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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.
—
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A retired judge needed four Torahs rescued from Indiana. So he called his rabbi. And his dentist.
Early on a Sunday morning in July a dentist pointed his black Toyota Sequoia south out of the Chicago suburbs, a rented box trailer swaying behind the hitch. In Champaign, Illinois, a rabbi who had spent the night at his mother’s house pulled onto the highway heading east. Their rendezvous: a century-old synagogue in Terre Haute, Indiana. Their mission: get the Torahs out.
Before the day was over, the operation would involve four Torah scrolls, a pair of towering brass menorahs, more than 100 boxes of books, one electric piano and — because even sacred missions deserve a victory lap — a round of golf.
The orders came from Arizona, where a 79-year-old retired judge, recovering from surgery, was running the operation by phone.
That would be Jerry Orbach, who splits his time between Scottsdale and Chicago and has made a second career of rescuing the remnants of shuls from across America. The walls of his Illinois shul, Northbrook Community Synagogue — where he serves as executive vice president — glow with stained glass he has salvaged from seven shuttered congregations across the Midwest.
So when Michael Brown, executive director of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society, called to say that the United Hebrew Congregation in Terre Haute had sold its building — and needed homes for nearly everything inside — Orbach knew exactly what to do, even if he couldn’t do it himself.
“We can’t get rid of Torahs,” he said. “We have to preserve them.”
He couldn’t make the trip. But he had a crew.
The crew
The whole operation was an in-house affair: all four men belong to Northbrook Community Synagogue. Orbach’s regulars are Dr. Michael Farr, 49, a dentist, and Farr’s best friend Jordan Ripstein, the shul’s gabbai and a violin maker who studied theoretical physics in college. The two have history. They once drove through the night to Kingston, New York, to rescue stained glass from a closing synagogue, smoking cigars and talking about life and music the whole way.
Last September, they hauled back 14 crates from the shuttered Beth Achim synagogue in Southfield, Michigan — towering 13-foot stained glass panels that now wait in the Northbrook basement for their next home.
But Ripstein was out of town. So Orbach turned to his bullpen and pulled out a rabbi.
Aaron Braun, 43, has led Northbrook Community Synagogue since it was founded in 2012 as a merger of three congregations — which makes him, in a sense, a professional preserver of shuls that might otherwise have disappeared. He is also long accustomed to his congregant’s obsession. “Everybody goes along with my meshugas,” Orbach said, using the Yiddish word for craziness. “I’m an old man, so they indulge me.”
Braun didn’t need convincing. “The chance to give Torahs a new home and see them brought back to life and used is one of the holiest endeavors we can pursue,” he said.
The extraction
The congregation they came to help is the oldest in Indiana still in continuous operation. This year, the United Hebrew Congregation celebrated 175 years in Terre Haute — a city whose Jewish community peaked at more than 1,000 people in the late 1940s, when Jewish families owned some 45 local businesses, including three of the four downtown department stores.
Today, the city’s Jewish population is estimated at just under 100. The Reform congregation, down to 45 member families, sold its building in mid-July. “We had to sell in order to continue operating,” said Scott Skillman, its immediate past president. The new owners have said they plan to use the building, known for its cavernous sanctuary and sweeping stained glass windows, as a wedding venue.
It is a familiar story across the state. Wendy Soltz, a Ball State University historian who led the Indiana Synagogue Mapping Project, has documented 66 purpose-built synagogues in Indiana dating back to 1865. Twenty-four have already been demolished.
The Terre Haute building held what the congregation couldn’t take to its smaller new locale. Nearly all of it was in the basement, down seven steps from a side door: four steps, a 90-degree turn, then three more. Farr worked a two-wheel dolly up and down that turn for more than two hours, stacking some 150 boxes of books in the trailer alongside two podiums and a pair of cast-brass menorahs, each more than six feet tall and about 150 pounds.
“We were a pretty sweaty mess,” Braun said.
When the crew opened the ark they found the four scrolls bare. In the tumult of moving out, the mantles had come off; someone had fashioned ropes of felt around them instead. “Not even gartelekh,” Braun said, referring to the sashes that traditionally bind a Torah.
