May 24, 2012 | 4:03 pm

Simon Wiesenthal Center honors uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer

Posted by Danielle Berrin

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Jerry Bruckheimer. Photo © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons

The Museum of Tolerance held its annual National Tribute Dinner last week, at the Beverly Hilton, an opportune moment, with hundreds turning out to see the museum confer a humanitarian award on the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, an entertainment industry titan best known for expensive blockbuster franchises such as “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “National Treasure,” along with a slew of successful television series including “CSI” New York and Miami versions and “The Amazing Race”.

During dinner, giant screens scrolled through images of the sleekly modern museum the Simon Wiesenthal Center is building in Jerusalem. Also, a joint project between the SWC and UNESCO that explores the “3,500 year relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel” was announced with great fanfare, with plans for exhibitions at UNESCO headquarters in Paris and at the United Nations building in New York.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Wiesenthal Center, paid his debts to the main attraction, a group of Hollywood moguls sitting together at a long communal table in the mezzanine.

“People don’t come here because the rabbi tells them to,” Hier said. “They come here because guys like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Ron Meyer ask them to.”

Katzenberg returned the flattery by referring to Hier as “Commander-in-Chief”.

“There are not many rabbis who have won two academy awards and distinguished honor from the French government”—Hier won France’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Merite in 1993—“in fact, there’s only one of that kind.”
 
As usual, the emotional crux of the evening came during the Medal of Valor presentations, honoring a mix of modern-day heroes, including the former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, and a group of elderly Tuskegee Airmen, who were the subject of the 2012 film “Red Tails” produced by George Lucas.

Giffords, who was initially unsure whether she would ascend the stage to accept the honor, walked stiffly but surely to the podium sporting a pair of chic and shiny tennis shoes, with her husband on her arm. She was beaming. After an emotional video detailing her ascent through the business world and into the U.S. House of Representatives, where her term was cut short by the assassination attempt that left her with a gunshot wound in her head, Kelly spoke to the crowd.

“Gabby always says the same thing to me as she leaves for therapy each morning,” he began, “her last words are… what?” he asked, turning toward her.

“Fight, fight, fight!” she said with a radiant smile.

“Gabby is a fighter,” Kelly said. “She is tough; tougher than anybody I know. She’s not willing to accept failure or defeat, and she reminds me [of this] every single day. Her dreams for a stronger America are not yet fulfilled, and her future is bright.”

The center also presented medals of valor to Holocaust survivor Elisabeth Mann, who, after being liberated from a concentration camp became a teacher and mother-figure to hundreds of orphaned Jews at a school in Sweden, as well as a group of Tuskegee Airmen, African American members of the U.S. Air Force who flew combat missions over Italy and Germany during World War II.
 
Actress Emily Procter, star of “CSI: Miami,” presented Bruckheimer with his award, but instead of focusing her remarks on the producer, she told an impromptu story about her first real estate purchase. After a seemingly meandering tale about the obstacles in purchasing this home and the magnificent orange tress that sat in the backyard, it turned out the owner was a Holocaust survivor who, when learning of her appreciation for the trees, granted her the sale.

Visibly choked up, Procter said, “He planted those trees in honor of his family”—who perished in the Holocaust—“and he said, ‘I’ll sell you the house if you care for the trees.”

By the time Bruckheimer took the podium, it was near 10 p.m. and the evening had reached its denouement. Surprisingly, there was no video montage of Bruckheimer’s greatest hits, so the producer nervously offered a few remarks, quoting Hannah Senesh, in an effort to ferret out the humanism in his blockbuster body of work.

“I’ve never been mistaken for a message producer,” Bruckheimer said, adding that although moral tales have not been the aim of his filmmaking, they have nonetheless found their way into the heart of his oeuvre. He specifically mentioned his pride in films like “Remember The Titans” that have “explored race through sports”. 

The evening raised $1.4 million for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

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May 23, 2012 | 12:39 pm

Because we Cannes, Cannes, can’t?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Francois Mori/Associated Press - The French feminist group ‘La Barbe’ protests on the red carpet at the 65th international Festival du Cannes in southern France.

Because Cannes becomes the center of the film universe each year for ten days, the tales that trickle from the Croisette tend to be somewhat inflated, even inflammatory.

Last year, Lars Von Trier stole the show with some off-the-cuff sympathy for Adolf Hitler. A grain of salt, or rather sand, must accompany this sort of scuttlebutt.

Last week, when it was reported that the French feminist group La Barbe (“The Beard”) had published an open letter in Le Monde decrying the festival’s lack of female-directed films, I wrote to a director friend to inquire about the festival’s mood.

“What women thing?” was his clueless response.

But in fact, a scandal was stirring. On Sunday, La Barbe staged a small protest smack on the red carpet during the premiere of Michael Haneke’s “Amour”. Their protest signage, like their letter in Le Monde, was sardonic in tone: “Marveilleux,” ‘’Merci!!!” ‘’Splendide,” ‘’Incredible!” “Le Barbe” [Marvelous, Thank You, Splendid, Incredible, The Beard]—and were proudly wielded by fake-bearded women to challenge the cuckoo Cannes establishment.

“Men are fond of depth in women,” read the now infamous line of their letter, “but only in their cleavage.”

