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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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ADL says antisemitic incidents dropped by a third in 2025, but assaults reached record levels
(JTA) — Antisemitic incidents in the United States fell sharply in 2025 from record highs in the previous two years, but physical assaults, including deadly attacks, continued to rise, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit.
In 2025, the ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents across the country, marking a 33% decrease compared to 2024, when it recorded 9,354 incidents. (Antisemitic incidents increased by 5% from 2023 to 2024.)
Still, 2025 marked the third-highest year for antisemitic incidents since the ADL began tracking them in 1979 — after 2023 and 2024.
And incidents of assault involving a deadly weapon, which included the firebombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence, increased by 39%, from 23 in 2024 to 32 last year.
“Our 2025 Audit, which shows it was one of the most violent years for American Jews on record, is a reminder of how dramatically the threat landscape has shifted. Numbers that would have shocked us five years ago are now our floor,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO and national director, said in a statement. “People are being murdered because of antisemitism on American soil, and thousands more are threatened. ADL will not stop until that baseline changes.”
While antisemitic harassment and vandalism both declined from 2024 levels, from 6,552 to 4,003 incidents of harassment and 2,606 to 2,068 cases of vandalism, the ADL’s report found that incidents of assault rose from 196 to 203, a 4% increase from 2024 to 2025. At least 300 victims were targeted by incidents of assault, according to the report.
Last year also saw the first time since 2019 that murders were recorded in antisemitic attacks, including two Israeli embassy staffers shot to death outside the Capital Jewish Museum last May and another victim who died of injuries sustained during the June firebombing attack at a Boulder, Colorado, demonstration for Israeli hostages.
“Behind every one of these incidents is a real person: a family threatened at their synagogue, a rabbi attacked on the street, a student harassed on campus,” Oren Segal, the ADL’s senior vice president for Counter-Extremism and Intelligence, said in a statement. “2025 brought some of the most violent antisemitic attacks in recent memory.”
The ADL’s annual antisemitism audit, which has widely been viewed as an authoritative survey of antisemitism in the country, also found a significant drop in antisemitic incidents reported on college campuses, with incidents dropping by 66% from 1,694 in 2024 to to 583 in 2025.
Antisemitic incidents related to anti-Israel protests, including encampments, also decreased by 83% on college campuses in 2025 compared to 2024, according to the survey.
That decline dovetailed with a number of universities across the country that, following the wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses in 2024, moved to restrict or dismantle encampments and adopt stricter policies governing demonstrations.
Incidents directed at Jewish institutions decreased from 1,702 incidents in 2024 to 1,129 this year, marking a 34% drop. Bomb threats to Jewish institutions also dramatically decreased, with the ADL recording 59 bomb threats against Jewish institutions in 2025 compared to 627 in 2024 and 996 in 2023.
In non-Jewish K-12 schools, incidents decreased slightly from 860 in 2024 to 825 in 2025, with the ADL reporting that the “vast majority of incidents involve individual, peer-to-peer behavior, such as antisemitic bullying or students vandalizing classrooms with swastikas.”
The audit also reported a nearly 50% drop in the distribution of white supremacist propaganda.
The ADL has long drawn criticism from pro-Palestinian voices for tallying incidents of anti-Israel sentiments as antisemitic. This year, the group reported that 45% of all incidents it tracked were related to Israel or Zionism, down from 58% in 2024.
The ADL said its counts “do not include legitimate political protest of Israeli policies or general pro-Palestinian activism,” and cited examples of antisemitic protest including celebrations of violence against Jews and glorification for terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
The ADL attributed the drop in Israel-related antisemitic incidents to a “lower level of antisemitic activity at rallies organized by anti-Israel groups,” with incidents occurring in the vicinity of anti-Israel protests decreasing by 67% from 2024 and 2025.
Other examples of antisemitic incidents included in this year’s tally were an anti-Israel protest at the University of Oregon in February in which protesters displayed signs that read “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as well as a message spray-painted on a sidewalk in Los Angeles in October that read “Stop the new Holocaust. Boycott, shame Zionism fascists [sic].”
