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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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El-Sayed’s Senate election has divided Michigan Jews. What will bring them together?
(JTA) — DETROIT – The “Jews For Abdul” in the room at the Michigan Democratic Party’s election night watch party were beaming as vote tallies rolled in, pushing Abdul El-Sayed closer to his eventual victory in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race.
“It’s actually hard to put into words what this night, and this moment, means to our movement,” Eli Newell, the Midwest field organizer for left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency shortly before El-Sayed’s victory speech.
Newell added, “We see our agenda of shared safety, equality, justice and a brighter future for all represented in Abdul’s candidacy.”
IfNotNow had mobilized heavily for El-Sayed, bringing a sizable Jewish cohort in from out of state to canvass in Jewish neighborhoods. Newell himself lives in Chicago.
But he and many of the other Jews at the watch party — who almost exclusively tacked left, particularly on Israel — offered a markedly different outlook from the state’s more traditionally pro-Israel Jewish institutions.
Many of the leaders from the latter camp had publicly mobilized against El-Sayed to various degrees during the campaign, objecting not just to his hard-line criticism of Israel, but also to his initial reaction to the state’s Temple Israel attack and his associations with Hasan Piker, the far-left streamer. For those Jews, the candidate’s victory was a more challenging story.
“Personally, I’m not sure I’m on his most favored list,” Rabbi Asher Lopatin, community relations director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, told JTA the day after El-Sayed’s win.
Shortly after El-Sayed won the Democratic primary, Lopatin took a brief leave of absence from his job to campaign with the Republican nominee, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers. He was one of the first Jewish figures in the state to do so publicly.
The week before the election, he also appeared at a Republican Jewish Coalition event boosting Rogers, where he and another rabbi in attendance received shout-outs from the stage.
Now Lopatin and other Michigan Jewish leaders who similarly backed Rogers face a new question: How can they build relationships with a senator they have gone on record as opposing on deeply personal grounds?
“I’m not taking anything back. But I think we have to work with what we have,” Lopatin said. “We have to build relationships with him. We have to build relationships with his supporters.”
Broadening the Jewish tent to include El-Sayed supporters was also on the mind of Decky Alexander, who chairs the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus. The caucus had refrained from endorsing the senator-elect during the campaign, and several members of its leadership had openly pledged to vote for Rogers.
Into that void, progressive Jews in the state organized Michigan Jews for Democracy, a grassroots movement to offer an alternative Jewish voice backing El-Sayed.
Now, Alexander said things were shifting. “We need to make sure that we are inclusive in our caucus,” she told JTA, naming Michigan Jews For Democracy as well as Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish group that had endorsed El-Sayed, as potential new partners she’d like to work with. “I think we need to have those voices at the table.”
The senator-elect’s campaign, on Thursday, pointed to a progressive PAC analysis of voting by ZIP code to argue that El-Sayed had “virtually matched” the 2024 Jewish vote for Michigan’s Jewish senior senator, Democrat Elissa Slotkin. The PAC, Millions of Michiganians, claimed that El-Sayed lost only 1.3% of votes across 72 heavily Jewish precincts that had gone to Slotkin.
Yet uniting such disparate Jewish voices could be easier said than done. In one reliably Democratic, heavily Jewish Detroit suburb in the days leading up to the election, homes could be seen repurposing their old “Haley Stevens for U.S. Senate” yard signs after the pro-Israel congresswoman endorsed Rogers in the race’s final days. El-Sayed beat Stevens in the Democratic primary in August.
Those yard signs went back up after Stevens’ endorsement and were still up after El-Sayed’s victory on Tuesday. Some had new handwritten additions addressed to Stevens: “Proud of you! Stand tall!!”
Prior to Election Day, more than 560 Jews in the state had signed a petition, titled “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” that pledged to vote for Rogers explicitly because of concerns over El-Sayed’s rhetoric.
While ultimately numbering slightly more than half of the total Jews to sign the open letter supporting El-Sayed, the signatories were influential. They included the president of Detroit’s Jewish federation; the head of the local flagship Holocaust center; and Mark Davidoff, who heads the Michigan-Israel Business Accelerator.
Post-election, Davidoff told JTA that his pro-Israel business group “is prepared to work with all newly elected and returning leaders across Michigan.”
A representative for the “Against Extremism” letter, Kalamazoo-based Troy Zukowski-Serlin, told JTA after the fact that the letter may have been too strongly worded.
“You could just as easily point a finger at the Mike Rogers campaign, with extremism,” Zukowski-Serlin, who had been listed as a Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus board member until he declared his intent to vote for Rogers, reflected. “That probably got the group off to a bad start.”
