core of what was motivating your character. Was that a scene that was important to you personally to include in the film?
What Megan and I want people to know overall is that a small number of brave sources can make an extraordinary difference. When you really look at the number of people who gave us the essential information about Weinstein, it’s a small conference room’s worth of people. Most of them are incredibly brave women, some of whom are depicted, I think, quite beautifully in the film. But there was also Irwin, Weinstein’s accountant of all these years, among them. It’s Megan and my job to build people’s confidence in telling the truth. And as we become custodians of this story for the long term, one of the things we really want people to know is that a tiny group of brave sources, sometimes one source, can make a massive difference. Look at the impact that these people had all around the world.
Did you feel the film captured the New York Times newsroom? There’s a kind of great reverence to the toughness and professionalism in the newspaper business that really came through.
Megan and I are so grateful for the sincerity and professionalism with which the journalism is displayed. There are a lot of on screen depictions of journalists in which we’re depicted as manipulative or doing things for the wrong reasons or sleeping with our sources!
We [as journalists] feel incredible drama in what we do every day. And we’re so grateful to the filmmakers for finding it and sharing it with people. And I know the New York Times can look intimidating or remote as an institution. I hope people really consider this an invitation into the building and into our meetings, and into our way of working and our value system.
And we’re also proud that it’s a vision of a really female New York Times, which was not traditionally the case at this institution for a long time. This is a book and a movie about women as narrators.
“Harvey Weinstein and his representatives were constantly trying to approach me as a Jew,” Kantor said. (The New York Times)
There have been comparisons made between this movie and “All the President’s Men.” One of the striking differences is that those journalists are two male bachelors running around D.C. And this film has scenes of motherhood, of the Shabbat table, of making lunches. What was it like seeing your personal lives reflected on screen?
It’s really true that the Weinstein investigation was kind of born in the crucible of motherhood and Megan and my attempt to combine work with parenting. On the one hand, it’s the most everyday thing in the world, but on the other hand, you don’t see it actually portrayed on screen that much. We’re really honored by the way that throughout the film you see motherhood and work mixing, I think in a way that is so natural despite our obviously pretty stressful circumstances.
I started out alone on the Weinstein investigation, and I called Megan because movie stars were telling me their secrets but they were very reluctant to go on the record. So I had gone some way in persuading and engaging them, but I was looking to make the absolute strongest case for them. So I called Megan. We had both done years of reporting on women and children. Mine involved the workplace more and hers involved sex crimes more, which is part of why everything melded together so well eventually. I wanted to talk to her about what she had said to female victims in the past. But when I reached her, I could hear that something was wrong. And she had just had a baby, and I had had postpartum depression myself. So we talked about it and I gave her the name of my doctor, who I had seen. Then she got treatment. And she not only gave very good advice on that [initial] phone call, but she joined me in the investigation.
I think the theme is responsibility. Our relationship was forged in a sense of shared responsibility, primarily for the work – once we began to understand the truths about Weinstein, we couldn’t allow ourselves to fail. But also Megan was learning to shoulder the responsibility of being a parent, and I had two kids. And so we started this joint dialogue that was mostly about work, but also about motherhood. And I think throughout the film and throughout the real investigation, we felt those themes melding. It’s totally true that my daughter Tali was asking me about what I was doing. It’s very hard to keep secrets from your kid in a New York City apartment, even though I didn’t tell her everything. And Megan and I would go from discussing really critical matters with the investigation to talking about her daughter’s evolving nap schedule. It really felt like we had to get the story and get home to the kids.
And also, we were reporting on our own cohort. A lot of Weinstein victims were and are women in their 40s. And so even though we were very professional with this and we tried to be very professional with the sources, there was an aspect of looking in the mirror. For example, with Laura Madden, who was so brave about going on the record, it was conversations with her own teenage daughters that helped her make her decision.
We didn’t write about this in our book because it was hard to mix the motherhood stuff with this sort of serious reporter-detective story and all the important facts. And we didn’t want to talk about ourselves too much in the book. But the filmmakers captured something that I think is very true. It feels particular to us but also universal. When Zoe [Kazan] is pushing a stroller and taking a phone call at the same time, I suspect lots of people will identify with that. And what I also really like is the grace and dignity with which that’s portrayed.
