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A Lesson From Joseph and His Brothers: Don’t Dismiss the Visionary in Your Midst
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
In a letter dated November 1861, General George B. McClellan — newly appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as commander of the Union Army — wrote to his wife Mary Ellen that “Mr. Lincoln is nothing more than a well-meaning baboon.”
McClellan’s undisguised disdain echoed a broader sentiment among the political and military elite, who badly misjudged Lincoln’s capacity to lead the United States in a moment of national crisis. In the years that followed, history would vindicate Lincoln as America’s greatest commander-in-chief — while McClellan’s own legacy was overshadowed by the very man he had once so casually disparaged.
McClellan was hardly the first person to look down on someone far greater than himself, and he certainly wasn’t the last. Take Ignaz Semmelweis, for example, the brilliant Hungarian physician whose simple, lifesaving idea should have made him a medical hero.
In the 1840s, Semmelweiss researched the high incidence of women dying after childbirth in hospitals and concluded that it was caused by doctors moving straight from autopsies to maternity wards, thereby infecting mothers. A staggering one in every six mothers died due to this practice.
There was a simple solution, Semmelweis said: doctors needed to wash their hands so that ‘cadaverous particles’ — the term germs had not yet been invented — would be removed. But the response to his suggestion was not gratitude but outrage. One senior Viennese physician dismissed Semmelweis’s handwashing solution as “the outpourings of a disturbed mind.”
The hostility to Semmelweis grew, and it essentially ended his career, the man poised to save countless lives was literally ridiculed into obscurity. He was eventually committed to an insane asylum, where he died at the age of 47. Only decades later did the medical world finally admit that the “disturbed mind” had been right all along.
Semmelweis was not the only doctor ridiculed for seeing the truth too clearly. During the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, Dr. John Snow proposed an idea that all his colleagues considered utterly laughable: he argued that cholera wasn’t caused by “bad air” or mysterious atmospheric vapors, but by contaminated water. Today we don’t question this fact — but in mid-19th-century London, it was considered scientific heresy.
Snow wasn’t put off easily. He painstakingly mapped cholera cases, eventually traced the outbreak to the Broad Street water pump, and persuaded local officials to remove its handle so no one could pump water there. The deaths plummeted almost immediately, but the medical establishment still refused to take him seriously.
The president of the General Board of Health dismissed Snow’s work as “mere hypothesis,” and another critic sneered that his theory “cannot be entertained in any scientific discussion.” Snow, like Semmelweis, was treated as an irritant rather than a visionary. Only years later, long after his early death at 45, did the world recognize that the man they had waved away as a crank had actually solved one of the great medical mysteries of all time.
This pattern of condescension was not limited to the medical world. In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace — daughter of the poet Lord Byron and one of the most extraordinary minds of her generation — became fascinated by Charles Babbage’s proposed “analytical engine,” a mechanical device most people viewed as little more than an elaborate calculator.
But Lovelace saw something far more revolutionary. In a set of notes that she appended to her translation of an Italian science paper, she suggested that this machine, if built according to her specifications, would be able to manipulate symbols, compose music, and even generate original ideas — concepts that today form the backbone of modern computing and, more recently, AI.
But her vision was far too radical for her contemporaries. One prominent engineer dismissed her ideas as “the wild fancies of a young woman,” and others insisted Lovelace simply did not understand the limits of machinery. Lovelace, like Semmelweis and Snow, was written off as someone who thought too strangely, too imaginatively, too far beyond the accepted boundaries.
A century later, computer scientists rediscovered her work and suddenly realized that her “wild fancies” were, in fact, the earliest blueprint for the digital age. The woman whose insights were rudely dismissed in her lifetime became known as the world’s first computer programmer.
The dismissal of great people by their peers was not a phenomenon limited to the 19th century. History is replete with such examples, going all the way back to the Bible itself, with the most famous case appearing in Parshat Vayeishev.
Long before Lincoln was dismissed by McClellan, long before Semmelweis was mocked as delusional, long before John Snow was waved away as a crank, and long before Ada Lovelace was written off as an over-imaginative dreamer, Joseph’s brothers concluded that he was an overblown egotist punching way above his weight. They saw his confidence and heard his dreams, and immediately decided he was an arrogant narcissist obsessed with visions of grandeur.
What they never paused to consider was that perhaps these dreams were not fantasies at all, but glimpses of a destiny that he alone could perceive. Their prejudices and preconceived notions of their little brother blinded them to the remarkable qualities standing right in front of them: Joseph’s intuition, his emotional intelligence, his spiritual imagination, his innate leadership — all of which would emerge in the concluding chapters of Genesis.