Aryeh Tuchman, an antisemitism researcher who spent two decades at the ADL before joining the rival Nexus Project, said that despite criticism of the audit, it is “the best data set of antisemitic incidents that anyone can compile in the United States.”
“No one agrees with anyone at this point on what constitutes, you know, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, like even those two words don’t mean very much anymore, and so people certainly are going to disagree with ADL,” Tuchman said, later adding. “Everybody who feels maybe a little bit differently than the ADL, or lots differently from the ADL, they need to engage with the audit on their own terms and find the value to them.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Protesters picket Manhattan synagogue over Israel real estate sale, testing Mamdani and new law
Protesters thronged a Manhattan synagogue Tuesday night outside an event promoting real estate in Israel and the West Bank — returning to the scene of a clash last year that prompted a new law shielding houses of worship and put the heat on newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The demonstration at Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side drew more than 100 protesters, kept nearly a block away from the house of worship by barricades and a heavy NYPD presence.
Chants of “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “We don’t want a two-state, we want ’48” rose from the crowd — slogans Zionist organizations view as antisemitic and a call for violence and removal of Jews in the region.
At one point, two protesters near the event ripped down a plastered poster of the Lubavitcher Rebbe that read “Messiah is here” from a traffic light and threw it in the trash.
A smaller group of pro-Israel counterprotesters rallied across the street from the pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
A spokesperson for the synagogue said it rented out the space for the Great Israeli Real Estate Event, which advertised properties for sale in Israel and the West Bank.
The standoff comes just days after a new law governing protests outside houses of worship took effect — a measure that City Council Speaker Julie Menin introduced after a November 2025 demonstration at Park East Synagogue.
The protests, combined with what some Jewish leaders saw as slow or equivocal responses from Mamdani, led to calls for legislation that would limit demonstrations near houses of worship.
Menin initially aimed to establish protest-free buffer zones of up to 100 feet outside synagogues but revised the bill after pushback from Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, some progressive Jewish groups and free speech advocates, under threat of legal challenges.
A watered-down version of that legislation that allows the NYPD to determine how large buffer zones need to be on a case-by-case basis passed with a veto-proof majority last month. Mamdani allowed the bill to become law without his signature.
Mamdani meanwhile vetoed a similar bill that would apply to schools. The Council could still vote to override that veto.
Police closed off the entire street where the synagogue sits to the public, while allowing the event’s attendees to enter. The demonstrators were well over 100 feet away from the building — a greater distance than even the largest buffer zone proposed by Menin.
Supporters of the law argued that its flexible standard — allowing the NYPD to determine buffer zone distances rather than specifying them precisely — would protect protesters’ rights. But the security at Park East showed how that discretion can, in practice, expand protest-free zones by granting the NYPD wide latitude to set the distance themselves.
A spokesperson for Mamdani, a vocal critic of Israel, said on Tuesday before the protest that the mayor is “deeply opposed” to the event, characterizing the sale of property in the West Bank as a violation of international law. The spokesperson, Sam Raskin, nevertheless emphasized that the city was ready to ensure the safety of participants entering the venue and those demonstrating.
“Our administration has been clear that we are committed to ensuring safe entry and exit from any house of worship, and that such access never be in question while all protesters are able to exercise their First Amendment rights,” said Raskin ahead of the event.
‘People are outraged’
Tuesday’s event was the first time under the new law, but the NYPD protest plan it calls for is still a work in progress: the police department still has another month to present a plan and 90 days to publicize it.
Local politicians noted the sensitive nature of the protest, saying that alone is reason to condemn it.
Assemblymember Alex Bores and Councilmember Virginia Maloney, who represent the district where the synagogue is located, said in a joint statement that the situation naturally evoked “painful memories of times when people have been harassed while entering houses of worship.”