It must have been surreal, seeing a Hollywood movie about your investigation of Hollywood.
I think part of the power of the film is that it returns the Weinstein investigation to the producer’s medium, but on vastly different terms, with the women in charge. Megan and I are particularly moved by the portrayals of Zelda Perkins, Laura Madden and Rowena Chiu — these former Weinstein assistants are in many ways at the core of the story. They’re everyday people who made the incredibly brave decision to help us, in spite of everything from breast cancer to legal barriers.
Working with the filmmakers was really interesting. They were really committed to the integrity of the story, and they asked a ton of questions, both large and small. Ranging from the really big things about the investigation to these tiny details. Like in the scene where we go to Gwyneth Paltrow’s house and Megan and I discover we’re practically wearing the same dress — those were the actual white dresses that we wore that day. We had to send them in an envelope to the costume department, and they copied the dresses in Zoe and Carey’s sizes and that’s what they’re wearing. There was a strand of extreme fidelity, but they needed some artistic license because it’s a movie. And the movie plays out in the key of emotion.
—
The post Weinstein approached me ‘Jew to Jew’: Jodi Kantor opens up on the ‘She Said’ movie’s Jewish moments appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
US-Israel attack on Iran aims to topple regime
The United States and Israel launched a major attack on Iran early Saturday, with U.S. President Donald Trump declaring his intent to overthrow the regime of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khameini.
In a video statement released by Trump, he address the Iranian people directly. “Bombs will be dropping everywhere,” he said. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed Trump, describing Iran as an “existential threat,” and encouraged the Iranian people “to seize their fate” and overthrow the regime.
In the hours since the attack, explosions have been reported across Tehran and multiple military facilities. State news is also reporting an Israeli strike on a girl’s school has killed more than 50 people, with eyewitness footage showing the school partially destroyed and smoldering.
Israel remains on high alert, with residents who have access to shelters bracing for potential attacks.
Elsewhere in the region, Iranian attacks have been reported in Jordan, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar. Footage circulating on social media appears to show successful Iranian strikes near the center of Abu Dhabi in the UAE, as well as a US naval base in Manama, Bahrain.
Conflicting reports are emerging regarding high-profile Iranian leaders, with one unnamed Israeli official telling N12 News, “We’ll fall off our chair if Khamenei makes a statement live. According to the assessment, he is ‘no longer with us,’ but we are waiting for final confirmation.” Separately, three sources have told Reuters that Iranian Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh was killed in a strike. Neither report has been confirmed at the time of writing.
The post US-Israel attack on Iran aims to topple regime appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel and US go for regime change in Iran, with leaders few trust
TEL AVIV, Israel — We were woken just after 8 a.m. by a siren, followed within minutes by the notification that there were in fact no incoming missiles. It appeared the government had decided to use the alert system as a kind of national alarm clock, to let the country know that the war had begun. For the second time in nine months, Israel had attacked Iran. This time it was in coordination with the United States.
Within the hour we had already been sent to the shelter by an actual missile alert. By midday, we would make that trip five times. The country, as far as one can tell from the stairwells and the WhatsApp groups, is stoic. Irritated, tired, but stoic. This is absurd, people say, but they lace up their shoes and head downstairs anyway. Or to the reinforced safe rooms that the lucky few have.
The arguments for this round of conflict are not, on the surface, overwhelming. After the 12-day war in June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs had been set back for many years, that the major threat to Israel’s existence had been removed. President Donald Trump, after American B-2 bombers joined on the final day, spoke repeatedly of the nuclear threat being “obliterated” at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. He bristled at intelligence assessments suggesting otherwise.
There has been little public evidence that Iran rebuilt that threat in the interim. Netanyahu said around midday Saturday in a recorded radio address that Iran’s new capabilities were being placed underground. Trump, meanwhile, demanded that Iran forswear nuclear weapons; but Tehran has long said it does not seek them, even as it enriched uranium to levels with no civilian justification. No one believes them. But they have been saying it.