Convinced they were dealing with an insufferable younger sibling who needed to be put in his place, they misread the situation entirely. In their rush to dismiss him, they failed to recognize that he was, in fact, the person who would one day save them all.
Malbim offers a psychologically astute insight that applies equally to all the examples throughout history: people interpret ambiguous information through the filter of their existing emotions. Because the brothers already viewed Joseph with suspicion, they didn’t read his dreams as neutral messages but as hostile declarations.
Their own jealousy and insecurity shaped what they thought the dreams meant — and, by extension, who they believed Joseph was. Malbim points out that had they not been so entangled in their biases, they might have seen the dreams in an entirely different light.
Which brings us to the most unsettling question of all. If Lincoln could be written off as a “well-meaning baboon,” if Semmelweis could be mocked into madness, if John Snow could be dismissed as a crank, and if Ada Lovelace could be waved away as a fanciful young woman, how many other potential Josephs has history quietly buried?
How many brilliant minds, original thinkers, and visionary spirits were crushed before their gifts could ever see daylight, not because they lacked greatness, but because those around them lacked the imagination to recognize it?
Joseph survived his brothers’ attempts to dismiss him and ultimately rose to fulfill his destiny. But his story stands as a warning: when we assume we already know someone’s limits, we may be blinding ourselves to the greatness standing right in front of us. And the tragedy is not only what we fail to see — it’s what the world loses when a future savior is silenced before he ever has a chance to begin.
So here’s a challenge for us all: This week, champion a quiet contrarian in your own circle. Seek out someone with unconventional ideas, and nurture them. Who knows, you might just uncover the next great thinker whose insights can change the world. Let us learn from the past and ensure that no potential Joseph is buried under the weight of our doubts.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Ari Emanuel has written a memoir and no one is safe — not even his brother
Roll the Calls: A Memoir
By Ari Emanuel
Knopf, 432 pages, $35
It must be exhausting to be super-agent Ari Emanuel: rising before dawn for a workout regimen, ingesting live worms to consume bacteria, and then placing hundreds of daily phone calls to clients and network honchos. It is, frankly, exhausting just to read about it, notwithstanding the clever, staccato narrative by (uncredited) ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer.
The point of it all, Emanuel keeps insisting in Roll the Calls, is not the dollars.
“Money isn’t the thing that makes me get up at 4:00 a.m.,” he says. “I’m just not sure yet what that thing is.”
Perpetually on the precipice of bankruptcy, he takes bold entrepreneurial risks to survive in an industry wracked by labor discontent, cutthroat infighting and technological change.
The goal, if there is one, seems to be simply to win — to bend everyone around him to his will. And, for the most part, he does. From the mailroom, Emanuel has ascended to the summit: executive chair and CEO of TKO and executive chairman of WME Group, “two companies,” his biographical blurb says, “that sit at the center of sports, entertainment and culture.”
Emanuel is probably best known as the model for the abrasive Ari Gold, the talent agent played by Jeremy Piven in the HBO show Entourage (2004-11). The show’s protagonist, Vincent Chase, is loosely based on one of Emanuel’s clients, the actor Mark Wahlberg. Emanuel says that he could never bear to watch the series, but notes that it helped turbocharge his career.
In his telling, the entertainment-industrial complex is a transactional, amoral, brutish and (though Emanuel doesn’t use this phrase) testosterone-fueled world, where the key players are nearly all men. It seems impossible to imagine any woman getting away with — let alone prospering from — the unhinged, profanity-laced approach that has become Emanuel’s trademark.
Even in this milieu, there are, in his view, particularly loathsome players. Among them is Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein, whom Emanuel indicts for his slovenliness, bullying tactics and editorial interference. Even without a mention of the producer’s alleged track record of sexual harassment and assault, Emanuel’s assessment of Weinstein is withering. “Empty at his core,” Emanuel writes, “Harvey’s sole motivation is to thwart and mess with other people.”
Emanuel expresses contempt, too, for other bold-faced names, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chair of Walt Disney Studios and cofounder of the film studio DreamWorks, and Hollywood scribe Nikki Finke, with whom Emanuel had a codependent relationship. He takes on Donald Trump as a client, doesn’t vote for him for president, and drops him, without regret, when he wins and can no longer generate commissions. None of this necessarily makes Emanuel a reliable narrator.
The memoir begins with the word “rage,” which Emanuel observes is also the first word of Homer’s Iliad. The allusion sets Roll the Calls up to be similarly epic. But its angry protagonist is, at best, an antihero, and the stakes of his success surely are less than mythic.
What are the origins of Emanuel’s rage? He points to his lifelong struggles with dyslexia and the bullying and humiliation that resulted. The Emanuel family ethos was unsparingly competitive. In life, he learned, “loser gets fed to lions,” so “keep your fists clenched and your head on a swivel.” And roughhousing with his older brothers, whom he jokingly calls “two violent psychopaths,” may have left Ari bruised and resentful.
