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Documentary explores the ‘Talmudic’ relationship between writer Robert Caro and his famous longtime editor
(New York Jewish Week) — Bob Gottlieb, who as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker ushered into print some of the 20th-century’s most accomplished writers — Nora Ephron, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, John Cheever and Ray Bradbury, to name a few — believes editing is a service job, one that should go unnoticed by the reader.
And yet, it is the relationship between editor and writer that his daughter Lizzie Gottlieb, a documentary filmmaker, explores in her latest film, “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022 and is now screening at theaters across the country.
Lizzie’s documentary sets out to explore the sometimes tense but ultimately caring relationship between her father, Bob, and one of his longest running authors, Robert Caro, who over the course of 50 years has produced “only” five major books: “The Power Broker,” a classic biography of urban planner Robert Moses, and four volumes of “The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson.”
Jews born and raised in Manhattan, Caro and Gottlieb have worked together since Gottlieb helped cut 350,000 words out of the first draft of “The Power Broker,” bringing it down to a book that ultimately ran 1,338 pages when it was published in 1974.
The thing they squabble over most often? Semicolons, still. Or, maybe, Caro’s overuse of the word “looms.”
The film, seven years in the making, takes on the ways Moses shaped New York City, the mysteries of LBJ’s political power, the sausage-making of bestselling books and the idiosyncrasies of two workaholics. It is also a story of two now elderly men — Caro is 87, Gottlieb is 91 — in what Bob Gottlieb calls an “actuarial” contest to finish Caro’s highly anticipated fifth volume of his Johnson biography.
“My dad and I are very close. We’re in constant contact with each other. If something funny happens, I call my dad. If something sad or confusing happens, I’ll call him. We’re just in each other’s lives all the time, so I didn’t feel that there was a secret I needed to uncover or something unexamined in our relationship,” said director Lizzie Gottlieb, who also teaches documentary filmmaking at the New York Film Academy.
“But the one thing I really knew nothing about in his life was his relationship with Bob Caro,” she said. “Because it was so different from anything else, and it was so kind of private. So really, the whole movie is the process of me understanding something that I didn’t understand before.”
The New York Jewish Week recently caught up with Gottlieb to talk about the making of the film, what it was like growing up in a high-profile family and how Jewishness impacts the work of the two men.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Lizzie Gottlieb is a documentary filmmaker who previously directed “Today’s Man” (2008) and “Romeo Romeo” (2012).
New York Jewish Week: You’ve been working on this movie for seven years. When did you realize you needed to make this movie and how did it get from start to finish?
For a long time, people would say to me, “You should make a film about your father.” I have an incredible father. He’s done a lot of great things. He’s interesting and funny. But I just thought, a film whose message is “look how great my dad is” is not a movie that anybody wants to see.
And then my father was given some award and Bob Caro was presenting the award. Bob Caro gave a speech about working with my dad over what was then 45 years. He talked about how he needs him, and he respects him and how they’re so productive. Then he started talking about their arguments. Somebody in the audience asked what they fought about and he said, “We have very different feelings about the semicolon.” Everybody erupted into laughs and it just hit me like a bolt of lightning. I thought, “This is the movie, this is the story.”
I wanted a story that had forward momentum and had something big at stake. A film about two men in their 60s who had done a lot of great stuff is not that interesting. But a film about two men who are hovering around 90 and are still in it, and engaged in their work, who have a dedication and passion and are in a race against time to finish their life’s work, felt really, really compelling to me.
People say, “Are you sure you should be wasting [Caro’s] time with a movie? He needs to be writing.” My producer Jen Small said we should put on the poster, “No Lyndon Johnson books were harmed in the making of this film.”
Do you think you had a perspective that made you the best person to try and talk about their relationship and document it, or was it challenging to make the leap of them being willing to open up to you?
There was definitely a pursuit of them. I called my father and I was like, “I have the best idea ever. I’m going to make a film about you and Robert Caro.” He said, “No way. Absolutely not. Never. It would not be good for our relationship.”