In the shelter, I had time to contemplate all this with the same cast of neighbors I got to know rather well in June.
The divorced lawyer and her boyfriend. The mathematics divorcee with her enormous dog, which takes up the space of two folding chairs. The sweet elderly couple who sit holding hands, as if the room were a train platform and they might be separated. The religious French family from upstairs preparing to celebrate a son’s 18th birthday; the mother, improbably, in her finest dress at 9 in the morning. Everyone bleary-eyed. Everyone attempting humor. Some trepidation, but not much.
At one point a commotion erupted. Someone had noticed that a shop in the building had installed an air-conditioning unit in such a way that it partially blocked the emergency exit from the underground shelter. The prospect of being herded underground because of missiles while potentially trapped was not exactly welcome. My wife calmly announced she would deal with the management company first thing Sunday morning. I know her. She will.
It is in rooms like that that the big questions feel both distant and unavoidable. Why now? If the programs were truly crippled in June, what has changed? One possible answer lies not in centrifuges but in politics.
Trump had boxed himself in last month when he told Iranian protesters that “help is on its way.” Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, took him at his word and were killed by the regime’s goons. Trump took heat for having encouraged them and then done nothing. He looked ridiculous, and — to paraphrase The Godfather — a man in his position cannot afford to look ridiculous.
In the interim, the U.S. steadily built up an armada in the region. Ships and planes accumulated in a way that was slow, but deliberate and ultimately overwhelming. It began to look like the kind of force that was not likely to go unused.
The more reasonable argument for assuming the risks of war — casualties, disruption in the oil markets, escalation and so on — is regime change. That idea has a grim history. It rarely works as intended. It is unpredictable, destabilizing, morally fraught. The record in the Middle East is not encouraging. The legal right to do it is debatable at best.
But there are exceptions, and the Islamic Republic, in its 47 years, has made a compelling case for being one.
Its internal repression is ferocious. Protesters are shot or imprisoned in numbers that make gradual reform a fantasy. Short of a palace coup, the Iranian people have little chance of dislodging their rulers on their own.
Moreover, Iran has destabilized the region for decades through proxy militias trying to spread jihadism: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Hezbollah helped prop up Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack ignited a war that left tens of thousands dead in Gaza and over a thousand murdered in Israel. Not every evil in the region can be laid at Iran’s door, but a significant share can, and much of it has victimized fellow Muslims.
There is a wide consensus in Israel that the Iranian regime is a menace. Many Israelis believe that if it fell, it would be good for Israel and good for the Iranian people. They harbor a romantic notion that a democratic Iran would become a partner, even an ally, and that ordinary Iranians would thank Israel for helping to bring about that outcome. Whether that is naive is another matter, but the distinction between regime and people is real in the Israeli mind.
And in what was perhaps the only surprise of the day — for the attack itself was widely telegraphed — Trump set regime change as the true aim of the operation in his comments announcing the strikes. In his characteristic rambling, self-congratulatory style, he urged Iranians to take over their government — and catalogued the crimes of the regime, going all the way back to the 1979-80 hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
This from a man whose National Security Strategy, released in December, downplayed democracy promotion, and who has shown little affection for liberal norms at home or abroad. Many assumed he wanted only some agreement he could spin as a win — yet he instead seems intent on transforming Iran.
Might regime change actually work? Without a ground invasion — which is neither contemplated nor remotely plausible — the odds seem low. Authoritarian systems are designed precisely to absorb shocks. Enough of the regime would have to be symbolically and practically shattered — key figures eliminated, command centers wrecked, the aura of invulnerability broken — that mass protests resume at a scale the authorities cannot contain.
The calculation appears to be that sustained external pressure, combined with visible regime weakness, could tip internal dynamics. A military already stretched by external attack might find itself unable, or unwilling, to suppress millions in the streets. What follows would not be a popular revolution in the romantic sense but something closer to a palace coup: factions within the system deciding survival requires abandoning the clerical leadership.
