RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/366431/in-israels-time-of-need-jewish-hollywood-has-failed-the-audition/

For a people that purportedly invented, and now control, Hollywood, Jews are awful at making demands—as Jews. There’s a reason why those early nickelodeons featured silent cowboy-westerns and scant Jewish immigrants. Jewish invisibility continued into the talkie era—more cowboys, wicked witches, tap dancers in gowns and tuxedos, a gin joint in Casablanca, and, yes, one Jewish jazz singer. Jewish characters didn’t only find themselves left out of the picture, they weren’t even on the cutting room floor. And as for silence, well, . . . that’s a Jewish specialty when it comes to standing up for their own people.

Antisemitism has overtaken America in ways not seen since the 1930s, when Hitler was ascending in Europe and the Depression caused pernicious divisions within the United States. The Jewish influence in Hollywood was never greater among studio chieftains and writers back then, but the motion picture industry had nothing to say about Hitler’s plan for European Jewry.

Some studio heads still had families in Europe. And they were at the helm of the ultimate megaphones and spotlights. But there was no golden hour for the Holocaust. Hollywood’s cameras were dark. The Third Reich was the second largest market for movies in the world—and foreign sales, in industry speak, is the Golden Calf. It wasn’t until Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940), as Auschwitz was beginning to burn, that Hollywood realized that the number of Jewish actors and extras in the world was rapidly shrinking.

And Chaplin wasn’t Jewish!

There’s a sequel to this sad story playing out all over again, an even more inexplicable example of how La La Land goes all blah blah rather raise the red flag for Jews. In the aftermath of the October 7th massacre in Southern Israel, which included the most gruesome and unimaginable of all horror flicks—the beheading and baking of Jewish babies, and the gang raping and mutilation of Israeli teenagers—sympathy for Israel evaporated before it even started. Instead, there was the surreal solidarity with Hamas. The victims were thrust into the woke paradigm as oppressors; and the terrorists were reincarnated as the resistance.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/anti-racism-is-a-religion-and-nearing-cult-status/

How much wrong is Ibram X. Kendi willing to do to prove he’s on the right side of history?
Linguist John McWhorter hit absolute paydirt in 2015 when he argued that 21st-century anti-racism is far more religious than political. “The Antiracism religion has clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin,” McWhorter wrote. “It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.”

Having grown up in religious circles, I don’t find it hard to look at the modern anti-racist movement and see the parallels. Racial division may not be quite as prominent a topic right now as it was in, say, 2014 and the summer of 2020, as it takes a backseat to matters such as elections, the future of our political parties, and whether Thomas Jefferson actually invented the swivel chair. But this backgrounding can help us to see what the anti-racist true believers are really up to, and where the movement is currently placing its evangelistic — yes, that is the right word — focus.

Unsurprisingly, as with many actual religions, there’s a lot of lying and manipulation going on. Ibram X. Kendi, the high priest of the American anti-racist religion, has released his newest ‘sermon’ via Netflix: Stamped from the Beginning, an adaptation of his 2016 tome by the same name. The documentary is like virtual church for anti-racists, except without . . . well, there are very few positives to virtual church, so the analogy holds. It’s exceptionally well-produced and well-told. And it’s a 92-minute tour de force in advancing the profoundly dishonest and overbroad rhetoric of the anti-racist religion promising to liberate us from America’s original sin.

“What is wrong with black people?” Such is the hopeful note that the film kicks off with. It makes the dichotomy of Kendi’s visual sermon apparent from the get-go: disagree with the story that’s about to be told, or the applications made from it, and you’re part of the group that thinks there’s something wrong with black people. And quite possibly, you’re complicit in the prejudice that has marked American history. “Often we assume that race is only about the color of one’s skin,” says presenter Angela Davis. But no: “It is about slavery.” This is when Kendi starts doing the thing he, and thousands of faith-healers before him, might be best at: telling stories that are very compelling — so long as you don’t think too hard about the bill of goods that’s actually being sold to you.

https://quillette.com/2023/11/30/black-progress-and-black-rage/

Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X, two enormously important figures in black history, were each the subject of a major cultural event in November. The biopic Rustin, produced by Michelle and Barack Obama, opened in movie theaters and was released on Netflix. Meanwhile, New York’s Metropolitan Opera raised the curtain on X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a decades-old production that has at last reached opera’s biggest stage. 