I just kept pestering and pestering and pestering him. Finally, he said I could call Bob Caro but he would say no and of course Bob Caro did initially say no. Then he said that he’d seen another film of mine and I could come and speak to him. Eventually, Caro said, “I’ve never seen a film about a writer and an editor, and I think this could be meaningful. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen this before.” So he let me start, but he had this kind of hilarious condition, which was that he didn’t want to ever appear in the same room as my father. That seemed funny and a little maddening and sort of endearing. It also seemed like an irresistible challenge to try to make a buddy film where they don’t appear in the same room as each other. A woman came to a screening recently and she said, “It’s a love story, and they don’t get together until the last scene.”
They both say that somehow the making of this movie has brought them closer together and that they have developed a real friendship after 50 years. Maybe just having to articulate what their relationship has meant to each other has made them appreciate it more.
What was it like to grow up in your household, with your father as this major editor and your mother (actress Maria Tucci) on Broadway?
I grew up in a really incredible household. My mother’s an actress, my father’s a publisher and editor. Our house was this kind of vibrant, boisterous household that was always filled with eccentric, incredible people — actors and writers. My dad’s writers would come for dinner and then my mother would go off and do a play on Broadway and then come back at midnight and make another dinner. It was incredible. So I feel that both of their work was kind of integrated into our life and into our family. All of his writers were really like family members, except for Bob Caro, who never came over and who I never met. I think that there’s something particular and peculiar about their relationship that they needed to stay apart and only come together over work. I guess that was something that intrigued me and that’s part of why I wanted to make the movie.
“Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” (Courtesy Tribeca Film Festival)
The Jewishness in the film is a bit more implicit, though you discuss it when talking about their upbringings. How do you think their Jewish identities have impacted their work?
I don’t want to presume to speak for either of them about their Jewishness. I know they both very strongly identify as New York Jews, which probably means something slightly different to each of them, but I think it’s essential to their definitions of themselves. Their humor may be particularly Jewish as well. David Remnick uses a word at the end of the movie, where he says Caro needs to have “sitzfleisch” in order to finish the book. It’s this Yiddish [and German] word that means the ability to sit for long, long periods of time and apply yourself to something. I think that that is something that these two guys have: It’s almost a Talmudic focus on their craft, and without that they wouldn’t be who they are. So to the extent that that’s a Jewish quality, I think that’s essential to their being, to their achievements. There’s something like a Talmudic scholar in going over all these things, the industriousness and the empathy as well, this sort of looking at a thing from all sides and dedicating yourself to this pursuit.
Bonus question: You briefly show the various eccentric collections your dad has, including plastic handbags and kitschy Israeli record albums from the ’60s and ’70s. What is that about?
Yes, he has a lot of collections. He also has a collection of macramé owls. There are many that are not in the movie. Maybe that’s a Talmudic thing as well, like a deep dive into whatever it is that is interesting to him. He says that every subject gets more interesting the deeper you get into it. When something strikes him as charming or funny or curious, he goes all the way with it. My mother doesn’t love them. There’s a little bit of a power struggle there, but he wins. You grow up with something and you don’t really think about it. But I knew I had to find a way to put this in the movie. People kept saying it’s irrelevant, it’s to the side, but I knew I had to because it’s so weird and says so much about him.
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Cyber Threats Spike 150% Since Oct. 2023, Israeli Healthcare Most Vulnerable
A hooded man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. Photo: Reuters / Kacper Pempel / Illustration.
i24 News – Four years after the cyberattack that crippled Hillel Yaffe Hospital, the vulnerabilities of Israel’s healthcare system remain glaring. Since the outbreak of the war in October 2023, Israel’s digital domain has turned into a front line: by year’s end, authorities recorded 3,380 cyberattacks, a 150% surge compared to previous years.
More than 800 of them carried “significant damage potential,” according to ynet.
Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report places Israel as the world’s third-most targeted country after the United States and the United Kingdom. It is also the leading target in the Middle East and Africa, absorbing more than 20% of attacks in the region.
Iran remains the most aggressive adversary, directing roughly 64% of its cyber activity at Israel in attempts to gather intelligence, disrupt services, and spread propaganda.
