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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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AI, Judaism and what to do about ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Communism’
In the mid-2010s, journalist Aaron Bastani coined the phrase “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” arguing that automation, AI, and synthetic biology would eventually make work and material scarcity essentially obsolete. Eventually this idea became a manifesto envisioning a post-scarcity, post-capitalist world.
The Internet took notice, and by the summer of 2015, Bastani’s earnest manifesto had spawned millions of trollish variations (including my personal favorite, “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” — the ‘gay’ and ‘space’ parts pointing to different ways to deal with overpopulation on Earth). As such things usually are, the memes were half-joking, half-serious, pointing both to a utopian vision of the future and to the impossibility of ever achieving it.
Eleven years later, though, the utopia may be at hand — though, as we’ve all heard by now, it could be more of a dystopia.
We’ve all read the takes: AI is taking our jobs, data centers are polluting the heartland, and, oh yeah, there’s a 10% chance that rogue AI agents will wipe out life on Earth. Of these three very different risks, Mira Fox recently wrote about the third from a Jewish perspective, and many pundits have commented on the second. I want to focus on the first one — on what happens to society when the value and availability of work changes so radically,and on how Jewish traditions may end up being of value.
On, in other words, Fully Automated Luxury Jewish Communism.
Let’s start in the present, when, as AI boosters are fond of saying, LLMs are the least-capable that they will ever be, yet have already radically altered the fields in which my husband and I both work. Jobs are already disappearing and highly qualified “white collar” workers are finding it harder and harder to get new ones. I’d guess that 90% of the work I did as a young lawyer could be done by 2026-level LLMs, with review by a senior attorney. And that’s today.
It is, at best, extremely unclear how our society is supposed to cope with the economic and social-spiritual-psychological consequences of this.
Economically, most AI-boosters say we’ll need some kind of Universal Basic Income (UBI) to support all those laid-off actuaries, coders, call center operators, researchers, and technical writers. Never mind that many of these same AI boosters are libertarians opposed to the state doing anything at all, and that many others are contributing mightily to Republican politicians who are opposed even to raising the minimum wage or expanding healthcare coverage. These are the politicians who will usher in UBI socialism for all?
But the question is deeper than economics. When the work you do is done by a machine, who are you?
After all, work isn’t just about putting food on the table; our identities are often tied to our jobs, and, more generally, to our capacity to provide for ourselves and our families. (For traditionalists, much of this is still gendered — men do the providing — but not for most progressives.) Even if our material needs are somehow met by UBI and the explosion in productivity that AI is supposed to bring about, what about our non-material needs: our need for purpose, meaning and identity?
Lest this sound vague or ‘soft,’ consider that what philosopher Jon Vervaeke has called the ‘Meaning Crisis’ animates much of our contemporary politics today. MAGA populism is, in large part, a response to the erosion (real or perceived) in American conceptions of communal identity, economic opportunity, gender roles, and religion – i.e., the Meaning Crisis. Yes, much of MAGA’s resentment is driven by economics: by the hollowing out of the American middle class in the wake of globalization and other factors. And a lot of it is driven by racism. But much of it is also about meaning: what it means to be an American, to be a man, to be white, to be Christian. And Donald Trump has brilliantly, intuitively channeled the rage at those societal changes into a hopeless, nihilistic patriotism — the Lost Cause for the 21st century.
The point is, “soft” concerns often drive our politics. Sure, it’s the economy, but also what economic dislocation means to people who experience it. And that meaning is as much spiritual, for lack of a better term, as it is financial.
From my vantage point, as a rabbi/journalist/psychedelics scholar/meditation teacher, it seems obvious that we are headed for a collective crisis even more massive than the ones we have already experienced. In a sense, AI is to white-collar work what globalization, de-unionization, and technology was to blue-collar work. Twenty years ago, it was the factories that were closing. Now, it’s the law offices cutting back on hiring. What is supposed to happen next?
From that same vantage point, it seems equally obvious that, as a society, there will need to be significant reorientation toward non-economic forms of value. Of course, these exist already: people find meaning in family, religion, culture, creativity, sports, hobbies, and a thousand other interests. It’s not like we’re starting from scratch. But consider how many people in your life (present company included) also derive meaning from work, and what will happen when that is taken away.
Religion, in its broadest possible sense, will almost certainly grow in response. Already, we’ve seen some of this in conservative quarters — converts to Catholicism like JD Vance and Peter Thiel, for example, or even the broad religiosity of Joe Rogan. But Capital-R Religion’s price of admission may be too high for many people: belief in God, conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, and all the myths and stories that seem preposterous if taken literally.
But there is also what I’ve called lower-case-r religion: forms of communal, ethical, and spiritual cohesion that are less about God, dogma, and obligation and more about the sacred in everyday life, rituals that bring us together, and practices that help us to grow ethically and spiritually.
In other words, what a lot of liberal Judaism, at its best, is already about.
A majority of non-Orthodox Judaism is already what Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie has called “God-optional” — it may have some general notion of the universe as sacred (I once wrote a book about that), and may maintain traditional God-language in liturgy and text, but it’s not focused on belief in an old man in the sky or obedience to Him for fear of punishment. Rather, as I wrote about in these pages in 2009, it’s focused on what religion does: how it can nourish the soul, teach ethical values, mark the passages of time, and bring people together in communities of meaning.
DZ Kalman, a leading theorist on Judaism and artificial intelligence, told me that “neither Judaism nor any other religion has a ready-to-hand answer for what to do when a chunk of the world’s jobs is suddenly no longer necessary. We have thoughts about the value of work, but those ideas are premised on a world where human labor is necessary to keep society running. We are not yet ready for a ‘time that is wholly Shabbat,’” a metaphor for the messianic age.