Micah Lasher, a state legislator who is vying for the open congressional seat on Manhattan’s west side, described the protest as “intended to create fear in the hearts of Jewish New Yorkers and stigmatize the community.” Lasher said leaders should condemn the protest, no matter any disagreement on policy.
Rob Jereski, a local attorney who is Jewish and came to support the Palestinian side, had reservations about the security perimeters, arguing it kept protesters too far from the real estate event.
“I know the new law is supposed to maintain free speech and honor the Constitution, but this doesn’t seem to do it,” Jereski said. “The fact that Jews pray in a place doesn’t mean that crimes that are committed in that place should be without a response if people are outraged.”
Some counterprotesters also criticized the new Council measure — for not going far enough.
“That’s outrageous that it’s not clear that you cannot demonstrate and harass kids or people around religious institutions,” said Tomer Morad, a demonstrator on the Israeli side.
Karen Lichtbraun, an activist affiliated with the Zionist Herut movement in New York, said the new bill was a “joke” that doesn’t address the problem.
“Today, thank God, they’re away from the synagogue,” she said. “But what happens if next time the police commissioner decides that they can be 50 feet or 10 feet away?”
The post Protesters picket Manhattan synagogue over Israel real estate sale, testing Mamdani and new law appeared first on The Forward.
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Canadian Intel Reveals Gaza War Motivated At Least 7 Lone-Wolf Terror Plots in 2025
Dueling pro-Israel and anti-Israel demonstrations at McGill University in Montreal, Canada; May 2, 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)’s newly published annual report documents how aspiring domestic terrorists have felt justified to plan attacks in response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
“The threat of a domestic lone-actor attack in Canada increased significantly since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict,” the CSIS report said in a section on religion-motivated crime. “In 2025, at least seven of CSIS’s priority investigations involving mobilization to violence have been assessed as motivated by this conflict in whole or in part.”
CSIS Director Dan Rogers offered examples in the report’s introduction, writing that “we achieved a number of counterterrorism successes that led to law enforcement action, including the arrests of Hide & Stalk members in Québec, and of a minor who intended to violently target Jewish people and police in Montréal.”
The report further described how the war in Gaza “has also fueled violent extremist organization narratives and has the potential to inspire a new generation of extremists. The conflict will likely continue to motivate some extremists in the near term, but understanding the true impact of the conflict will only be clear over time.”
Antisemitism appears in Canada in many forms today, with the report noting continued incidents of vandalism, graffiti, online propaganda, overt racist statements, and bomb threats. The document also said that, since 2014, there has been one attack against a Jewish institution and five plans stopped, including an incident in August 2025 involving a minor in Montreal.
Earlier this year, three shootings targeted Jewish institutions in less than a week in Toronto.
Other terrorist crimes from last year spotlighted in the report included a man in Winnipeg charged in March for offenses motivated by “nihilistic violent extremism,” and a woman in Montreal who pleaded guilty in July to providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). That month, law enforcement arrested four members of Hide & Stalk, a far-right conspiracist militia driven by an “accelerationist” ideology which seeks to speed up societal collapse.
In September, the neo-Nazi propagandist Patrick Gordon MacDonald, known by the alias “Dark Foreigner,” received a 10-year prison sentence on three terrorism offenses. The report described how “his objective was to inspire others to engage in violence through his graphic designs and videos he produced in support of Atomwaffen Division (AWD).”
Founded in 2015 by neo-Nazi Brandon Russell — who now serves a 20-year prison sentence after a conviction last year for plotting attacks on electrical substations in Baltimore — AWD draws inspiration from James Mason, a former member of the American Nazi Party (ANP) and leader of the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF), who wrote an essay collection titled SIEGE which advocated for a white American ethno-state. The group has often blended with Salafi and Jihadist terrorists, “citing their culture of martyrdom and insurgency as inspiration for their tactics and propaganda.”