The scrolls, the crew decided, would not ride in the trailer with the boxes. Braun laid them down across the back seat of his SUV and covered them with tallitot, the prayer shawls tucked around them so they couldn’t shift — “even, God forbid, in an accident,” he said. A Torah is the rare object Jews treat like a person: You stand when it passes. You kiss it as it goes by. If one is dropped, the whole congregation fasts. Braun drove north with four of them sleeping in his back seat.
Braun, examining what he could, was impressed by their condition: the calligraphy of at least three of the four looked to be in fairly good shape. The fourth scroll is a mystery: written in a slanted, old-fashioned hand, its lines ragged. “It’s not even full justified,” he said. “It’s wild.”
The getaway
The trailer was full. The Torahs were secure. And one more passenger had joined the convoy: a Yamaha Clavinova electric piano the Terre Haute congregation no longer needed, destined for Braun’s mother’s house in Champaign.
Which is how the getaway came to include a detour. The two men dropped off the piano, then headed to the golf course where Braun grew up playing and got in 18 holes.
“Dr. Farr played some of the best golf I’ve ever seen him play,” the rabbi said.
Farr, a beginner, doesn’t dispute it. “I had a good round. I definitely played better than I normally play,” he said. “Probably by virtue of the fact that we saved four Torahs that day.”
At some point a crop duster buzzed low over their cars — “a not unusual reality of downstate Illinois,” Braun said. Nobody flinched. It had been that kind of day.
Farr rolled back into the Northbrook parking lot around 10 p.m., where the synagogue’s president, Ben Resnick, was waiting in the dark to help unload. The boxes went into the social hall, stacked against the wall. The next morning, Farr was back at his dental practice — “the yank and pull,” as he calls it.
The social hall, though, is only a way station. The items aren’t necessarily staying at Northbrook; the congregation is a holding ground while Orbach hunts for their next home. He plans to call Nik Jakobs, the Jewish farmer building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield in rural Illinois, about two hours west, to see if he wants any of the pieces for his sanctuary. He also will contact the Jewish Community Legacy Project, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that helps find homes for sacred objects from downsizing and closing congregations.
The sorting has already begun. Brown hopes any documents or photographs in the boxes will go to the Indiana Jewish Historical Society’s archives. A scribe is coming to examine the four scrolls and determine what repairs they need before they can be read from again.
Brown, who set the whole thing in motion with a phone call, sees it as “one of the few small happy threads from a sad story of Jewish decline in the crossroads of America.” He calls Orbach “an unsung Midwestern Jewish hero.”
Back in Terre Haute, the congregation is still holding services every Friday night, in space rented from a Unitarian church — a sanctuary with no crosses and, as it happens, a few Stars of David. “It’s not a closing,” Skillman said. “It’s just a shrinking of our footprint.”
And in Northbrook, four Torahs rest in the social hall. Orbach turns 80 in September. His crew is waiting for the next call.
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Conservative rabbis just told interfaith couples they don’t count — again
Acting improv students learn a fundamental tool called “Yes. . . And.” As you step into a scene, you take what you are given, you don’t ignore it, you don’t try to change it. YES, this is what I have to work with. Then comes the AND: here’s how I build on it.
The guidance issued last week from the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards giving guidance on supporting interfaith families got as far as “Yes,” but dropped the ball on “And.”
The committee’s statement, known as an Omnibus Teshuvah, recommended measures that opened the doors for interfaith families to be included in many life-cycle, religious and communal events — but declined to endorse a measure called for by many families: permitting Conservative rabbis to marry a Jew to someone who is not Jewish.
Let’s start with the “Yes!” The Conservative movement has definitively acknowledged and accepted the reality that many Jewish families are interfaith families. While this has been so for decades, the stated position since 1989 sent them a harsh and strongly disapproving message: “The Conservative movement has been committed to discouraging both the idea and the act of intermarriage.”
The Rabbinical Assembly emphasized its commitment to Jewish law, but included a statement that tolerance might “‘encourage others who are so inclined to intermarry’ without consequence.”
