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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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French, German, Jewish leaders call for resignation of UN’s Francesca Albanese over ‘common enemy’ comments
(JTA) — A slew of prominent voices, including the French foreign minister, have called for the resignation of United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese over her latest comments about Israel.
Albanese, the U.N.’s Palestinian rights envoy, is a vocal critic of Israel who has drawn sustained rebuke from multiple U.S. administrations over comments seen as veering sharply into antisemitic territory. Last year, the Trump administration formally sanctioned her, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio accusing her of “virulent antisemitism and support for terrorism.”
This time, speaking at the Al-Jazeera Forum in Doha last weekend, Albanese ignited rebuke from an array of world leaders when she suggested that Israel was “a common enemy” for all.
“Instead of stopping Israel, most of the world has armed, given Israel political excuses, political sheltering, economic and financial support,” he said. She continued, “We who do not control large amounts of financial capital, algorithms and weapons — we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the comments inappropriately targeted all Israelis instead of the Israeli government.
“France unreservedly condemns the outrageous and reprehensible remarks made by Francesca Albanese, which are directed not at the Israeli government, whose policies may be criticized, but at Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable,” he told French lawmakers earlier this week.
The German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, added to the calls for resignation on Thursday. “I respect the system of independent rapporteurs of the UN. However, Ms. Albanese has already repeatedly failed in the past,” he tweeted. “I condemn her recent statements about Israel. She is untenable in her position.”
And Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, called Albanese “a dangerous figure who continues to use her position to promote discredited conspiracy theories, divisive and antisemitic narratives” and said he would use his appearance at the Munich Security Conference, which begins Friday, to petition for her removal.
“As I meet with leaders in Munich and in the weeks ahead, I will advocate for a clear moral line to be drawn,” he said in a statement. “Individuals such as Ms. Albanese must be removed from the UN before more damage can be done to the Jewish people — and the institution’s mission.”
Albanese has rejected the idea that her comments were antisemitic or inappropriate. On X, she said she had taken aim at “THE SYSTEM that has enabled the genocide in Palestine, including the financial capital that funds it, the algorithms that obscure it and the weapons that enable it,” not Israelis.
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Is there life after Lubavitch?
Schneur Zalman Newfield knows as well as anyone what it takes to leave Orthodoxy. In his new memoir, Brooklyn Odyssey, he likens his transformation from Hasidic to secular to a butterfly’s metamorphosis. “At one stage it is clearly a caterpillar; at another it is a butterfly. But when exactly did it shift from one organism to the other?” he asks. When exactly does a Hasidic Jew become someone who prays with egalitarian minyans and protests with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice?
Newfield, a 44-year-old sociology professor at Hunter College, has been asking that very question for years. For his first book, Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Newfield interviewed 74 ex-Lubavitch and ex-Satmar Hasidic Jews to analyze what it means to leave Orthodoxy. Brooklyn Odyssey brings that sociological scrutiny to Newfield’s own life.
But the memoir is much more readable than the academic book that preceded it. Newfield renders vividly what it’s like to be an 11-year-old boy running amok in Crown Heights, the nerve center of the Lubavitch Hasidic universe, while rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the lionized leader of that community, was still alive. He also captures the feelings of a twentysomething ex-Hasidic virgin at Brooklyn College. After his mom reacts coldly to the news that he has shaved his beard, Newfield writes that he “felt like a Lubavitch mitzvah tank, one of those converted Winnebagos, had just rolled over my chest.”
I spoke with Newfield to see how he views the risk factors for leaving Orthodoxy, and how the Haredi world’s treatment of these people might be changing. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lauren Hakimi: There are already so many memoirs out there about people’s journeys off the derech [out of Orthodoxy]. What did you think was missing from the OTD genre?
Schneur Zalman Newfield: None of the memoirs that are out there really captured the experience of growing up in the Lubavitch community, especially the Lubavitch boys’ environment.
Also, OTD memoirs tend to describe growing up in a very geographically constrained area. My experience is very different from that. A big part of my experience in Lubavitch was traveling around the world doing outreach work. Being exposed to the world and grappling with an awareness of other people was a big part of my process of leaving the community. There’s whole chapters in the book on my experiences visiting Russia, living in Singapore, living in China, living in Argentina.
Most of the OTD memoirs describe very stark breaks with people’s families once people left the community. In my last book, Degrees of Separation, I found that many people who grew up Lubavitch and Satmar who left the Hasidic community still maintained ties with their family. Sometimes those are very painful ties, but still, they are ties. That’s very much my own experience. A big part of my process of deciding to leave the community was complicated by the fact that I had a very loving and warm relationship with my family.
Lubavitch is as strict as other ultra-Orthodox sects, but its emphasis on kiruv [missionary work to encourage non-Orthodox Jews to become Orthodox] exposes Hasidim to secular Jews at young ages. How did your international travels affect your exit journey?
I was profoundly influenced by the people that I encountered. Especially in my late teens, my early 20s, once I was already reading a lot of secular books secretly on my own, I was very interested to learn more about the outside world. I think that really opened up new vistas for me that had I stayed in Crown Heights would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, for me to access.
In the very beginning of the book, there’s a photo of you and your family at your daughter’s bat mitzvah. Why was it important for you to include that?
A part of what I’m trying to convey is the fact that there is life after people leave the community. The narrative within the ultra-Orthodox community is that ‘we have such a great life, and we know the truth, and if anyone is crazy enough to leave the community, their life is doomed, and they’ll all become drug addicts.’
This is a propaganda message that the community employs in order to scare people and prevent them from even thinking of trying to leave. Many people who leave the community, yes, they face challenges, but many, if not most of the people who decide to leave the community eventually find their way in the broader society and are able to establish healthy and meaningful lives on the outside.