Yet, Kalman continued, “Shabbat is fundamental here. Humans can simply be; AI (for the moment) cannot. We as a society are not good at championing the value of presence, which is core to the Shabbat experience.”
But soon, we are going to have to be. Because what is “fully-automated luxury Jewish communism” if not a time that is wholly Shabbat?
What “religion” looks like in its particulars will vary with every person who experiences it. For some, it may mean a recommitment to seemingly non-religious activities: rescuing animals is ‘religious’ in this sense, as is throwing elaborate parties, seeing films, writing poetry, or, of course, raising a family. For others, it may well be the full traditional package, which excels at providing holistic systems of meaning. And for me, it will continue to mean a combination of spiritual practice (meditation, psychedelics, ritual), family life and political activism. Judaism and Jewishness already encompasses all of these things; just peruse the weekly schedule of a mainstream suburban synagogue, and you’ll find most of them already.
Personally, among those various possibilities, I’m interested in whether we’ll see a Jewish ‘archaic revival’ — a term coined by psychedelic theorist Terrence McKenna to describe a resurgence in ‘primitive’, non-rational ways of relating to the great mystery of the human condition. I’m excited by that possibility, which will likely be accelerated by psychedelics in particular (if you haven’t yet, please read the ‘Jewish Journeys’ study which showed how psychedelic experience super-charged people’s interest in spirituality). There are plenty of risks as well: Contrary to hippie myths, spirituality does not make one more politically liberal, and often makes people more particularistic. But I’m intrigued by an embodied Judaism newly revitalized to meet the needs of a post-work future.
Of course, that’s only one Jewish path, and not the most popular one. The broader point is that as work recedes in importance and society faces radical and destabilizing changes, we are going to need more and better ways to understand ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Which, for all its shortcomings, Judaism has been exploring for around 3,000 years.
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Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia after terror attack on board
(JTA) — A Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after passengers reported that an altercation broke out between two pilots. Israeli officials are describing the incident as a terrorist attack and passengers say they intervened to restrain a man who had attacked one of the pilots.
The flight, carrying more than 100 Israeli passengers, was diverted while flying over Jordanian airspace and eventually landed at Tabuk Airport in northern Saudi Arabia, an Israeli official to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
An Israeli official briefed the media and was quoted by Israel’s Channel 12 as saying that one pilot stabbed the other and attempted to “do a 9/11” — either by hijacking the plane and flying it toward Israel or crashing it. The official said that a “dramatic disaster was prevented.”
According to accounts from passengers posted on social media and reports by Israeli media, the co-pilot attacked the captain and attempted to take control of the aircraft. At least two people were injured in the incident. The entire incident lasted about an hour and a half.
“We are on the flight from Dubai. We took control of the flight. There was an attacker with a knife who stabbed one of the pilots,” passenger Itzhak Liber said in a Facebook video. “A few of us jumped in and pulled him out of the cockpit. Everything is OK now. The terrorist is neutralized. There is a pilot who is seriously injured.”
“It was tough. Everything is covered in blood,” Liber added.
Another passenger, appearing in a video posted to social media with blood visible on his face, said the passengers were in the middle of a hijacking and had restrained the attacker as the plane prepared to land. In another video, several passengers said they were protecting the pilot.
A third passenger told Israel’s Channel 12, “There were moments when we were sure this was the end.”
Saudi authorities said the two pilots were taken to a hospital after sustaining injuries, according to international media reports. Flydubai, which is owned by the United Arab Emirates, has acknowledged that there was an “incident” that led to the diversion of the flight. It stressed that the plane landed safely and that all passengers were safe. UAE officials had not commented on the incident as of publication.
Data from Flightradar24 showed the aircraft descending roughly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds during the incident. The plane subsequently diverted from its route and landed in Tabuk.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had held consultations and was monitoring developments. “Following concerns over an aviation incident, the prime minister held consultations on the matter and followed developments,” Netanyahu’s office said. “The incident is under control, and all measures are now being taken to return the Israeli passengers safely to Israel.”
Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have formal diplomatic relations, but the two countries maintain ties. This is not the first time a flight carrying Israeli passengers has landed in Saudi Arabia.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a post on X that there had been an attempt to “crash” the aircraft and “murder 180 Israelis.” He called for Israel to hold accountable the “state or terrorist organization” responsible for the incident.
This is a developing story.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia after terror attack on board appeared first on The Forward.
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Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust
(JTA) — James Fishback, a fierce critic of Israel and a far-right politician, offered scathing remarks about the Jewish state and likened abortion to the Holocaust during an address at the University of Mississippi on Tuesday evening.
Fishback, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate in Florida, recalled that earlier this summer the Combat Antisemitism Movement flagged as antisemitic one of his X posts describing abortion as a holocaust.
“Abortion is a holocaust, and by every single historical metric available, it was worse than the other one,” Fishback said, claiming that “61 million children have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in 1973.”
He also had harsh words for the state of Israel. “It is time for President Trump to call [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and cut him off. We must decouple from Israel to save America,” he added.
Fishback was speaking at a Turn Up the Mic forum arranged by members of the University of Mississippi chapter of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Slamming immigration policies on both sides of the aisle — Republicans for too few mass deportations and Democrats for an influx of foreign workers — Fishback declared, “It’s time to stand up and tell both parties that no, American jobs are for Americans only.”
He noted, however, that making such demands could result in a person being labeled a racist or misogynist, and that “if you’re really bad they’ll call you an antisemite.” Stressing that he condemns “all forms of religious hatred,” he maintained that “the most virulent” type is the hostility “against Christians in this country.”
Fishback blamed Israel and the inability of the U.S. to “tell them no” for drawing the country into the war with Iran. That war, he argued, has pushed gas prices and Treasury yields higher.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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