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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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Can this LGBTQ+ Jewish organization navigate these turbulent times?
Nonprofit Keshet has been a leading advocate for Jewish LGBTQ+ rights for nearly three decades.
This year, however, longtime CEO Idit Klein stepped down, while at about the same time, the Trump administration was ramping up its policy assault on the LGBTQ+ community. (It recently mandated that U.S. passports for transgender people must now reflect the sex on their original birth certificate, reversing a decades-old policy.)
The question was not whether Keshet would plot a path through this challenging period, though. It was how.
The organization’s latest educational offering, the Shivyon Project, offers a window into its evolving priorities, as it contends with this less-than-agreeable federal administration and, in select pockets of the country, a recrudescence of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment.
Shivyon, as it’s known, provides Jewish organizations — JCCs and synagogues are Keshet’s most frequent clients — with an “action plan” aimed at improving an institution’s LGBTQ+ policies. It’s a collaborative and customizable endeavor, so the specifics can vary. “This is not one size fits all,” said Rabbi Micah Buck, Keshet’s Director of Education and Training. Once a blueprint is agreed upon, Keshet’s trained professionals provide coaching and guidance over the course of a year, by the end of which — all having gone smoothly — the plan has become reality.
Thoughtful and soft-spoken, Buck acknowledged that this was hardly a straightforward moment for the organization. “We are living in a time in which LGBTQ+ identities, especially transgender and non-binary and gender expansive identities, have become inappropriately politicized,” he told me.
Demand for Keshet’s services in general, and for Shivyon in particular, has duly shot up. “For so many LGBTQ+Jews, safety and belonging in our Jewish communities feels more urgent and needed than ever before,” said Buck.
Though Shivyon grew out of the ‘Leadership Project,’ Keshet’s first foray into general community education more than a decade ago, it is “drastically different” from any of the organization’s previous cohort-based programs, Buck said. After all, Shivyon has been rolled out against a somewhat unusual split backdrop: On the one hand, recent political turbulence; and on the other, a sustained effort by the mainstream Jewish community to embrace LGBTQ+ Jews.
“Organized segments of Jewish life have made tremendous progress celebrating LGBTQ+ identity,” Buck said. “And we are seeing greater and greater numbers of the LGBTQ+ community in positions of leadership and influence.” The non-orthodox rabbinate, for example, is often cited as both an incubator for and testament to the improving integration into mainstream Jewish life of the LGBTQ+ community; the sheer number of LGBTQ+ students attending rabbinical school has, in fact, become something of a phenomenon in its own right.
With Shivyon, then, Keshet had to strike a fine balance: gesturing sufficiently at the dangers of the current political moment, while also recognizing and incorporating into its curricula the advances of LGBTQ+ Jews during the previous decade.
One solution, Buck told me, was to talk about belonging rather than inclusion, a shift in emphasis that has shown up in ways both grand and unassuming.
Take Congregation Beth Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Dallas, and one of Shivyon’s participating congregations. It recently became the first Conservative synagogue to march in the Dallas Pride Parade — a milestone made possible, said its executive director Katie Babin, by Shivyon’s success in making Beth Shalom’s “queer community feel fully included and embraced.”
Yet no less significant were the “small but intentional changes” Beth Shalom instituted, Babin told me over email — most notably updating the language on its membership applications. This kind of attention to the fine print is an integral part of Shivyon, too, the substance to go along with the symbolism.
Textual analysis has been Shivyon’s other calling card, Buck told me, an excellent source of community and common interest. “We can find clear indications of LGBTQ+ Jewish presence forever,” said Buck. “For so many people in our community, one of the moments that can be really beautiful is encountering that sense of: My ancestors have always been here.”
As for the present political challenges, Keshet has opted to double down on its values-based approach. “For all the weaponization of people’s identities,” Buck said, “the basics of access, dignity and celebration are not fundamentally sites of division within the Jewish community.”