Those consequences were in effect tocut the interfaith couple and family out of Jewish communal life, creating bitterness, pain, and family rupture on the one side, and effectively ensuring that Judaism was diminished on the other.
In fact, one of the anecdotes I often share about why I chose to work with interfaith families and support their decisions is the time that I witnessed a Bat Mitzvah — who was raised in a Jewish home, kept kosher, had respect for Shabbat, and had attended Hebrew School her whole life — stood alone at the Bimah, because her only surviving parent had never converted to Judaism. Instead of being the proud and joyous moment it should have been, she was isolated from her father, the man who had raised her Jewishly and brought her to this milestone. My heart broke for both of them, and my shame of being even partially complicit moved me to examine and change my perspective. In the fullness of time, the RA has realized that creating tsuris at a time of joy is unacceptable. The new guidance explicitly says that that father can stand on the bimah. Mazel tov..
Deserving of equal praise, if not more, is the decision to allow grieving families with Jewish connections avenues to Jewish practices in mourning that provide comfort, strength and faith. This too is progress: A family death is not a time to wag one’s finger and metaphorically tell the mourner that they have to sleep in the bed that they made.
And representing the other end of the life cycle, a rabbi may now congratulate an interfaith family for the birth of a child. Being able to celebrate the advent of a baby into the household should always have been an open avenue of clergy communication, and that it is now is nothing but a positive change.
This turnaround is no small feat and deserves its recognition. The Rabbinical Assembly has identified and addressed many of the strictures and attitudes that previously diminished the enjoyment of a joyous event or added pain for a grief-stricken individual. An interfaith family is no longer subject to “consequences,” to use a term as stated in the 1989 decision — mostly.
All the life-cycle events that interfaith families have struggled with are at long last within the welcome embrace of the Conservative movement, save one: The wedding itself. The fig leaf in the forms of a misheberach (a blessing) by the rabbi either before or after the wedding and the blessing of the home the couple is creating does nothing but call attention to the movement’s disparagement of the creation of interfaith families. The movement is in effect saying: “We are repulsed by your decision to marry outside the strictures of our interpretation of Judaism, but we will not exact revenge upon you for doing so.” Small comfort.
Here is where the “and” can still come in — and where the Conservative movement itself has paved the way for it to happen.
The religious law prohibition against interfaith marriages derives from a verse in Deuteronomy 7:3 “You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons.”
This biblical statement has evolved from meaning marriage with the seven nations proscribed in the Torah to general intermarriage.
However, as recently as the 19th century, the renowned scholar Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch noted that the prohibition was based on the presumption that the resulting family would be estranged from the Jewish community. That presumption was based on a self-fulfilling prophecy that an interfaith family would be shunned, and therefore not engage with their community.
The committee of the Rabbinical Assembly fulfills this prophecy as it concludes the new guidance with this hurtful assertion: “The role of Conservative/Masorti clergy on the wedding day remains limited, but that specific day is only one small aspect of the establishment and growth of a family.” Relegating a wedding to be a small aspect to the ‘establishment and growth of a family’ is patently untrue, as evidenced by the great importance society at large, and Jewish society in particular place on this event.
The RA, by sticking with the prohibition against interfaith marriage, is perpetuating the very estrangement that Rav Hirsch posits is the entire motivation for opposing interfaith marriage. Nevertheless, that very foundation, the estrangement from the community, is no longer a barrier unless we want it to be. The Omnibus Teshuvah maps out how an interfaith family can be welcomed into the community and how they can engage in almost every other Jewish life cycle event and communal engagement.
Why then, does the RA persist in condemning the act of interfaith marriage?
The movement itself already has the religious law tools they can use to find a way forward. The arguments the RA used to pave the way for LGTBQ individuals, couples and families to be integrated into Jewish society are equally valid here. The first principle they used was that of Dor dor V’doroshav, that every generation is obligated to interpret the Torah in their terms — in effect, that the accumulated knowledge and experience of Judaism over time has bearing on rabbinical decisions. In terms of interfaith marriage, the accumulated knowledge and experience is demonstrating that interfaith families retain a Jewish identity and desire to remain a part of the community. Intentional interfaith families show dedication and great consideration to incorporating Judaism into their lives, and that this is not a new phenomenon.