Trump’s rhetoric suggested precisely this. His call for the Revolutionary Guard to stand down, coupled with promises of amnesty, is an attempt to split the regime from within, to persuade those with guns that their future lies in defecting rather than fighting. It could work — because that is how hated the regime actually is.
It would have been better for any such action to have gotten the green light from the United Nations Security Council. But — even beyond Trump’s disrespect for the organization — that body is paralyzed by the veto power of Russia, Iran’s sometimes ally.
Moreover, all of this would be easier to deal with if the leaderships in Israel and the U.S. were trusted at anywhere near a normal level. But we are dealing with Trump and Netanyahu.
Trump, it need hardly even be said, has made dishonesty a kind of performance art. He is the most determined dissembler to ever hold the American presidency, as far as I can tell. It has become something of a joke, in America and across the world. In a moment like this, it is not a joke. So in a crisis that could reshape the region, there is no reliable way to know if his claims are true.
Something even worse can be said of Netanyahu, who is on trial for bribery and trailing badly in the polls ahead of elections that must be held by October and could come sooner. It is axiomatic for many Israelis that he would do anything to cling to power, including starting another war.
So these two men, each viewed by large portions of their publics as self-interested and manipulative, now preside over a conflict that could be ruinous.
And yet there is another astonishing layer. Trump, who has damaged the standing of the U.S., abandoned Ukraine, expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and rattled NATO with talk of seizing Greenland from Denmark, may be on the verge of a historic achievement. If the Iranian regime were to fall with American assistance, it would rank among the most consequential geopolitical events of the past half-century, perhaps second only to the collapse of Soviet communism. Oddly, I am old enough to have witnessed that as well, as a correspondent for the Associated Press.
Back in the shelter, there is a massive improvement relative to June: Wi-Fi has been installed, thanks to my tireless wife. The dog is still panting, the elderly couple still holds hands, the air-conditioning unit still blocks the exit, the French mother is now checking her phone between sirens.
It is possible to feel two contradictory things at once. This might be a reckless, perhaps even insane action launched by unworthy leaders. And it might, just possibly, change everything for the better.
The post Israel and US go for regime change in Iran, with leaders few trust appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
US, Israel strike Iran: Trump, Netanyahu call for regime change in Tehran as Israelis take shelter
(JTA) — This is a developing story and will be updated.
The United States and Israel jointly launched what U.S. President Donald Trump called “a major military operation” in Iran on Saturday morning, ending weeks of speculation.
Iran immediately retaliated by launching missiles toward Israel and U.S. positions in the Middle East, sending Israelis across the country to bomb shelters for the first time since last June.
Both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated in video addresses that their goal was to topple the Islamic Republic regime that has been in place for nearly 50 years.
“Our joint operation will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands,” Netanyahu said.
“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere,” Trump said. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take this will be probably your only chance for generations.”
Trump cited the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas as one in a series of attacks staged or supported by Iran over decades justifying the campaign, in which he warned U.S. service members could die.
One person was reported injured in a first wave of retaliatory attacks in Israel. Most missiles appeared to have been shot down, with the sounds of explosions resounding in parts of the country. A second wave was reported to be on its way several hours later.
Last year, nearly 30 people in Israel were killed by Iranian missiles during a 12-day war that included a U.S. strike on Iranian targets. Trump said again during his address that the attack had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program” but said the country “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions” since.
U.S. and Iranian negotiators most recently met on Thursday in Geneva. On Friday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told embassy staff that they could leave Israel, urging them to do so “TODAY” if they chose to depart, signaling that the massive troop buildup in the Middle East could soon be deployed against Iran.
In Israel, Ben Gurion Airport has closed; hospitals relocated essential operations underground; and synagogues that had been hosting Shabbat services reconvened in parking decks. The country is set to celebrate Purim, a holiday celebrating the defeat of a Persian ruler who had tried to kill the Jews, starting Monday night.
The post US, Israel strike Iran: Trump, Netanyahu call for regime change in Tehran as Israelis take shelter appeared first on The Forward.