Both Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, a prominent oncologist and bioethicist, and former Chicago mayor and prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel are known for their combative personalities. Ari suggests that the family is tight-knit and loving. But one of the book’s quietly shocking reveals is Rahm’s mockery of his brother’s dyslexia when they share a stage during Chicago Ideas Week.
Emanuel argues that his anger, which can turn threatening, provides a bargaining advantage by intimidating adversaries. He cites a study showing “that angry negotiators had the edge.” In a bar, he calls out Michael Moore as an [expletive deleted] antisemite for views the director expressed about Israel; Moore denies the charge, they keep talking and Emanuel ends up with a new client.
“You’ve got to be a little psychotic in this town,” Emanuel argues. To succeed, “you need to show that you can color outside the lines, and that, once in a while, you might eat the [expletive deleted] crayon.” The memoir doesn’t delete the expletives.
Yet Emanuel understands the personal costs of his anger enough to have devoted years to psychotherapy aimed at moderating it. (The results seem mixed at best.) Emanuel also admits to a habit akin to stalking: calling potential clients, business partners and others constantly until they succumb to his sales pitch.
This incessant hounding landed him the mailroom gig at Creative Artists Agency, from which he quickly rose — until he departed, with allies, to start his own company. Similar persistence won him the business (and, later, friendship) of the famously curmudgeonly Larry David, who said, over lunch, that he would sign with Emanuel — if only the agent would stop calling.
After his first marriage (unsurprisingly) dissolved, Emanuel deployed his telephone tactics in courtship — not a method, one imagines, that would have worked for a lesser man. In Emanuel’s case, relentless pursuit led, after some drama and heartbreak, to his second marriage, to a much younger woman who had initially resisted his overtures.
None of this is to say that Roll the Calls isn’t worth a read, especially for anyone interested in an unabashedly jaundiced insider account of how Hollywood operates. The book is quick-paced, laugh-out-loud funny at times, and filled with acidic observations and gossip. It is also horrifying.
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NY Jewish Democrats defend Mamdani after Netanyahu calls him a Hamas supporter
(JTA) — Some top New York Jewish Democrats are defending New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him an “antisemite” and said he is “buddies” with Hamas.
Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, and the outsized role Mamdani played in it, were the culmination of escalating criticism of Mamdani from Israeli officials in recent weeks.
Mamdani is an avowed anti-Zionist who during his campaign to be the mayor had pledged to arrest Netanyahu. Over the summer, he conceded he didn’t have the power to do so, though he criticized the Israeli government over Gaza in the run-up to the prime minister’s visit.
But while his full-throated criticism of Israel has alarmed some local Jewish officials, many felt that Netanyahu’s attacks on Thursday from the U.N. plenum went too far.
“It’s scurrilous to suggest that the mayor voices support for Hamas,” Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish, said Friday in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, also a Jewish Democrat, has opposed Mamdani on some legislation related to protests outside houses of worship — a sensitive issue in the wake of protesters picketing outside synagogues that were holding Israeli real estate events. Menin said in a press conference on Thursday that Netanyahu’s remarks were “not helpful at all” because “we need to turn the temperature down.”
“This idea of what the prime minister said can really incite violence. We cannot have this,” Menin said.
Mamdani, an outspoken pro-Palestinian advocate, has condemned Hamas as “a terrorist organization” and has denounced antisemitic hate crimes committed in New York.
The mayor responded with a statement of his own, saying that Netanyahu “used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.”
“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Mamdani said. The United States is not a party to the ICC and has no obligation to carry out its warrants on U.S. soil.
Netanyahu’s remarks at the U.N. General Assembly came amid a reelection campaign in which Netanyahu’s Likud Party has made Mamdani a villain. Hoylman-Sigal called Thursday’s speech a “political ploy” and a “deflection by someone who has a lot of domestic turmoil, political and otherwise.”
“Clearly, Netanyahu is fighting for his political life,” said Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish.
Netanyahu’s arrival in New York sparked a wave of demonstrations in Manhattan on Thursday, including multiple organized by Israeli expatriate groups who emphasized the Oct. 27 Israeli election date. Rallygoers chanted “Vote him out!” at a protest held by the Israeli anti-Netanyahu group UnXeptable.
Even before his visit, Gov. Kathy Hochul pushed back on comments Netanyahu had made. Calling Mamdani a “supporter of the Hamas monsters” was false and “hurt his own credibility,” Hochul said in an interview with the radio station WNYC earlier this week.
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, which is supportive of Netanyahu and has been harshly critical of Mamdani, called Netanyahu’s remarks “Churchillian” and his “greatest speech.”