In a decision two decades ago embracing LGBTQ Jews, Rabbi Elliot Dorff and colleagues leaned on the concept of human dignity, kavod ha briot, quoting the Talmudic stricture: “So great is human dignity that it supersedes a negative commandment of the Torah.” They point out that living in humiliation violates this idea.
Perhaps most powerfully, we read that homosexual marriage is “understood to be a profound desire by gay and lesbian Jews to sanctify their lives and establish faithful families guided by the light of Torah.” Should that “profound desire” within an interfaith marriage not carry equal weight?
Today, by continuing to deny legitimacy to an interfaith marriage, the RA relegates the couple to a lesser status, belittling them for following their emotional guidance, and denying them their full humanity.
The RA has issued some remarkable guidance in this Omnibus Responsum. YES! The many parents and grandparents who will receive with gratitude the congratulations on the birth of their children, the families who will be allowed to be united at the bimah at a B’Mitzvah, the mourners who will find strength and comfort from clergy during their time of grief — they will all be positively affected by the new permissions and guidance. These are concessions, but important ones.
In spite of the limits of this guidance I hold out hope for the “AND” that is to come. Not just the recognition that interfaith marriages happen, but the inherent truth that they can be a joyful part of the Jewish experience and a positive force in their community.
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Justice Department pledges action on antisemitic hate crimes in New York as it recognizes Ari Halberstam murder as civil rights case
More than 30 years after Ari Halberstam was killed in one of New York’s deadliest antisemitic attacks, the U.S. Justice Department has formally acknowledged that if his murder had happened today, it would be investigated as a federal hate crime and civil rights violation.
At the same time, the Justice Department also pledged that it would be devoting resources to investigating and prosecuting hate crimes across New York as antisemitic attacks continue to climb in New York City.
NYPD statistics released this week show that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims. In addition, anti-Jewish incidents increased 53% in July compared with the same month last year.
Halberstam was 16 when he was murdered in 1994 when Rashid Baz, a Lebanese-born cab driver, opened fire on a van carrying Lubavitcher yeshiva students across the Brooklyn Bridge. Baz was convicted of murder and sentenced to 141 years in prison, where he died in 2023.
Because the attack was not immediately recognized as an act of terrorism and later rejected as part of a conspiracy, Ari’s mother, Devorah Halberstam, for decades fought to have her son’s killing recognized as an antisemitic hate crime and a federal civil rights matter.
“There is no question that if the murder of your son, Ari Halberstam, had occurred today, we would investigate it and seek to prosecute it as a federal hate crime,” wrote former U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a letter dated July 23, one of his final acts before becoming director of national intelligence on Monday. The acknowledgment came weeks after Clayton met with Devorah Halberstam, who co-founded the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. It expands on remarks Clayton delivered in June at an NYU Law School conference on combating hate crimes. “I have discussed these matters with my successor, Jamie McDonald, and we are fully aligned,” Clayton wrote.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about what specific steps the office is taking under McDonald’s leadership to address the recent increase in antisemitic hate crimes across the city.
Halberstam, who is credited with helping draft New York state’s first anti-terrorism laws and has spent decades facilitating the training of law enforcement officers on combating terrorism and hate crimes, said the letter gives her hope that the federal government remains committed to confronting antisemitic violence.
“With hatred on the rise nationally and internationally, I am deeply concerned about the safety of Jewish New Yorkers,” she said in a statement. “I will continue to fight to ensure that no other mother has to bury her child because of hatred, as I did.”
Earlier this year, Halberstam hosted Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. Since taking office, Mamdani has come under scrutiny from Jewish leaders over his handling of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests. Some Israeli officials have accused the mayor of fueling antisemitism through his sharp criticism of Israel.
In a statement on Monday, Mamdani called the rise in antisemitic hate crimes “unacceptable” and pointed to an 800% increase in funding for the city’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. “The work to uproot antisemitism out of this city is one that will continue,” Mamdani said, “ until we see hate crimes come to an end in the city.”
JTA contributed to this report
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