The techniques used are familiar but highly effective: exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities, using leaked or stolen credentials, and launching basic phishing schemes that grant direct access to internal networks. Despite the prominent role of state-linked actors, financial gain still drives most activity: data theft accounts for 80% of attacks, and more than half involve ransomware.
For Amir Preminger, CTO of the Israeli critical-infrastructure security firm Claroty, the scale of the threat can no longer be ignored. His team has tracked 136 claimed attacks over the past three years, including 34 aimed at essential infrastructure and eight targeting healthcare systems. “Hospitals face the same risks as any organization, but their rapid digitalization leaves them uniquely exposed,” he warns.
The exploited weaknesses are often depressingly basic: weak or reused passwords, overdue software updates, and outdated systems. Preminger identifies two main types of state-sponsored operations: high-impact attacks designed to cause maximum shock, potentially endangering patients, and long-term infiltration efforts intended to quietly siphon off sensitive medical data.
Artificial intelligence is amplifying the threat. “AI tools are enabling inexperienced attackers to scale up quickly,” Preminger says. Some autonomous agents can already execute complex sequences of cyber operations, while healthcare institutions adopt AI faster than they can secure it.
Despite the escalating danger, Preminger argues that regulation has fallen behind. The state possesses advanced cyber capabilities but has limited authority to enforce standards or assist private-sector organizations.
The path forward, he says, must include education, awareness programs, financial support, and mandatory baseline security requirements, before the next major attack hits the core of Israel’s healthcare system.
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Exclusive: DOGE ‘Doesn’t Exist’ with Eight Months Left on its Charter
Elon Musk holds up a chainsaw onstage during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, US, February 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard/File Photo
US President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump’s pledge to slash the government’s size but which critics say delivered few measurable savings.
“That doesn’t exist,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE’s status.
It is no longer a “centralized entity,” Kupor added, in the first public comments from the Trump administration on the end of DOGE.
The agency, set up in January, made dramatic forays across Washington in the early months of Trump’s second term to rapidly shrink federal agencies, cut their budgets or redirect their work to Trump priorities. The OPM, the federal government’s human resources office, has since taken over many of DOGE’s functions, according to Kupor and documents reviewed by Reuters.
At least two prominent DOGE employees are now involved with the National Design Studio, a new body created through an executive order signed by Trump in August. That body is headed by Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, and Trump’s order directed him to beautify government websites.
Gebbia was part of billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE team while DOGE employee Edward Coristine, nicknamed “Big Balls,” encouraged followers on his X account to apply to join.
The fading away of DOGE is in sharp contrast to the government-wide effort over months to draw attention to it, with Trump, his advisers and cabinet secretaries posting about it on social media. Musk, who led DOGE initially, regularly touted its work on his X platform and at one point brandished a chainsaw to advertise his efforts to cut government jobs.
“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” Musk said, holding the tool above his head at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, in February.
DOGE claimed to have slashed tens of billions of dollars in expenditures, but it was impossible for outside financial experts to verify that because the unit did not provide detailed public accounting of its work.
“President Trump was given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government, and he continues to actively deliver on that commitment,” said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston in an email to Reuters.
TRUMP OFFICIALS HAVE BEEN SIGNALING DOGE’S DEMISE
Trump administration officials have not openly said that DOGE no longer exists, even after Musk’s public feud with Trump in May. Musk has since left Washington.
Trump and his team have nevertheless signaled its demise in public since this summer, even though the US president signed an executive order earlier in his term decreeing that DOGE would last through July 2026.
In statements to reporters, Trump often talks about DOGE in the past tense. Acting DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason, whose background is in healthcare tech, formally became an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy in March, according to a court filing, in addition to her role with DOGE. Her public statements have largely focused on her HHS role.
Republican-led states, including Idaho and Florida, meanwhile are creating local entities similar to DOGE.
A government-wide hiring freeze – another hallmark of DOGE – is also over, Kupor said.
Trump on his first day in office barred federal agencies from bringing on new employees, with exceptions for positions his team deemed necessary to enforce immigration laws and protect public safety. He later said DOGE representatives must approve any other exceptions, adding that agencies should hire “no more than one employee for every four” that depart.