Even as the Rogers campaign had courted Jews, it also employed messaging many outside observers pegged as Islamophobic. Some of El-Sayed’s campaign surrogates who liaised with the Jewish community, including Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, also pointed to Rogers’ associations with Christian nationalist donors.
Today, Zukowski-Serlin said, “I can understand why somebody would vote for El-Sayed.” His own daughter did, for one — and they were far from the only Jewish household in the state to have split their votes.
Echoing a line El-Sayed himself often employed when addressing Jews on the campaign trail, he suggested that, apart from Israel, they were likely aligned on most policy positions.
“There’s plenty of other issues that I think we can find common ground on,” he said. “I think we can get along.”
Other Jewish groups in the state didn’t mince words, even after the race was called and some early-voting exit polls suggested that a majority of Jews in the state may have voted for El-Sayed despite any reservations.
Michigan’s chapter of the Anti-Defamation League was among those to signal what it called “serious concerns” with El-Sayed’s “history of minimizing the fears of the Jewish community and demonizing Israel.”
The ADL’s statement included an olive branch of sorts.
“As we move forward, Senator-elect El-Sayed has an opportunity and a responsibility to demonstrate that he will hear Jewish Michiganders, reject efforts to blame or marginalize them because of their connection to Israel and confront antisemitism with the moral clarity this moment requires,” the organization noted.
Detroit’s chapter of the American Jewish Committee raised similar flags. While recognizing what it called the “historic significance” of El-Sayed becoming the first Muslim elected to the Senate, the AJC statement continued, “Unfortunately this historic moment has been tarnished by the Senator-elect’s continued anti-Israel rhetoric that alienates countless Jewish Michiganders and other supporters of the State of Israel, and endangers American Jews.”
Detroit’s Jewish federation, meanwhile, congratulated “all those elected to federal, state, and local office in Michigan” and offered a veiled plea for restraint without naming the senator-elect.
“Together, we look to those elected to act with wisdom, lead with compassion, and uphold the civic and social values that ensure the safety and inclusion of our community and of all Americans,” the nonpartisan organization’s communal relations arm said in a statement.
Gary Torgow, the Michigan-based chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, told Rogers during the campaign, “We need you to get elected.” On Thursday, Torgow released a post-election statement calling on the local Jewish community to “move forward with optimism, dignity, and pride in who we are.”
Now the work of mending fences begins — not just between El-Sayed and Jewish leaders, but between Michigan’s Jews themselves. Across the state, rabbis offered reassuring messages to their communities, and some were eager to put the divisiveness of the campaign season behind them.
“I think the election divided the Jewish community,” Lopatin said. “I’m excited to get back to uniting them.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Three lessons for American Jews from the failed GOP attacks on the trans community
There are many reasons for the majority of American Jews — proudly American, politically liberal or centrist, supportive of Israel but opposed to nationalist extremism — to celebrate this week’s election, or at least heave a sigh of relief.
But I want to focus on what might seem to be an unusual aspect of this historic moment: the failure of Republican attacks on transgender people. If you live in a deep blue state, you might not have noticed these attacks at all, but if you live in a battleground state, you were likely inundated by them: relentless television ads, millions of phony “Trans & LGBTQ+ Student Resource Guides” mailed to Texas voters from a fake organization, and puerile, false claims about Senator-elect James Talarico.
And what did the Republicans get from this multi-hundred-million-dollar campaign of misinformation?
Bupkis.
Now, this was an unusual election. It’s possible that nothing would have made a difference, given the terrible economy, the pointless Iran war, and the unprecedented corruption of Donald Trump. These were, polls tell us, the core issues motivating mainstream American voters, and they voted, as the saying goes, to throw the bastards out. As The New York Times reported, Republicans vastly outspent Democrats in every competitive Senate race, but still lost nearly all of them. So maybe, in a closer election, the anti-trans attacks might have worked.
But they didn’t, and as I see it, the failure of this massive campaign offers three encouraging lessons for the Jewish community.
First, anyone who knows Jewish history should be grateful for the failure of a vicious attempt to vilify and scapegoat a small, vulnerable minority. Obviously, Jewish people are often that minority — and we were again this year, targeted by both the Far Right and Far Left. Anti-trans activists lied relentlessly about science, Democratic policies, trans people’s lives, sports (and the alleged advantages trans women possess, which have been disproven countless times), and most devastatingly, about the nature of transgender care, which never involves surgery on minors.
All of this was harrowing for me to watch, especially as someone with several trans friends whose lives were being so brutally misrepresented — and directly impacted by rollbacks in healthcare access (including by hospital chains who caved to blackmail by the Trump administration). And as a scholar of Jewish history and theology, and as a queer person myself, it also felt eerily, darkly familiar. Perhaps it’s a cliché to say that when one group is attacked, we are all attacked, but in this case, I felt it viscerally. I am relieved it didn’t work.
