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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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Yemen’s Houthis Confirm Launching Attack on Israel for First Time in Current War
Houthi police trooper mans a machine gun mounted on a patrol vehicle at the site of a rally in solidarity with Iran, as the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran continues, in Sanaa, Yemen, March 27, 2026. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis confirmed on Saturday that they had launched an attack on Israel for the first time during the current Israeli-US war against Iran, marking their entry to the conflict and raising the prospects of a broader regional confrontation.
Israel earlier said it was working to intercept a missile from Yemen.
The group said the attack with a barrage of missiles came after continued targeting of infrastructure in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, adding that their operations would continue until the “aggression” on all fronts ends.
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Inside the ancient Christian theology driving modern antisemitism
Christian influencers like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are rallying their followers against Israel — and Jews. And to do so, they’re also weaponizing a centuries-old concept that underlies many strains of Christianity.
It’s called supersessionism, and it’s the idea that Jesus’ existence supersedes all commands, laws and beliefs that came before it. Christians often say that Jesus’ death “fulfilled” God’s commandments, meaning that everything God said to Jews in the Hebrew Bible, all of the covenantal promises and laws, are obsolete.
These views on Israel, and their theological interpretation, collide with a Christian Zionist movement that deeply supports Israel for its own scriptural reasons, believing that Jews must return to Israel to fulfill a prophecy and herald Jesus’ own return.
Yet supersessionism has become a theme in Christian opposition to Israel. We hear it in the words of Carrie Prejean Boller, a recent Catholic convert and a now-former member of the Religious Liberty Commission, a Trump administration council on religious protections. After she used a panel on fighting antisemitism as a platform to declare that her religious convictions prevented her from supporting Israel — and was removed from the commission as a consequence — she doubled down. “The Catholic Church is the True Israel,” Prejean Boller declared in a post on X. “Christians are the spiritual Semites. We are the new people of God.”
Candace Owens, a Christian podcaster who often refers to Judaism as Satanist; avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes; and right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson have all similarly said that their Christianity prevents them from supporting Israel because Jesus has obviated the need for a holy land. “As Jesus says plainly in the Gospels, I am the Temple. I am the Temple now,” said Carlson in a recent video, explaining his religious opposition to Israel.
These supersessionist Christian influencers have expressed support for Gaza and criticized Israel on political and moral grounds; that part is not religious. But they have also insisted that they must oppose Israel from a religious perspective, because its very existence goes against their belief that Jesus has taken the biblical place of Israel.
In their hands, supersessionism fuels not only opposition to Israel, but explicit antisemitism — Prejean Boller has said that she is incapable of being antisemitic because, she argued, since Catholics are the true Semites, she would have to be discriminating against herself. Owens repeatedly refers to Judaism as the “synagogue of Satan,” an age-old accusation that in rejecting Jesus, Jews have rejected God and become evil.
This ancient and controversial piece of theological history is increasingly becoming a bludgeon against Israel, and Jews more broadly.
The roots of supersessionism
In the supersessionist understanding of Christianity, now, Jesus’ followers — Christians — are the chosen people of God, overriding and replacing the Jews in covenant with God.
Scholar Susanna Heschel has referred to supersessionism as a form of colonization. “Christianity colonized Judaism theologically,” she writes in an essay on supersessionism in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, arguing that the newer religion usurped its central theological concepts while “denying the continued validity of those ideas for Judaism.”
The reasons supersessionism emerged as a dominant belief in Christianity are rooted in a complicated history. Christianity arose from Judaism, and Jesus was a Jew. So early Christians put a lot of work into differentiating themselves and their new religion from Jews and Judaism.
“Paul, you know, he did not want Christians to adopt Judaism,” Marcia Kupfer, an independent scholar who researches and writes about supersessionism, particularly in medieval art, told me over the phone. “It would mean that they are turning to the law when they should be just putting their faith in Jesus.”
Much of that differentiation involved rejecting the continued validity of Judaism. While Christians do consider the Hebrew Bible to be part of their holy texts, there’s a reason they refer to it as the “Old Testament” — because, now, it is obsolete, making anyone who continues to follow its teachings in some way backward and no longer in active relationship with God.
“It is this problem of having, in a way, consumed Judaism,” Kupfer said. “It’s part of their Bible. But it has to be preparatory, prophetic, some anticipatory stage to something more complete and true. More spiritual. So it’s at the same time taken over and rejected.”
Who believes in supersessionism?
Today, it can be tough to definitively say what movement thinks what, due, in large part, to the stratospheric rise of Christians who consider themselves non-denominational — and to the linguistics around supersessionism, which some consider to be a negative term, even as others embrace it.
“It often doesn’t get talked about as supersessionism,” said Matthew D. Taylor, a theologian and visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University. “I don’t know too many Christians who will come out and say: ‘I’m a supersessionist.’”