“There is no target around reductions” anymore, Kupor said.
FORMER DOGE EMPLOYEES MOVE ON TO NEW ROLES
DOGE staff have also taken on other roles in the administration. Most prominent is Gebbia, whom Trump tasked with improving the “visual presentation” of government websites.
So far, his design studio has launched websites to recruit law enforcement officers to patrol Washington, D.C., and advertise the president’s drug pricing program. Gebbia declined an interview with Reuters via a spokesperson.
Zachary Terrell, part of the DOGE team given access to government health systems in the early days of Trump’s second term, is now chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services. Rachel Riley, who had the same access according to court filings, is now chief of the Office of Naval Research, according to the office’s website.
Jeremy Lewin, who helped Musk and the Trump administration dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department, according to the agency’s website.
Musk shortly after Trump’s election said he had a mandate to “delete the mountain” of government regulations. He made undoing government regulations and remaking the government with AI two key tenets of DOGE, in addition to eliminating federal government jobs.
The administration is still working toward slashing regulations. The White House budget office has tasked Scott Langmack, who was DOGE’s representative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with creating custom AI applications to pore through US regulations and determine which ones to eliminate, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Musk, meanwhile, has reappeared in Washington. This week, he attended a White House dinner for Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
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How Black music brought me closer to Judaism
Once, while my parents were away, my Grandma Min woke my three siblings and me at five in the morning to lecture us on the proper way to squeeze a toothpaste tube. Funny how effective that was. To this day, I can’t pick up a tube of Crest without thinking about how to squeeze it properly.
Toothpaste incident notwithstanding, I loved my Grandma Min. She was a rule-breaker and a rebel. Among the first Jewish women in Minneapolis to march for civil rights, she regularly hosted Black community leaders in her apartment and served them her own brand of soul food: blintzes, kugel, borscht, and mandelbrot. Everyone she touched — including me — was changed for the better. She’s the one who introduced me to the world’s greatest guitar teacher.
One Sunday afternoon, in the midst of a brilliant sun-shower, Lester Williams pulled up to our house in his pale-yellow Fleetwood Brougham. There’s little question that he was the first Black man to park a Cadillac on our block and walk to the door of a Jewish kid’s house for a guitar lesson.
It was Grandma Min’s idea. She’d seen Lester perform at a Hadassah luncheon, singing songs from Fiddler on the Roof with a big archtop Gibson and a tambourine balanced on his shoe. Afterwards, she asked if he’d teach me.
Lester, who was in his mid-70s at the time, wore a high-rise Don King hairdo and played in a style that was equal parts Texas blues and Yiddish theater. He taught me Sam Cooke’s ”You Send Me” and Lightning Hopkins riffs. When he sang, his eyes closed like he was singing for the Lord.
To this day, I’ve never opened my guitar case without thinking of Lester.
Back then, Jewish felt dorky; Black felt cool. In the early ’70s, a newly bar-mitzvahed kid playing funk and blues was an anomaly. Now, of course, the pop charts are built on it, but in the day it was the Eagles and Jethro Tull, not Kanye and Kendrick Lamar.
I was drawn to the groove and gravitas of Black music — Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, John Lee Hooker. It wasn’t only sound; it was a worldview. There was truth in that rhythm: sophisticated, sardonic, somehow sacred. It hovered between sex and Godliness. You could put a record on the stereo and feel righteous about reproducing the human species to it. To play that music, you had to become it, not just imitate it. I developed a lilting accent that slipped in naturally when I sang, like a thing that made down-in-the-bones sense. Every rock musician had done it in some form — Jagger, Van Morrison, the whole British Invasion.
It was a bridge to something larger, a way to escape the confines of white suburbia and begin what would become a lifelong expansion of my creative and spiritual boundaries. In retrospect, it may have been the first step on the path that led me to become an observant Jew.
Most of the kids around me seemed content inside their circumscribed worlds of hockey, keggers and Sadie Hawkins dances. I wanted to erase the margins someone else had drawn around my life. The times I could do that were rare, but they happened most powerfully when I was making music. It was then that the world lost its edges. The interplay between musicians could feel like one spirit inhabiting separate bodies. That’s how it felt when I first played with Wynston Robyns.