Second, despite all the rhetoric and rage-baiting, fundamentally there is a core congruence between what LGBTQ advocates say and what ordinary Americans, including Jewish ones, believe: not the finer points of gender identity, but “live and let live.” Most Americans still do not understand transgender as a phenomenon (yet), and they still have significant concerns, particularly about kids (and sports). But Democrats have finally learned how to talk about this issue, and it’s by appealing to common sense, American values, and even ‘Judeo-Christian’ teachings like loving your neighbor.
For example, Senator-elect Dr. Abdul El-Sayed did a great job framing the issue as about private medical decisions that should be left between families and their doctors. Comedian and influencer Suzanne Lambert framed the issue around love and respect, even when we don’t understand ‘the other.’ James Talarico made light of his opponent’s pathetic attempts to impugn his masculinity, while also refusing to throw trans people under the bus.
No Democrat ran on trans rights as a signature issue. But the best Democrats didn’t run away from it either.
Which brings me to my third point: Moderate Americans can agree to disagree, and still unite on core concerns. The middle 40% of America is not made up of culture warriors or Christian Nationalists. And it seems (I would love to see exit polling data on this) that they saw the endless ads and attacks for what they were: an attempt to distract from the core issues. Despite Elon Musk’s massive investments in hysteria — perhaps motivated by his inability to accept his own trans daughter — most centrist Americans are more focused on stuff that actually impacts them. It’s not that they agree with, or even understand, transgender issues. It’s that they don’t need to agree on everything in order to vote for a political candidate.
The same is true, of course, for issues bitterly dividing the American Jewish community today. Both right and left seem to have adopted the worst aspects of so-called “cancel culture,” in which any deviation from ideological purity on a single issue is grounds for exclusion. Thus we have seen progressives like Scott Wiener be bullied by the Far Left and critical-of-Israel politicians like El-Sayed demonized by the Center and Right.
In the High-Intensity-Jewish bubble, it can seem as though Israel, Palestine, and the relationship between Anti-Zionism and antisemitism is all-consuming. I’ve felt that way myself. But outside the bubble, in fact most American Jews understand that there are more important issues. 62% of Jewish Michiganders voted for El-Sayed, for example. And in exit polls conducted over the last several elections, American Jews have not ranked Israel among their top concerns (we don’t yet know if that was true this year), despite what they hear from lobbyists and mainstream organizations.
Indeed, many leaders, particularly in the New York metro area, have alienated their own communities by insisting that some views are “beyond the pale,” or that Jews are physically unsafe, or that contact with this or that media figure renders one untouchable, as if a podcast interview is a contagious disease like the Biblical tzaraat.
Successful politics doesn’t work that way. As the cliches go, politics is the art of the possible, and it makes for strange bedfellows. We don’t agree on every issue with everyone we vote for, or are interviewed by. That is how we win — and, in this case, rescue the democracy that has made the American dream possible for generations of Jews.
I’m not suggesting that everything is now rosy for trans people in America. That is far from the case. Even as the nationwide anti-trans attacks failed, state level initiatives passed that seriously harm trans populations. Trans activists are regarded by our own government as domestic terrorists. And misinformation continues to run rampant. The work remains ahead to re-introduce actual trans people, lives, medicine, and science to middle America. And that will take a long time.
But that’s the long-term work. In the short term, elections are about making compromises, and I’m encouraged that this attempt to scapegoat a tiny and vulnerable minority, which happens to include several friends of mine, ended in failure. There is much that we in the Jewish community can learn from it.
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Liberal Jews hail wave of Democratic victories a day after the election
(JTA) — While liberal Jewish Americans reveled in a blue wave of victories after Tuesday’s pivotal midterm elections, centrist and conservative voices issued words of caution about the increasing fragility of the country’s relationship with Israel.
The pro-Israel liberal group J Street hailed the results as a “resounding victory for new politics on Israel and Palestine,” celebrating that 98% of J Street-backed candidates were projected to win their races.
“We are proud to have supported a record number of candidates who share our commitment to Israel’s future, democracy and a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, said in a statement that lists all the successful politicians that had the lobby’s support.
Voters, he argued, rejected the president’s policies and “made clear they want a different direction for America and a different approach in the Middle East.” He pointed to the losses of Republican stalwarts Susan Collins in Maine and Mike Lawler in New York, calling them “prominent champions of the old approach to Israel politics.”
