By MYRON LOVE Anyone who has been to a sporting event in recent years is sure to be familiar with the hot dog and t-shirt launchers that propel hot dogs and t-shirts into crowds. What you probably don‘t know is that the launcher was invented right here in Winnipeg – by Brian Glow. 
“I have always been an inventor,” says the son of Freda and the late Syd Glow. “I came up with the concept for the launcher in the early 1980s. It has many other uses in addition to sporting events. It can be used to spew out streamers or confetti. It can shoot out a guide rope from a ship to tie the vessel to a dock and fire out life-saving vests to swimmers or boaters in trouble.”
While few probably know about Glow’s avocation as an inventor, people all over the world will know him from his “day job” as one of North America’s most in-demand magicians.
Brian Glow has been making magic for almost all of his life. His resumé includes more than 10,000 corporate shows under his belt, including sales meetings, trade shows, banquets, annual general meetings, and award ceremonies. He has also performed and produced shows for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics and the Pan American Games.
Glow’s multi-award winning one-man “Comedy, Magic and Mindreading” production has become one of the favourite touring magical shows in North America. He has entertained in casinos, on television and film, and for corporate events and public spectacles in over 45 countries worldwide.
In a recent interview with Glow in his West St. Paul home, he recalled his first performance. “I was the entertainer for my eighth birthday party,” he recounts.  “I have been in demand ever since.”
It was from the old Ed Sullivan show – which those of us of a certain age will well remember – that Glow was introduced to magic.  “My family and I never missed an Ed Sullivan broadcast,” he says. “It was like a religion.”
As a magician, Glow was self-taught.  “I learned my first magic tricks from reading books at the West Kildonan Library,” he recalls. “There were two books about magic at the library. One was called ‘Magic of the World,’ which was published in 1965. The other was Houdini’s ‘Biography of Magic for Kids.’ Those books were amazing teachers. I still use some of those same tricks today.”
“In our corporate shows,” he continues, ”we incorporate our sponsors’ products in the production. For example, if we are doing a show for an auto dealership or manufacturer, I make a car magically appear.”
Glow points out that while many people can do simple magic tricks, the key to taking it to the next level is the presentation.”That takes skill,” he says. “The presentation is what makes an act magical, amazing, fun.”
While Brian Glow truly is an amazing magician, what really separates him from his brethren is that he is also a man on a mission. That mission is to build his magic act as a framework around which he teaches children and teenagers how to counter bullying.  And, over the past 40 years, he has brought his anti-bullying training to tens of thousands of children primarily living in remote – largely Indigenous –  communities across the north – from Nunavut to Alaska, also northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Northwestern Ontario.
Why does he focus on those regions? He explains that in larger, more easily accessible centres, there are professionals – doctors, psychologists, social workers –  who can provide counselilng for individuals who are being victimized by bullies.  That help is simply not available in large swaths of our country.
When it comes to surviving bullying, Brian Glow speaks from his own personal experiences growing up. He notes that he has lost some friends to suicide because of the torments they suffered from bullies.
In his shows focusing around countering bullying, he intersperses magic with his own stories about experiencing bullying.  Glow tries to provide strategies for standing down bullies and working on creating more positive self-images for victims of bullying, that include calling up audience members to engage in role playing among other techniques. 
“Bullying involves an imbalance of power,” he explains.  “One of the more effective ways of disarming a bully is to refuse to react to the insults. You have to try to keep calm and respond in an even voice.  The bully wants to humiliate you. If he can’t, he will lose interest.”
Glow concedes that is not easy when someone is telling you that you are fat or ugly. “You have to keep at it to a make a difference,” he says.
He further points out that the exponential growth in social media over the past 25 years has made the bullying problem much worse. Social media can amplify your public humiliation,” Glow observes.  “You can be left with a sense of worthlessness and really spiral down.”
He notes that he continues to stay abreast of the latest research related to bullying and learn new techniques in countering this pernicious practice.
Brian Glow may now be past what is still generally considered retirement age, but he has no intention currently of slowing down.  In fact, he recently left on another two-month round of anti-bullying performances in the north – starting with northern Saskatchewan.
“I am a lucky man,” he concludes.  “I have been able to spend my life doing what I love, also using magic to help others.  And, I am still learning.”
One can certainly say that Brian Glow has lived a magical life.

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.

The post Ari Emanuel has written a memoir and no one is safe — not even his brother appeared first on The Forward.

(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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