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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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‘NAZA’ documentary draws sold-out crowd – and protests – at US premiere
(JTA) — Even a powerful Nor’easter couldn’t stop the crowds from showing up at the North American premiere of the controversial Israeli documentary “NAZA” on Saturday afternoon.
The two weekend screenings scheduled at Lincoln Center as part of the New York Film Festival sold out in minutes. Dozens of people waited in a box office standby line that stretched around the corner despite the blustery conditions, while at least one local politician scored a ticket: Brad Lander, the Jewish progressive and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th Congressional District.
Meanwhile, two groups of Israeli-Americans showed up on Saturday with no intention of going inside the theater: one demonstrating in solidarity with the filmmakers, and a larger group across the street that denounced the film as they waved Israeli flags.
The documentary, which was produced by The Guardian and alleges that Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in Gaza, has received early acclaim, winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. It will be made available for free on The Guardian’s website later this fall.
John Kwiatkowski, senior manager of publicity and communications for Film at Lincoln Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “NAZA sold out almost immediately.”
But “NAZA,” whose name is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage,” has also roiled a number of Israeli officials and the country’s military. The Israel Defense Forces issued a public rebuttal after the film’s reception in Venice, with the IDF chief of staff calling the film a “deliberate distortion of reality.”
The Israeli filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, have faced intense backlash at home. Israel’s culture minister threatened to strip them of their citizenship and protesters accused the duo of treason in a demonstration outside Szor’s parents’ home.
Roni Tamari, who organized the rally supporting the filmmakers on Saturday, called the Israeli reaction “out of proportion.”
David Lawson, a Jewish Queens resident who had purchased a ticket for the Saturday premiere, told JTA that he’d appreciated Abraham and Szor’s previous film, “No Other Land,” which focused on settler violence in the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta.
Minutes before the screening’s slated start time, Lawson said that he was “very excited” to see “NAZA,” not just for what it will say “about Israel, but also just about the alarming use of AI in warfare in general.”
Lawson said he likes “to hope that the tide is shifting on acceptance of Zionism in the United States,” and that support for “NAZA” was an example of that shift. He also said he was “expecting” to see protesters who disagreed with the film. “Pathetic,” another person in line chimed in, describing the demonstration.
They were referring to the protest organized by the Israeli-American Council, which drew dozens of critics of the film who believe it omits the context of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack in its depiction of the IDF’s military campaign in Gaza. Speakers included IAC’s chief communities officer Noa Peri-Jensch and a pair of survivors of the Nova music festival that Hamas attacked.
A fleet of four black trucks circled the area with LED screens that displayed images of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack along with various messages. “Movies have editors. History does not,” one message read. The trucks were commissioned by the IAC.
“We mourn every innocent life lost in this war, Israeli or Palestinian,” Peri-Jensch said during the rally. “But compassion for Palestinian civilians does not require [us] to erase Oct. 7, ignore Hamas or accept one narrative without questioning it.”
Peri-Jensch was not calling for the film’s screenings to be canceled, she said in an interview, but rather for them to be paired “with context” at festivals, like panels featuring Oct. 7 survivors.
Asked about Israeli officials’ threats toward the filmmakers and the demonstrators calling them traitors, Peri-Jensch said she “cannot comment on what people in Israel do, I can only comment here,” adding that viewers “deserve to know the full scope.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed legislation last week that would strip the Israeli filmmakers of their citizenship, while the Israeli army has weighed taking legal action against them.
Protesters gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home multiple nights in a row last week calling on authorities to “expel the traitors.” One speaker called for Abraham and Szor to be executed while the crowd chanted, “Execute the traitors.” Participants in the right-wing protest included activists and campaign staff from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right party, according to Haaretz.
On Saturday, Nova massacre survivor Rom El-Hai himself referred to the filmmakers as “traitors,” and said that there have been “liars” like Abraham and Szor within the Jewish community since the Bible and during the Holocaust.
In an interview following his remarks, El-Hai said it isn’t his job to say how exactly Abraham and Szor should be dealt with in Israeli society, but that they “should be punished” and that they cannot “live their life in Israel like nothing happened.”
“People need to understand there is a price for what they’re doing,” he said.
Near the standby line running along the sidewalk of Broadway, about a dozen demonstrators who are involved with the group Israelis for Peace held signs reading, “We stand by the countless victims in Gaza and Rachel & Yuval for speaking truth to power.”
Tamari, one of the organizers, said she felt it was “actually very disrespectful” for images of wounded and killed Oct. 7 victims to be shown in public.
Moshe Kayam, an Israeli-American who demonstrated in solidarity with the “NAZA” filmmakers on Saturday, said IAC’s rally was “doing a disservice” because the Oct. 7 attacks were indeed “horrendous,” but “did not justify the mass killing” of civilians in Gaza.
“We want the truth to come out,” Kayam said of the film. “We want everyone to see what really happened there, and the damage that it caused to Gaza, to Israel’s image and to us as Israelis.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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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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