Another terrorism conviction in Canada came in October when Matthew Althorpe pleaded guilty for his involvement in the Terrorgram Collective, a neo-Nazi Telegram channel. CSIS explained that “the violent tenets of Terrorgram’s content and manifestos have inspired at least three violent attacks in Slovakia, Brazil, and Türkey, two plots to attack critical infrastructure in the United States, and the attempted assassination of a foreign government official in Australia.”
While a variety of ideologies can inspire terrorist attacks in Canada, the perpetrators fit a familiar pattern, with 93 percent being male and the average age being 34, findings consistent since 2022. However, the report noted increases in both youth and those over 48.
The Canadian government also designated numerous organizations as terrorist organizations. In February, newly proscribed groups included seven transnational criminal organizations reclassified as terrorist entities: Cártel del Golfo, Cártel de Sinaloa, La Familia Michoacana, Cárteles Unidos, La Mara Salvatrucha, Tren de Aragua, and Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación.
Later in the year Canada added Lawrence Bishnoi Gang, 764, Maniac Murder Cult, Terrorgram Collective, and the ISIS-aligned Islamic State-Mozambique.
The report explained how foreign governments engage in espionage in Canada. Tactics range from agents cultivating friendships with targets to manipulate them to using blackmail and launching cyber-attacks to compromise digital devices. “In 2025, the main perpetrators of foreign interference and espionage against Canada remained the People’s Republic of China (PRC), India, the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Pakistan,” the report stated.
Canada joined 13 other countries in July 2025, issuing a statement condemning “the attempts of Iranian intelligence services to kill, kidnap, and harass people in Europe and North America in clear violation of our sovereignty.”
The report described the concept of transnational repression as “when foreign governments, or those acting on their behalf, reach beyond their borders to harass, threaten or harm individuals or groups to advance their interests or to silence criticism and dissent.” Methods employed include physical violence, threatening overseas relatives, lawfare, cyberbullying, online defamation, extortion, and community ostracism.
CSIS named Handala Hack Team as among Iran’s henchmen. The group “doxed several Iran International-linked journalists, including a Canadian resident,” the report said. “The Canadian’s photos, provincial driver’s license, permanent resident card, and Iranian passport details were released on the internet and social media platforms. The hacktivist group reproached the Canadian for, among other things, their promotion of 2SLGBTQIA+ issues in Iran.”
The doxxing resulted in death threats and the harassment of family members in Iran. CSIS warned that Iran may use proxies to go after dissidents, sometimes relying on transnational organized crime networks.
Hostile governments may also seek to plant disinformation, false narratives deliberately spread as “part of broader information operations aimed at manipulating audiences.”
One of the report’s most alarming findings was the degree to which extremist groups with differing ideologies draw inspiration from one another. CSIS described finding “an overlap in content, aesthetics, conspiracy theories and grievance narratives, including those that are anti-liberal, anti-2SLGBTQIA+, antisemitic, and Islamophobic … On occasion, similar violent content is consumed, including gore sites, jihadi beheading videos, and attack manuals.”
CSIS warned that “violent extremists with these different ideologies are increasingly finding common causes. They find inspiration and motivation in the events and trends that polarize society or cause them to lose hope for the future. They easily access and amplify content online that radicalizes them and reinforces their view that violence is justified to achieve their extremist goals.”
The report named Islamic State as the most significant threat to Western interests, with CSIS analysts warning the terrorist group “will continue to attempt to influence supporters — particularly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan — to plan attacks on targets related to world events, and enable them to do so, while Al Qaeda will continue efforts to reconstitute itself in permissive territories, including through the rise of the Islamic State in Somalia and increased Al-Shabaab terrorism activities in North Africa.”
A recent example of the trend of cross-ideological alliances appeared late last month in Mali, where Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM,) an Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group, joined with Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg rebel separatist militia, in a shared effort to overthrow the military junta which has ruled the African nation since Aug. 18, 2020. The coordinated attacks resulted in the killing of Defense Minister Sadio Camara and the seizure of Kidal, a key town in Mali’s eastern region.