But, in general, the more doctrinally focused the church — Catholicism, Orthodox, Calvinism — the more likely it is to have historically preached supersessionism; the more experiential churches, such as the non-denominational charismatic movement, are less attached to the ideology and often lean toward endorsing Israel.
Among the sects that have historically preached supersessionism, however, the ideology has been a topic of hot debate since the Holocaust. In recent years, these churches — especially the Catholic church — have made moves to reject the ideology, due to supersessionism’s antisemitic undertones.
Rev. Russell McDougall, director of ecumenical and interreligious affairs at the United States Council of Catholic Bishops, told the Forward that “the church has repudiated” supersessionism “quite clearly,” and admonished Catholic influencers like Owens, Prejean Boller and Fuentes in a letter from the USCCB. He pointed to a 2015 Church document titled “The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable,” released on the 50th anniversary of another groundbreaking document about Jews, Nostra Aetate.
Nostra Aetate, a portion of the revolutionizing Catholic council known as Vatican II, is lauded for improving church views on Jews. It rejects the belief that the Jewish people bear responsibility for Jesus’ death, and also affirms Christianity’s roots in Judaism. But, while Nostra Aetate sought to improve Catholic respect for Judaism, it still affirms some supersessionist ideas. “Although the Church is the new people of God,” it says, “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.” Jews, in other words, are not hated by God — still, Christians have replaced them as God’s favored children.
The 2015 treatise grapples with this issue at far greater length. It admits that rejecting supersessionism undermines the central beliefs of the Church. “The theory that there may be two different paths to salvation, the Jewish path without Christ and the path with the Christ,” the document says, “would in fact endanger the foundations of Christian faith.” How to excise supersessionism without undermining the church, it concludes, “remains an unfathomable divine mystery.”
The idea that salvation is given by God exclusively through Jesus is so central to church teachings that rejecting supersessionism poses clear contradictions — which is perhaps why modern Christian influencers are returning to it.
The Christian movements that do not preach supersessionism — the charismatic non-denominational movements, Pentecostal Christians, and fundamentalist evangelicals such as Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel — don’t resolve the contradictions either.
Many Christian Zionists focus, in part, on a line in Genesis, 12:3, in which God says that those who love Israel will be blessed and those who oppose it will be cursed; Ted Cruz cited this verse to Tucker Carlson in explaining his support for Israel. Others reference prophetic books in the Bible that point to God’s promises around Israel. But they do not necessarily engage with other lines in the New Testament that imply support for supersessionism.
“They’re reading the Bible in a very helter-skelter way,” said Taylor of the charismatics.
Why does any of this matter?
While supersessionism is core to Christian theology, it might seem like a niche debate best left to pastors and rabbis. But, looking at statements from Carlson, Prejean Boller and others, it’s clear that it informs and justifies their politics regarding Israel and Jews at large — even though it has officially been rejected by many churches.
“They’re in many ways rebelling against the past 60 years of Catholic theology, and trying to hearken back to something that they view as more authentic,” said Taylor of the influencers. “So I think that the supersessionist piece is signaling something significant because it’s part of the broader distaste for some of the modernizing shifts within Roman Catholicism.”
Supersessionist beliefs have, for years, driven antisemitism. It is woven into centuries of artistic and cultural portrayals of Jews as backwards, lesser or even Satanic, based on the idea that Jewish practice is defunct and has rejected God. Synagoga, a symbolic representation of Judaism throughout medieval art, is often depicted as blind. The theological precept has also driven attempts to evangelize and convert Jews for centuries, something Christians might not understand as antisemitism but which many Jews see as an attempt to erase Judaism.
Many, many church leaders — Catholic and otherwise — support Israel. Christian Zionists like Huckabee or John Hagee, a preacher who runs the Christian Zionist advocacy group Christians United For Israel, are a major force in the U.S. Some of these groups lean even philosemitic, appropriating Jewish rituals such as blowing the shofar or wearing a tallit into their Christianity. (This is also seen by many Jews as a form of supersessionism and cultural appropriation.)
Still, a growing number of Christians are embracing antisemitism in the name of supersessionism. This theology undergirds the increasingly common argument that some antisemitic beliefs are a fundamental part of Christianity — and therefore that asking Christians to fight antisemitism infringes on their freedom of religion.
Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene refused to vote for the Antisemitism Awareness Act, saying it would restrict Christian beliefs. Prejean Boller, in the Religious Liberty Commission hearing on antisemitism that resulted in her removal, accused the Jews on the panel of calling all Catholics antisemites. Since then, she has repeatedly rejected accusations of antisemitism and said that they are infringing on her own religious liberty.
This debate — whether or not Christianity embraces or rejects Jews, and how either choice operates theologically — has become a core conflict in American Christianity, and among the right wing in the U.S.
“I think Israel has become a kind of battleground between these folks with the more interventionist kind of Christian Zionist,” said Taylor, “versus this more kind of isolationist, Catholic and Calvinist, supersessionist and antisemitic coalition.”