“Importantly, he also called out Mamdani as a dangerous antisemite who has endangered Jews in New York City,” Klein said in a statement.
The U.N. speech came as Israeli officials have escalated their rhetoric against Mamdani.
Last month, Ofir Akunis, the Israeli consul general in New York, compared Mamdani’s support for the boycott Israel movement to Nazi Germany. A Mamdani spokesperson told JTA the comparison was “offensive, completely unhinged and detached from reality,” and said Akunis “should be ashamed of himself.”
The statement was Mamdani’s first time weighing in on the Israeli consul general, who had accused Mamdani of being directly responsible for anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city.
Republican City Council member Inna Vernikov, who is Jewish and a staunch Mamdani critic, took issue with the mayor’s response.
“When Mamdani cleans his own house, then he can criticize Jewish leaders,” said Vernikov, pointing to Mamdani’s wife’s anti-Israel views and his vetoing of a bill on protests around schools.
Brad Lander, the Jewish progressive and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district, blasted both Akunis’ and Netanyahu’s attacks on Mamdani.
“Netanyahu and Akunis are cynically weaponizing accusations of antisemitism for their own narrow, selfish political purposes,” said Lander, one of Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish allies, in a statement to JTA. “They are making Israelis, American Jews, Palestinians, and the whole world less safe.”
Lander himself was the recipient of a Nazi Germany comparison when Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for New York governor, said that Lander “would be a camp guard in the concentration camp if he could.”
Hoylman-Sigal called the comparisons “outrageous,” and said that he is more worried about a rise in far-right parties, including Germany’s AfD.
“We should be very careful, no matter what our background is, to draw such extreme comparisons,” he said.
Phylisa Wisdom, who heads Mamdani’s office to combat antisemitism, told JTA that it is “appalling that some leaders have resorted to comparing their political opponents to Nazis.”
“We can and should disagree — sometimes deeply — but we must be able to do so without debasing public discourse,” she said.
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a group that leads outreach to non-Jewish community organizations, told JTA in an email that comparisons to Nazis should be out of bounds.
It is “particularly concerning given that our own community frequently, and rightfully, calls out those using dehumanization and/or making inappropriate Holocaust comparisons,” she said.
As a case in point, Spitalnick pointed to the Anti-Defamation League’s article on inappropriate Holocaust comparisons, which includes COVID-19 vaccine requirements and free speech complaints.
The ADL did not return a request for comment on Akunis’ Nazi Germany comparisons.
“Disagree with the Mayor on his policies or rhetoric — I certainly have — but comparisons like this are deeply offensive and wrong, in addition to undermining the very relationships and engagement necessary to ensuring Jewish safety in New York and beyond,” Spitalnick said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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‘Nobody Wants This’ star Adam Brody on Gaza: ‘Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide’
Adam Brody, the Jewish actor who plays a “hot rabbi” on the hit Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This, called the war in Gaza a genocide in a new interview, making him one of just a few Jewish celebrities to speak out publicly against the Israeli campaign.
The comments came in an interview with GQ about Brody’s efforts canvassing for Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterms.
“Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine,” he said. “It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”
The claim of genocide in Gaza is heavily disputed. Several international bodies, human rights organizations and academic institutions have concluded Israel’s actions in Gaza since Oct. 7 fit the description, including a United Nations Commission of Inquiry. Other similar groups, like the International Court of Justice, have not applied the term.
Brody’s comments were surprising in part because he had previously kept his feelings about the war private, even as other leading Hollywood figures openly criticized it. He does not maintain a public social media presence, and he did not participate in pin-wearing campaigns or sign various petitions related to the war — an approach he indicated he might change going forward.
“I’m not wearing a pin, so I’m not inviting a certain question, and perhaps I should,” he said. “I really admire people who do. But 99% of what I’m asked about is about the show. I’m not trying to plead ignorance—here we are doing a political interview, so it makes sense that we wade into this territory—but I’ve never ducked a question, really, not a political question anyway.”
Brody — who came to fame in the 2000s as the teenager Seth Cohen on The O.C. — joins Hacks star Hannah Einbinder and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) as perhaps the most high-profile Jewish actors to publicly call the war a genocide. Other Jewish entertainment figures, like Mandy Patinkin and The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer, have criticized the war but stopped short of calling it a genocide.
Yet Brody’s comments are perhaps especially notable because of the character he plays on TV. In Nobody Wants This, Brody plays a rabbi dating a non-Jewish woman — introducing her to the beauty and foibles of Jewish faith and culture. Israel has been conspicuously absent from the show, with its creator, Erin Foster, saying she deliberately avoided geopolitics.
Season 3 of Nobody Wants This releases to Netflix October 22.
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