The post Can this LGBTQ+ Jewish organization navigate these turbulent times? appeared first on The Forward.
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The Silence on Tucker Carlson’s Rhetoric Is Dangerous
Tucker Carlson speaks at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Oct. 21, 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
For the better part of the last two months, I have sat across the table from senior officials at the US State Department and the Department of Justice. Our conversations centered on one issue: how to confront the alarming rise of antisemitism in the United States.
As Chairman of the World Jewish Congress, this work is central to my mission, and what I witnessed in Washington was both serious and heartening. The meetings reflected an administration that, at least within the departments I visited, is approaching antisemitism with an intensity and clarity of purpose that has not always been present in Washington.
At the State Department, for example, officials briefed me on their efforts to address antisemitism on university campuses and in other sectors of American society. For years, as a member of the Conference of Presidents, I visited that same building and left with the unmistakable impression that hostility toward the Jewish community still lingered in its halls. This time, the shift was unmistakable. The institution is changing, and that change matters.
It is precisely because of this progress that the current silence regarding Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric is so troubling.
In my view, Carlson has increasingly embraced themes that echo extremist or white-nationalist narratives, including giving a platform to figures such as Nick Fuentes, whose openly antisemitic positions are well documented.
Carlson has questioned the loyalty of Jews and Christian Zionists, and has — in my assessment — amplified sentiments that undermine the safety and standing of Jewish Americans. These are not merely policy disagreements; they are messages that, intentionally or not, legitimize bigotry.
What concerns me even more is the reluctance of political leaders, many of whom have long been genuine friends of the Jewish people, to call this out with the urgency it deserves.
Carlson’s influence on the political right is significant, and ignoring this trend risks allowing antisemitic tropes to migrate from the fringes into the conservative mainstream. If that happens, it will do profound damage not only to American Jews, but also to the conservative movement itself.
The fight against antisemitism cannot be selective. It cannot stop at the water’s edge of partisan convenience. If government officials are prepared to confront antisemitism within international institutions, academia, or foreign governments, they must also be willing to address it when it emerges from figures with large domestic audiences.
Elie Wiesel wrote, “We must always take sides.” My own family — grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles — were murdered in the Holocaust while too many remained silent. The consequences of silence are not abstract to me.
America is not Europe in the 1930s. But history teaches that hateful ideas take root when they go unchallenged. Carlson’s rhetoric, in my judgment, crosses a line that no one committed to the security of the Jewish people — or to the health of American democracy — can afford to ignore.
At a moment when the Federal government is showing a renewed seriousness in combating antisemitism, it is time for political leaders across the spectrum to speak with equal clarity. “Never again” must be more than a memory; it must be a principle we are prepared to defend in real time.
J. Philip Rosen is chairman of the World Jewish Congress, American section. He has been a Jewish activist for most of his life and is currently a Board member of Yeshiva University and JINSA, and is Vice-Chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
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What’s Really Behind Attacks on AIPAC?
AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr speaking at the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., March 2, 2020. Photo: AIPAC.
In the age of websites tracking “pro-Israel money” and politicians questioning American support for Israel, one claim has become a rallying cry: AIPAC should register as a foreign agent. It’s repeated so often that many accept it as fact. But repetition doesn’t make something true, and this claim reveals more about the accusers than about AIPAC.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires registration by those who act “at the order, request, or under the direction or control” of a foreign entity while engaging in political activity on that entity’s behalf.
Notice what’s required: not merely sympathy with a foreign country or advocating for policies that benefit it, but actually operating under its direction or control. This crucial distinction is what AIPAC’s critics ignore.
If the Department of Justice, which has dramatically ramped up FARA enforcement since 2016, believed AIPAC met the legal threshold, it would be an obvious target. Yet the DOJ hasn’t pursued AIPAC. Professional prosecutors evaluating the actual legal standards apparently don’t find the case compelling. But that hasn’t stopped the pundit class.