The simultaneity is a coincidence, but the contrast between the two men brings into unusually sharp relief a fundamental divide in the struggle of black people for equality. Aside from Martin Luther King, almost no one contributed more to the victory of civil rights in America than Rustin. The only other figure who deserves to be placed ahead of him is A. Philip Randolph, who organized the first predominantly black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—a substantial base that enabled him to play the role of patriarch to the movement. 

Randolph was also something of a father figure to Rustin, who was born to a young single mother and raised among Pennsylvania Quakers by his grandparents. The two men first collaborated in 1941, when Rustin, then in his late twenties, assisted Randolph in organizing a march to demand an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industries. President Roosevelt yielded, and the march was called off. At the war’s end, Randolph and Rustin reprised that scenario, securing an order from President Truman to integrate the armed forces. 

Then, in 1947, Rustin and a few other pacificists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation undertook the first “freedom ride,” which aimed to secure enforcement of a ruling against discrimination in interstate transport. In North Carolina, he was beaten by police, arrested, and sentenced to work on a chain gang. From his cell he sent dispatches to the New York Post, generating such an outcry that North Carolina abolished chain gangs. 

In 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott propelled King into national prominence. Rustin had traveled to India to study Gandhi’s techniques and he mentored King in the strategy of nonviolent protest. Then, together with Randolph and a few others, Rustin organized the first civil-rights mass marches, the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools. The movement gained momentum with the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960 and the “freedom rides” of 1961, reenacting the 1947 effort of Rustin and his pacifist colleagues but this time into the murderous deep south. The gathering momentum led to the movement’s culmination in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the most important protest in US history.

The 1963 march was orchestrated by Rustin, who bore the misleading title Deputy Director (the other civil-rights leaders were afraid that his homosexuality and brief youthful membership in the Young Communist League made him too controversial to be called the Director), and it provided the venue for King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Even more importantly, it decisively tilted Washington’s political scales in favor of civil rights. There followed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. This trifecta of legislation put paid to a century of overt racial discrimination.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/golda/

Golda is a biopic about Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War. The film was released in the US on August 25, 2023. Golda Meir was Israel’s fourth prime minister, its first and only woman prime minister, and the third woman prime minister in the world. Her tenure was from 1969 to 1974. She resigned after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Golda Meir was not only exceptional because she was a woman and a leader, and not only because she rose to power without being the wife or daughter of a male leader. World leaders typically cultivate as glamorous an image as they can; attractiveness is a form of power. Golda Meir, in her youth, looked like a studious, serious young lady, more interested in books and service than primping in front of a mirror. In her maturity, Meir looked like a grandmother. Pulling back her long, graying, frizzy hair into a bun and keeping it in place with barrettes was her one obvious grooming choice. Her suits were in neutral colors, conservative and unadorned. She wore sensible shoes that came to be known as “Golda shoes.” Eschewing obvious appeals to glamour, Golda Meir, counterintuitively, became an icon.

Meir lived a life on the front lines of historic events that affect us today. She was born in 1898 in Kiev, what is now Ukraine, and what was then part of the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire was not a safe place for Jews for much of the early twentieth century. Anti-Semitic violence was increasing significantly. “Between 1918 and 1921, over 1,000 anti-Jewish riots and military actions … were documented in about 500 different locales throughout what is now Ukraine … a conservative estimate is that 40,000 Jews were killed and another 70,000 subsequently perished from their wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure … About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed,” writes historian Jeffrey Veidlinger.

A photograph of the child Golda Mabovitch is a portrait of sadness. Five of her siblings died in childhood. “I can’t recall anything good or happy. I remember the strife at home, a real … shortage of food. And I remember the fear of pogroms,” Meir would later say. Among this little girl’s earliest memories was one of her father boarding up the house to protect his family from a rumored pogrom.

The Mabovitch family escaped to America. Little Golda watched the store when her mother had to buy supplies. Meir made aliyah to Israel with her husband in 1921, and quickly took on leadership positions. She signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948. She would go on to be the first Israeli prime minister to meet with a pope, and she hosted West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s visit to Israel.