But even the more philosemitic side isn’t really embracing Jews for their own sake or on their own terms. Though politicians like Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz cite scripture to justify their support for Israel, it’s an uneasy alliance rooted in Christianity, not Judaism.
For these Christian Zionists, Jews operate as a way to access and experience a form of Christianity that feels ancient and authentic — think Paula White-Cain, Trump’s former spiritual advisor, being wrapped in a Torah by a messianic Jewish “rabbi,” an act of supposed Judaism that no Jew would ever do. For many of them, support for Israel springs out of a scriptural hope for the end times, and the need to gather Jews in Israel to trigger the apocalypse.
“On the American far right, this bifurcation into philosemitism and antisemitism are not opposites,” said Taylor. Instead, he said, they’re “two sides of the same coin — they’re often instrumentalizing Jews for Christian purposes.”
The post Inside the ancient Christian theology driving modern antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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We were instant friends. Then came the Israel question.
There’s one thing these days Jewish publications of all stripes seem to agree about: The Jewish future — geographically, politically, spiritually — is Florida. An article last month in the conservative magazine Tablet pondered whether Miami was “the new Jerusalem,” and left-wing quarterly Jewish Currents made the Sunshine State the theme of an entire 2024 issue.
As a Jewish journalist, inveterate spring breaker and friend of a Florida man with a couch for me to crash on, I wanted to see for myself. So last week, with paid time off burning a hole in my swim trunks, I took my talents to South Beach … and spent essentially no time in the Jewish community at all. (Though I did DoorDash banana bread from Zak The Baker.) But just as Jonah could not outrun his destiny, the Jewish future inevitably found me anyway. This happens when you like talking to random people at bars.
I had spent much of the night getting to know an ebullient pair of strangers, Will and Deanna. (Names changed here.) They are best friends and roommates, two Dallas-born transplants chasing careers in fashion design. Both are gay, and neither is Jewish. But we found common ground when Will told me he is religious. As I told Will, I’ve reported extensively on the experiences of queer Orthodox Jews for the Forward (“a really cool Jewish newspaper”). I spoke of the challenges they face, their resilience and their breakthroughs, and Will spoke about bringing his queerness to his faith.
There was something he needed to ask me, though: Had I been reporting on Jewish people where I’m from, or — he ventured nervously — “Israeli Jews”? I told Will I mostly write about American Jews, but that this Jewish issue transcended borders.
Then the real purpose of the question came out. He volunteered his sense of horror about Gaza and related his shock about the circumstances of Israel’s establishment. What he believed about the history was unclear — it was loud in there, and I couldn’t quite make out his claims — but I could tell: I was being tested.
Yes, this did feel like the Jewish future: one in which any conversation about Judaism will become one about Israel or — and this is how I read the question — your Israeli politics. A future in which Jews everywhere, upon identifying themselves as Jews, are asked (or held) to account for Israel’s actions. And, frankly, a future where it is harder for Jews to make friends with non-Jews.
In another context, or a different mood, I might have been put off by the turn our conversation had taken and quit the interaction. But I liked these two old souls. I said to Will that what has happened in Gaza was terrible; as a journalist, I keep my politics close, but this was sticking to facts. And I saved the looming debate over Israeli history for another time. The three of us went back to enjoying the music and yapping about our dreams and nightmares, and when the lights finally came on at the bar, they invited me to meet them for brunch the next day. I said yes.
Part of me wanted to bring Israel up the next day, but at brunch I couldn’t find a place for it. Yet I found there were lots of opportunities to discuss Judaism. I told them about my grandmother’s recent passing, the dignity of Jewish burial rites and the intensity of shiva. We told stories, laughed, got closer: I learned that Deanna had lived in her car when she first moved to Miami, and Will showed pictures of himself in drag. When the food arrived, this fledgling trio held hands and said something like grace.
A couple hours later, we laid down towels on South Beach. Deanna stayed on the shore as Will and I waded waist-deep into the water. Here was my chance to say something about “Israeli Jews,” or invite him to ask me anything he wanted to know about Israel. But what crossed my mind in the ocean was a mitzvah I often contemplate at the beach. “In Judaism,” I explained, “there’s this practice of ritual immersion…” We never did circle back to Israel.
Florida (particularly South Florida) has come to represent the Jewish future because its Jewish community is ethnically diverse and teeming with young people. (It’s also deeply pro-Israel.) Other features seem predictive of everywhere else: Chabad reigns supreme and religious schools are heavily subsidized. The state is also a kind of extremist incubator — see gubernatorial candidate James Fishback; Florida International University’s antisemitic conservative group chat; or the Miami nightclub that played Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” for conservative influencers — with Jews a prime subject of obsession.
Meanwhile, American Jews should expect to field uncomfortable questions from strangers about Israel and Gaza for the foreseeable future. It might not be fair, but reality rarely is. All we control — besides the weather, media and global financial system, of course — is our reaction.
The post We were instant friends. Then came the Israel question. appeared first on The Forward.