I wanted to highlight that about my own experience. Yes, there were real challenges, and that’s certainly part of what I talk about: the mental health issues I struggled with, the challenges related to maintaining a loving relationship with my family. At the same time, I was able to establish a healthy and meaningful life on the outside.
In Degrees of Separation, you draw a distinction between intellectual and emotional reasons for leaving Orthodoxy, but in your memoir, the intellectual and emotional seem to come together, like when your sadness over your younger brother Shimmy’s death makes you question God. I’m wondering how you view those two factors in the context of your own path.
To be clear, even in Degrees of Separation, I argue that everyone who leaves the community has both intellectual and social-emotional reasons for doing so. It’s simply a question of which of these aspects of their experience they tend to focus on. Most people tended to focus on one versus the other. This is not the full picture. The people who were talking about their intellectual disagreements with the community also experienced some kind of disenchantment or social-emotional issues related to their community. Same thing for people who talked about their social-emotional reasons for leaving.
When I thought about leaving, and then even after I left, when I thought about my experience of leaving, I did tend to describe it in intellectualist terms. In fact, early on when we were dating, my now wife asked me if Shimmy’s death played a role in my experience of leaving. I said, ‘No, I don’t think that that had anything to do with it.’
Only years later, after I was doing my academic work and thinking much more rigorously about all of these issues, did I realize that Shimmy’s death had a profound influence on my religious evolution. That, and the death of the Lubavitcher rebbe, who we were taught to believe was the messiah.
After you shave your beard, your mom sends you and your brother to a rabbi who tries to convince you to become more religious again. As someone who researches journeys out of Orthodoxy, what do you make of that intervention?
It is very common for parents, relatives, neighbors, to try to connect the person who’s thinking of leaving with some rabbi whose mission is to quote-unquote straighten the person out. In a sense, it’s kind of remarkable that there was only one intervention in my case.
Sometimes, these interventions are carried out under the guise of mental health. There’s a therapist, a psychologist, a social worker, or someone who doesn’t have any mental health training but purports to be a mental health professional. They often basically argue that for your own mental health, it would be best if you would come back to Orthodoxy.
The rabbi I was sent to had been my teacher for several years. When I had him as a teacher, I thought that he was this brilliant guy, charming and charismatic. But when it came to this interaction, where he was basically trying to convince me to remain Orthodox, he was very plebeian in terms of the arguments that he was making, and his general attitude of disdain for me, for non-Orthodox forms of Judaism, and for secular knowledge in general.
Do you think that if you were going OTD today, as opposed to 20 years ago, the Orthodox net might have done a better job trying to catch you?
I think the ultra-Orthodox community has become more aware of the fact that large numbers of their members are leaving and that they need to do a better job of trying to respond to it.
Each individual religious community responds in a somewhat different way. So it’s hard to make generalizations, but it definitely seems that the ultra-Orthodox community is trying to respond to this issue in a more sensitive and thoughtful and humane way than they were doing, let’s say, 20 or 30 years ago.
Me and other scholars have also noted a rise of quote-unquote ‘modern’ ultra-Orthodox people.
I sometimes stay in Crown Heights for Shabbos with my family and go to shul with one of my brothers in law. I go to this one particular shul, and there’s a bunch of people who have trim beards, or something’s going on with their beards, not quite the way nature intended. They’re going to shul every Shabbos, they send their children to Lubavitch schools. In a lot of significant ways, they’re enmeshed in the community, and they’re recognized as being full-fledged members of the community, yet they’re living a kind of Lubavitch lite.
So yes, I think if I was leaving today, or if I was living in the community today, it’s hard to say exactly how things would end up. But I didn’t grow up in the community today. I grew up in the community 30 years ago, and my story is my story.
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Homeland Security hires social media manager whose posts raised alarm for promoting ‘white-nationalist rhetoric’
(JTA) — The Department of Homeland Security has hired a new digital communications director whose social media content for the Labor Department reportedly raised alarm bells inside the department and beyond for promoting white supremacist rhetoric.
Peyton Rollins began his new role at Homeland Security this month, The New York Times was the first to report this week. Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, did not confirm the move to the newspaper, but Rollins’ LinkedIn profile shows that he began working at the department this month.
Rollins, 21, has been identified as the staffer responsible for posts at the Labor Department that have been decried as making veiled antisemitic and racist allusions. He also claimed credit for a large banner of President Donald Trump’s face that was hung from the Labor Department’s headquarters, which its critics said echoed fascist stylings.
During Rollins’ time at the Labor Department, its social media pages have featured a range of slogans including “the globalist status quo is OVER,” “PATRIOTISM, NOT GLOBALISM” and “Patriotism will Prevail. America First. Always,” which featured an image of an American flag with 11 stars, the number that appeared on some Confederate flags.
One post on X in November, which featured the phrase “Americanism Will Prevail,” spurred hundreds of negative comments because it appeared to use the same typeface used on the original cover of “Mein Kampf.”
Staffers at the department were alarmed, according to the New York Times. “We’re used to seeing posts about things like apprenticeships, benefits and unions,” a former employee, Helen Luryi, told the newspaper. “All of a sudden, we get white-nationalist rhetoric.”
In his new role, Rollins will oversee the Homeland Security social media accounts, including its X account which has been accused of tweeting antisemitic dog whistles.
Rollins joins a growing list of hires under the Trump administration who have faced allegations of promoting extremist rhetoric.
In March, DHS hired speechwriter Eric Lendrum, who has previously promoted the “Great Replacement” theory and likened conservatives in the United States to Jews in Nazi Germany. In May, the Pentagon also appointed Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly echoed antisemitic rhetoric online, as its press secretary.
Last year, the appointments of Darren Beattie as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in February and Paul Ingrassia in May to a senior legal role drew criticism for the pair’s relationships with white supremacists.
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