Several feature films and documentaries have covered Meir’s life. Anne Bancroft, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Davis, Tovah Feldshuh, Valerie Harper, and Colleen Dewhurst have all played Meir on either stage or screen. Golda 2023, rather than presenting Meir’s entire life story, focuses on the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Director Guy Nattiv and screenwriter Nicholas Martin dramatize what they call new revelations about that war that will significantly alter received interpretations of Meir’s role, and the role of other key figures. Nattiv is one of two Israeli directors who has won an Academy Award. Nicholas Martin’s previous project was writing the script for the 2016 Meryl Streep – Hugh Grant biopic, Florence Foster Jenkins.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-equalizer-hero-in-a-world-without-knights/

Action flicks these days aren’t dominated anymore by square-jawed, one-note actors like Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, and Statham (they aren’t even mostly the domain anymore of men, but that’s an article for another day). In recent years, the leading men of the best “actioners,” as they’re known in Variety-speak, are heavy-hitting thespians like Liam Neeson and Denzel Washington, whose acting chops elevate the genre to a whole new level. In The Equalizer movies, for example, Denzel brings compelling depth to a character that would be one-dimensional in a lesser talent: a chivalric hero in a world without knights.

The Equalizer 3 opened in theaters last week, and I was in one of them to check out the latest installment of the franchise, happily contributing a few dollars toward the $42 million the film raked in domestically over the long Labor Day weekend.

If you’re unfamiliar with the movies, in the first Equalizer outing in 2014, Denzel (and let’s face it, he has reached the stratosphere of one-name celebrity, like Sting or Madonna) plays Robert McCall, a quiet, mysterious loner whose unassuming demeanor belies his lethal special ops training. Living like a monk, as one baffled character puts it, while working nine-to-five at a Home Depot-type store, the widowed McCall, a retired assassin from “the Agency,” flies under everyone’s radar.

McCall confesses in that film that he had once done things that he wasn’t proud of, but that he had promised his now-deceased wife that “I would never go back to being that person.” And indeed, he now lives by such an honorable code that he chides acquaintances about character failings like swearing and eating junk food. But he is supportive and inspiring as well: he helps coach a hapless coworker to prepare for a better-paying job as a security guard, for example, and he encourages the dream of a singing career for a young Russian call girl he has befriended at the local coffee shop, where he hangs out and reads during sleepless nights. Coming to the aid of this damsel in distress brings down the wrath of ruthless Russian sex traffickers – but they, like everyone else, underestimate McCall.

McCall is also a big reader, working his way through a list of the 100 Best Books. At one point the call girl sees him with a new book and asks what it’s about. “It is about a guy who is a knight in shining armor,” McCall replies, “except he lives in a world where knights don’t exist anymore.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/21/the-oppenheimer-file-missing-cast-and-forgotten-back-stories/

In the early going of this marathon film, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) tells a hostile government committee that his testimony should be understood in the context of his life and work. Context also is important for movies, but Oppenheimer keeps key back stories off the screen.

Viewers see the “Hitler Invades Poland” headline from September 1, 1939, but do not see or hear anything about Josef Stalin’s Communist forces invading Poland on September 17, 1939. This joint invasion started WWII and came about because of the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 23, 1939. Viewers see nothing about the Pact, and no headline such as “Stalin Invades Finland,” marks November 30, 1939.

While the Pact was in operation, Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis) invaded Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and took over France by the summer of 1940. Under the Pact, the Nazi and Soviet intelligence forces collaborated and Stalin handed hundreds of Jewish Communists over to the Gestapo. Jewish scientists in America would have been well aware of that deadly exchange, but not a word in Oppenheimer.

Viewers never learn that for nearly the first two years of the war, Stalin and Hitler were allies. The Communist Party USA collaborated with pro-Nazi groups in America and did everything in its power to keep the United States out of the conflict. In Oppenheimer, no Communist is asked to account for what he or she did during the Pact, and why they stayed in the Party after many others left, never to return.

The Communist Party USA was founded, funded and controlled by the USSR and members pledged loyalty to the Soviet regime. Oppenheimer portrays Party members as misguided liberals concerned about the conflict in Spain. Viewers hear about “the brigades” but no character explains that the Abraham Lincoln Brigades were a Communist Party militia that opposed anti-Franco groups such as the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. The POUM fighters included George Orwell, author of 1984, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia. See also Cecil Eby’s Between the Bullet and the Lie.