The claim that AIPAC operates under Israeli government control crumbles under scrutiny. DOJ guidance asks whether an organization acts independently or as “an agent or alter ego of the foreign principal.” The evidence overwhelmingly supports AIPAC’s independence.
When Isaiah “Si” Kenen founded what would become AIPAC in the 1950s, he described the idea that he was an Israeli “agent” as ludicrous, pointing to constant disagreements with Israeli diplomats. When the US planned to arm Iraq, Israeli diplomats wanted to immediately campaign for arms to Israel. Kenen disagreed, arguing that opposing arms to the entire region was the better strategy.
During the Oslo Accords, AIPAC publicly supported the agreement while internally opposing Israel’s request to send US aid directly to Yasser Arafat, insisting instead that it go to Palestinians more broadly with proper monitoring.
These aren’t the actions of an organization under foreign control. They’re the actions of an independent American organization whose members at times disagree with Israeli policy and advocate for their opinion of what’s best.
Organizations like the United States India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) operate nearly identically to AIPAC. Founded in 2002, USINPAC helped secure the landmark 2008 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement. Additionally, a 2009 Foreign Affairs article stated that “the India Lobby is the only lobby in Washington likely to acquire the strength of the Israel lobby.”
Yet when you search for “FARA” and “USINPAC” together, you find essentially nothing. Meanwhile, countless articles, entire books, and dedicated websites exist solely to “expose” AIPAC and its alleged foreign agent status.
This isn’t about legal analysis. It’s about targeting one ethnic lobby while giving identical organizations a pass. Irish, Armenian, and Cuban lobbies have all shaped American foreign policy throughout our history. AIPACis targeted because its members are Jews.
What if AIPAC did register under FARA? According to FARA specialist Matthew Sanderson, it would mean filling out a few extra documents with essentially no practical effect.
AIPAC already operates under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, requiring extensive public disclosure: lobbying expenditures, specific issues and officials lobbied, lobbyist identities, funding sources, and political contributions.
Since AIPAC doesn’t accept money from foreign entities, the FARA funding disclosure forms would be blank. Since it doesn’t lobby under foreign control, it wouldn’t need to file interpersonal disclosure documents detailing who it contacted or announce itself as a foreign agent during lobbying calls — requirements that only apply when an organization operates as an extension of a foreign principal. The only potential requirement might be labeling some materials as coming from a “foreign agent,” but in today’s climate, where everyone already has opinions about AIPAC, this would have a negligible impact.
If FARA registration would change nothing practically, why does this matter?
First, truth matters. The claim is false. When bad-faith actors misrepresent AIPAC’s history as sinister subterfuge, often with antisemitic overtones reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, capitulation legitimizes their framing.
Second, selective scrutiny reveals troubling double standards. The vast chasm between scrutiny of AIPAC versus identical organizations, suggests factors beyond legal analysis drive this narrative. When the campaign focuses overwhelmingly on the Jewish State’s supporters while ignoring others, we should call it what it is.
Third, FARA’s ambiguity makes it a potential weapon. A statute so broad it could require registration for “routine business activities” becomes dangerous when applied selectively based on political preferences. This sets a disturbing precedent.
AIPAC is an American organization, funded by Americans, run by Americans, advocating for what its American members believe serves American interests. That some disagree doesn’t make it a foreign agent. It makes it a lobby, like hundreds of others in Washington.
The next time someone claims AIPAC should register as a foreign agent, ask: Where’s the evidence of foreign control? Why don’t they make the same claim about similar organizations? And why aren’t DOJ prosecutors, who’ve ramped up FARA enforcement dramatically, pursuing this supposedly obvious case?
The answers reveal this isn’t about law. It’s about politics — and prejudice.
Alexander Mermelstein, a recent USC graduate with a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Data Science, is an aspiring policy researcher with a focus on Middle East affairs and combating antisemitism.