The day before, J Street had said it “ran the largest super PAC investment in organizational history,” raising $10 million for more than 200 candidates. The lobby warned, however, that “AIPAC and its supporters will continue to influence American foreign policy, finding creative ways to override the will of voters with dark money.” AIPAC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Halie Soifer, CEO of the liberal Jewish Democratic Council of America, likewise lauded the Democratic victories as a referendum on Trump, quipping that the president asked voters to “pretend he was on the ballot in the midterms, and Jewish Americans did just that.”
“Jewish voters are not a monolith, but they widely disapprove of Donald Trump,” she said in a statement, describing the administration’s agenda as “antithetical to core Jewish values.”
Soifer added, “Jewish Americans want leaders who will lower costs, defend our freedoms, stand against antisemitism, support Israel’s security, and hold the Trump administration accountable for its corruption, cruelty, and lawlessness.”
This cycle was JDCA’s largest-ever midterm Jewish voter engagement, involving a seven-figure investment in vast mobilization efforts, the group said in a statement.
JDCA noted that its political action committee ran many targeted ads, including in Ohio and Texas, where Democratic Senate candidates Sherrod Brown and James Talarico defeated their Republican rivals. The group also said its PAC funded ads for successful House candidates Cait Collins in New York, Piya Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz in Florida and Christina Hines in Michigan.
But not all Jewish Democrats were thrilled by the outcome.
Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Democratic Senate staffer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the “obvious” bad news coming out of the election was the normalization of “a vitriolic, occasionally untethered, and all too often fact-less attack on Israel and its bona fides.”
A registered Democrat, Robins said, “it’s painful to hear the enemies of Israel celebrating as they have today, and claiming that this is their referendum on Israel.”
Robbins said that such habituation was already clear in last year’s election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel. This cycle’s shift, he added, was apparent in the success of Abdul El-Sayed in his Michigan Senate race and the primary loss of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman to former city comptroller Brad Lander.
Robbins also expressed concern about “the push among anybody wanting a career in the Democratic Party” to distance themselves from Israel, which in many cases amounts to antisemitism, he said.
He particularly called out the House wins of Christopher Rabb in Philadelphia, Claire Valdez and Darializa Chevalier in New York City, Melat Kiros in Denver and Troy Jackson in Maine. Jackson, Robbins added, ended up repeating anti-Israel diatribes that have become popular among many members of the progressive left.
“The fact that he defeats somebody who was a stalwart and very knowledgeable friend of Israel, Susan Collins, is more bad news,” he said.
Robbins stressed that the Jewish community must take the results as a “warning sign” and stop assuming that “raising money and honoring people and dinners” is sufficient, without “making the case in the public square.” Members of the pro-Israel Jewish community cannot “just assume that people will realize that, of course, the victims of a genocidal attack are not the perpetrators of a genocide,” he added.
At the same time, Robbins, who also served in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under former president Bill Clinton, pointed to other results he was happy with. “The good news is that the Democrats elected a number of people who are moderate and therefore sensible when it comes to the realities of the Middle East, and those people’s voices in Congress may be a blessing.”
He acknowledged that the voices of these moderates who support Israel could be consequential in the Democratic caucuses in both the House and the Senate.
Jonathan Greenberg, director for combatting antisemitism at Defending Education and a former AIPAC staffer, called the election as “a disastrous night for the Republican Party.”
“I really don’t think there’s any way for a conservative to look at what happened last night and say that there’s a silver lining,” added Greenberg, who ran for state office in Illinois as a Republican in 2012 but now is unaffiliated.
He called upon Republicans to seize the opportunity to rebuild a stronger foundation, after “years of bad rhetoric and a cycle full of bad candidates.” He slammed Democrats for failing “to police their own side,” while also recognizing that some moderate Israel supporters were successful in this election.
“If the the more blue dog-type Democrats who got elected last night are willing to stand up to the crazies in their party and say, ‘This isn’t us, and you’re not welcome to say things like that in our party,’ then, yeah, that would be great,” he said.
Greenberg credited Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, for his outspokenness on this issue, while stressing that “he can’t be the only one.” In Moskowitz’s primary race, he was a staunch defender of Israel against progressive challenger Oliver Larkin.
“You have to have a critical mass of passionate people – the ascendant far left has that right now,” Greenberg added. “If the center doesn’t organize itself and forcefully push back, then they’ll lose.”
For Robbins, this tumultuous period for American Jews has been a long time in the making and is hardly a surprise. He said he has warned Israelis for the past 10 to 15 years about an anti-Zionist shift in the Democratic Party, but he has repeatedly received the response, “Hakol b’seder,” the Hebrew phrase for “everything is OK.”
“I would say, ‘No, kol is not b’seder,’” Robbins concluded.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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