Inquiries about Oppenheimer’s “left wing” associations fail to note that the Party had an open and secret membership, as Whittaker Chambers detailed in Witness. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr cite evidence that Oppenheimer was a member of a secret Party unit at UC Berkeley, where his friend Haakon Chevalier, a professor of French literature, was an active Communist. In the movie, Jefferson Hall plays Chevalier, and Oppenheimer resists his request to pass on information to the Soviets.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2023/08/03/fbi-finds-hundreds-of-sex-trafficking-victims-in-major

The FBI located 200 victims of sex trafficking in a nationwide enforcement campaign, the agency said Tuesday, which included dozens of minors.  

The two-week operation, dubbed “Operation Cross Country,” also led to the identification or arrest of 126 suspects of child sexual exploitation and human trafficking and 68 suspects of trafficking, according to a press release. 

“Sex traffickers exploit and endanger some of the most vulnerable members of our society and cause their victims unimaginable harm,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “This operation, which located 59 actively missing children, builds on the tremendous work the FBI has undertaken over many years to rescue minor victims and arrest those responsible for these unspeakable crimes. We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners across the country to prevent human trafficking; increase detection, investigation, and prosecution of human trafficking crimes; and expand support and services to protect and empower survivors.”

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children praised the FBI and their law enforcement partners for their efforts to protect children.

“Behind every statistic, there is a person with dreams, aspirations, and the right to live a life free from child sex trafficking and exploitation. As a society we must work together to ensure the protection, support, and empowerment of those impacted by this heinous crime,” said the group’s president and CEO, Michelle DeLaune. “Their tireless efforts in combatting crimes against children sends a powerful message that child sexual exploitation will not be tolerated.”

The operation’s success comes after the media’s criticism of anti-child trafficking film “Sound of Freedom,” which was smeared as a conspiracy theory promoted by MAGA Republicans. 

https://pjmedia.com/culture/anthony-gonzalez/2023/08/02/why-everyone-should-go-see-sound-of-freedom-n1715508

Yesterday, I decided to go ahead and watch “Sound of Freedom” at my local theater. To say the movie was good would be insulting. It was an eye-opening, inspirational, and incredibly well-made film that captivated me from start to finish.

I didn’t know Hollywood had it in them anymore.

To date, “Sound of Freedom” has generated over $150 million at the box office. It should be noted that it has yet to be released internationally.

Even CNN is calling the film a “box office hit.” Who would’ve thought?

I think of the film as the Mike Tyson of the movie industry. No movie comes close, except “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One,” which I saw last week. With that being said, “Sound of Freedom” remains at the top of the leaderboard.

The movie highlights the dangers of the child sex trafficking that is going on everywhere around us. I bet many of us aren’t even aware of the crisis, at least not how it operates. I think of child sex trafficking as a silent pandemic, swooshing through the winds, staying in the shadows.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/barbies-checkmate

I know. You’ve had it up to here with Barbie. You don’t care about the stunning $162 million global record-breaking opening weekend. You roll your eyes at the Barbie luggage, the candles, the ice cream, the Airbnb listing, the NFTs. You’re sick of the whole “women are so oppressed yet so wow.” You’ve heard it a million times already; the future is female.

Well, you may not be interested in Barbie, but Barbie—or more precisely, Mattel, Barbie’s corporate puppet master—is interested in you. Young children are Mattel’s core customers, but the company has set its sights on a much wider market. It sees the movie as a way for everyone—“teens, young adults, moms, glammas [a portmanteau for glamorous grandmas]” to “engage in the franchise,” in the words of Richard Dickson, Mattel’s former president and COO (now CEO of clothing retailer Gap).

Judging from the pink tsunami of the past few weeks, Mattel’s efforts are paying off. We shouldn’t be surprised. The movie is only the latest in a long series of brilliant chess moves confirming Mattel’s place as the World Champion Grand Master of marketing to progressive, relatively affluent, sophisticated consumers. I don’t know whether the company or the movie are actually as woke as some are grumbling, but I do know Mattel saw the sales potential of the woke phenomenon when Nikole Hannah-Jones was still in elementary school.