At my cousin Jeff’s house near Cedar Lake, we jammed in the basement — low ceiling, unused shuffleboard court in the floor, winter coats piled on the Ping-Pong table. Some older Black guys from the North Side brought their gear, a little weed, and some Ripple wine. I’d never tried Ripple before. I drank to excess.
Soon the room came alive: guitars tuned, reeds moistened, drums whacked, a few tentative chords tossed out. First rhythm, then flight. Jeff on the Fender Rhodes, me on guitar, all of us tearing it up. After an hour, the alto sax player, Jimmy, said, “You boys gotta meet Wynston Robyns.”
With Jeff’s parents away and my parents asleep and dreaming back at my house, we piled into Jimmy’s car and drove north, well past the safety of our suburb. By the time we reached Wynston’s place it was close to one in the morning. Dim light spilled from the basement windows, bass and drums rumbled from below. When Wynston finally opened the door, he filled its frame: barrel-chested, magnetic, with a half-smile suspended between welcome and menace.
We smoked more weed and played until God knows when. Some Stevie, some Lou Rawls. It was nearly dawn when Jeff and I became the new members of Wynston Robyns and Soul SearchLyte.
Rehearsals were constant — four nights a week, sometimes after school, sometimes before. Neither of us was old enough to have a driver’s license, so we took the city bus.
It took months for Soul SearchLyte to land just two gigs. The first was a corporate lunch my dad attended in a suit and tie. “Wynston seems like a really nice guy,” he said afterward, which was true…mostly. The second was New Year’s Eve at the Holiday Inn downtown. We were the “headliners,” scheduled for 1:00 a.m. — which everyone in the business knows means the time everybody has gone home to party. The real headliners went on at midnight. It was another North Side band, Champagne, featuring Morris Day, André Simone, and a diminutive guy with a large afro.
Jeff and I watched them in awe. André’s bass ran through a Mu-tron Funk Box that made every note sound like it came from the world’s best wah-wah. Morris Day’s drumming was tight, crisp, unstoppable. Wynston leaned toward me and shouted over the groove, “You see that guy? The way he chops out that rhythm? His name’s Prince. They say he’s got a record deal on Warners. Peter, that’s what you need to do if you wanna be more than just a basement guitar player.”
No offense to Soul SearchLyte, but Champagne was a brutal act to follow. By the time we went on at 3:00 a.m., only my Uncle Sonny and the bar staff were still around, mopping the floor while we played our hearts out.
A few weeks later, during rehearsal, our lead guitarist, Larry Crags, announced he was quitting.
“Wynston, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to leave the snap,” he said.
Wynston stared at him. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Larry shifted his weight. “My wife thinks it’s not a good idea — all this practice when we haven’t got any gigs lined up.”
Wynston stepped forward and jabbed his finger into Larry’s chest. “You sayin’ I’m not a man?”
It was strange. Larry hadn’t said anything of the sort.
Before Larry could answer, Wynston swung and caught him square in the face. Larry, who’d once told me in strictest confidence he was a Kung Fu master, fell hard, then rose, bloodied, into a fighting stance. Having been an ardent viewer of Kung Fu, the TV series, I waited for the mystical retaliation. It never came. Wynston hit him again, a clean right hook that sent him flying into my amplifier.
Larry crawled away, whimpering, up the stairs and out of the house. Jeff, maybe out of shock, started playing ”Rock-A-Bye Baby” on the high keys of his electric piano. From behind the drum kit someone said flatly, “Why don’t somebody shut off that amplifier?”
Wynston, panting hard, looked at me. “Peter, I suppose you wanna quit this snap too, since you’ve just seen a Black man beat up on a white dude.”
“No, Wynston,” I said. “I love being in this band.”
Hell yes, I did. I just became the lead guitarist.
Those nights in North Minneapolis — half teachable moment, half transcendence — were my first real taste of faith: the moment when music, spirit and belonging coalesced into one sound, one rhythm, one funky-ass pulse of Creation.
I’m positive Grandma Min would approve.
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