Consider Barbie’s origins. For much of commercial toy history, baby dolls were your basic girl toy. Girls would pretend to bottle-feed, dress, and comfort their dolls in imitation of their housewife mothers, who, in turn, tended to their real-life average of five (!) children. The end of the baby-doll era came in the late 1950s, after Ruth Handler, along with her husband Elliot, a founder of the young Mattel company, had a eureka moment. During a visit to Germany, she spotted an unusual doll known as Bild Lilli in a shop window. Based on a risqué comic book character, Lilli was mostly sold in tobacco shops. The character was something of a floozy, with many R-rated adventures. At the time, Lilli was coveted not by little girls but by grown men, though exactly what they did with the dolls no one was saying. To create Barbie, Mattel desexualized and Americanized Lilli, giving her a California glow, evening out her dramatically arched eyebrows and toning down her red, puckered lips. One other seemingly trivial but significant change: Lilli’s shoes were molded to her invisible feet; Barbie’s shoes are removable.

Director Greta Gerwig’s movie opens with a hilarious take on Barbie’s arrival in the U.S. market. A gargantuan doll dressed in a zebra-striped bathing suit and sunglasses suddenly appears, monolith-like, astride a group of sad-looking young girls. Dressed in dowdy, Amish-inspired smock dresses, they are awestruck at this vision of adult sexiness and glamour and immediately smash their baby dolls in angry disgust, a scene that Gerwig gleefully sets to the majestic orchestral opening of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/oppenheimer-a-dishonest-masterpiece/

Although biopics about great scientists have been a Hollywood staple ever since the early days of the talkies, they pose distinct challenges to filmmakers. How, after all, to make the sight of somebody working out a mathematical problem in his head visually exciting? Still, from The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Madame Curie (1943) to The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game (both 2014), the genre has yielded some first-rate results. The latest such achievement is the epical Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk).

It’s the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), “the father of the atom bomb” – not to be confused with Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” Before seeing it, I read American Prometheus, the 2007 biography by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird on which it’s based. The book is fascinating, but after finishing it I wondered how Nolan had managed to make it cinematic. Yes, in films like this, sooner or later you know you’re going to see the hero excitedly scribbling complex equations on a blackboard. But in The Theory of Everything we also experienced the human drama of Stephen Hawking becoming increasingly weakened by ALS; in The Imitation Game, Alan Turing’s autistic personality made for plenty of interpersonal conflict; and A Beautiful Mind actually put John Nash’s imaginary friends onscreen.

But what to do with Oppenheimer? The man was a puzzlement, complex and contradictory. Obsessed with the paradoxes of the cosmos, he nonetheless found time to become a multilingual polymath of surpassing erudition — an aficionado of Picasso, Stravinsky, and The Waste Land who taught himself Italian so he could read Dante and learned Sanskrit just for the hell of it. Different people described him in strikingly different ways: for one, he was “angelic, true and honest”; for another, he was a guy who “could cut you cold and humiliate you down to the ground.” In more than one way, his story is similar to Turing’s. Both were geniuses who played outsized roles in winning World War II but who, years later, were punished by their governments for matters unrelated to their work (in Turing’s case, his homosexuality; in Oppenheimer’s, his intimacy with Communists). While Turing’s wartime work gave birth to the computer age, Oppenheimer’s ushered in the atomic age. Both men’s discoveries had their positive and negative consequences; but while the downsides of computers took decades to come into focus, the downsides of nuclear energy were clear from the git-go.

In Oppenheimer’s youth, to be sure, physics seemed innocuous — a matter of working out abstruse calculations about the behavior of atoms and the movements of galaxies that had no conceivable connection to everyday human life. Inclined, in any event, far more to theoretical than to applied science (in chem lab, he was a klutz), he took his undergraduate degree at Harvard, then — in order to immerse himself in quantum mechanics, which back then (it was the 1920s) had yet to gain a foothold in the U.S. — did advanced work at Cambridge, Göttingen, Leiden (where he picked up the nickname Opje, later anglicized to Oppie), and Zurich. Reading American Prometheus, I feared that any film about Oppenheimer would have to jettison these years in Europe, which, though colorful, might be dismissed by some screenwriters as tangential. But my concerns were unfounded: Nolan works just enough of this stuff in to get the gist of it all, and, bless him, puts in every last one of the details I was particularly fond of — such as the spectacle of Oppenheimer, newly arrived in Leiden, delivering a lecture in Dutch, which he’s just taught himself for the occasion.