Do the Cannes programmers have any excuse for an Associated Press observation that reads like this: “None of the 22 films competing for the Palme D’Or prize at the festival this year was directed by a woman.”

While some have suggested that this may be symptomatic of larger industry ills in which the percentage of women directors who are hired to work is negligible at best, it does seem odd that a festival that prides itself on progressivism, freedom of expression and art could be so obtuse.

Cannes certainly likes its gaggle of glamourous women on the red carpet, the letter stated wryly: “[N]ever let the girls think they can one day have the presumptuousness to make movies or to climb those famous Festival Palace steps, except when attached to the arm of a prince charming.”

A woman has won the Palme d’Or, Cannes’ highest prize, only once, an honor attached to Jane Campion for 1993’s “The Piano.” And the current powers that be don’t seem to want to scuffle over the issue. Juror Andrea Arnold, a director who has shown two films at Cannes in the past said, “I’d absolutely hate it if my film got selected only because I’m a woman. I would only want my film to be selected for the right reason, not out of charity.”

Festival director Thierry Fremaux agreed. He responded to the Le Monde lambasting by stating that the festival selects films strictly based on merit. “We would never agree to select a film that doesn’t deserve it on the basis it was made by a woman,” he wrote.

But more than 2,397 women in entertainment have signed on to an online petition on the Website change.org demanding some sort of affirmative action. In a letter penned by the Brooklyn based non-profit Women and Hollywood, “Where Are The Women Directors?”, the authors wrote: “We call for Cannes, and other film festivals worldwide to commit to transparency and equality in the selection process of these films. We judge films as human beings, shaped by our own perspectives and experiences. It is vital, therefore, that there be equality and diversity at the point of selection.” 

Signatories to the letter include feminist thinker and writer Gloria Steinem, playwright/activist Eve Ensler, writer Delia Ephron, and several Israeli groups, including the Haifa Feminist Center, Isha L’Isha, The Women in the Picture Association and The International Women’s Film Festival from Rehovot, Israel.

So is the fancy Festival du Cannes snobbish and sexist? Were the offerings from women not up to 4-star snuff? Or is the entire entertainment industry so subsumed in gendered hierarchy, women not only come up short but silenced?

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May 23, 2012 | 11:25 am

Self-Love for Y-Love

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Y-Love. Photo by Schneur Menaker

Self-actualization can be such a drag.

Just ask the African-American “ex-Chasidic” rapper Yitz Jordan, known to fans as Y-Love, whose religious journey clashed with his human journey when routine bouts of racism and homophobia dented his dignity.

One time, while praying at the Kotel in Jerusalem, he said, a group of black-hatted Jews taunted him by repeatedly calling him “shvartze.” As a black religious Jew, he became used to being served last in the kosher pizza line. Coupled with a decade of suppressing his sexuality to commit to the religious life, he wondered, “Why am I fighting tooth and nail to be a second-class citizen?” After the Kotel incident in 2007, he said, “I took off my bekishe [silk Chasidic coat] in the middle of the street in Jerusalem.”

Jordan isn’t the first Modern Orthodox Jew to struggle with a clash of cultures. Last December, Chasidic reggae star Matisyahu shaved his beard and wrote on his blog that it was an act of “reclaiming” himself.

“I felt that in order to become a good person, I needed rules — lots of them — or else I would somehow fall apart,” Matisyahu wrote.

For Jordan, 34, who decided to become Jewish at 6 years old, after seeing a “Happy Passover” announcement on TV, some of those same rules would prove pointless and oppressive.

The first time I met Jordan, I extended my hand for a shake, but he quickly covered his own hand with his cap so we wouldn’t have to touch. The surface of strict and serious devotion to Jewish law, however, belied a deeper conflict roiling inside. For the public persona Y-Love, halachah offered a means to hide.

“I’ve known I was gay my whole life,” Jordan said during a phone interview last week from Los Angeles, where he is spending the summer. His public coming-out, announced in capital letters on a widely disseminated press release, was vociferous in tone, the potent pronouncement of long-unheard roars.

“I mean, I’ve been wanting to come out for years,” he told me.

The closet was too claustrophobic. Jordan grew tired of “not being able to do the most basic things that heterosexual people take for granted — not being able to date, not being able to say a guy is cute online or leave a comment on somebody’s [Facebook] photo, making sure my friends keep secrets — that’s been the M.O. in my life for a long time. Now this weight is lifted off my shoulders.”

This wasn’t his first time. In middle school, he came out to some close friends, but “trying to get a 13-year-old to swear to secrecy is the same thing as getting a PR agent,” he said. He tried again at 15, coming out to the entire school, but added that “homophobia always sent me back into the closet.”

His first sexual experience, also at 15, ended badly. “I started crying afterward,” he recalled. “I went home and put on Jewish music. I was real depressed. It was like, immediately after sex was over, there was no afterglow; it was like, ‘I’ll never do it again. I’ll never do it again. I’ll never do it again.’ ”

For almost a decade, Jordan said he suffered from intense anxiety and depression. “I was on the antidepressant Lexapro. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. I was just artificially happy all the time.”

As a student at Ohr Somayach yeshiva in Jerusalem, he remembers discovering the text that would change his life, a responsum by the Belarusian rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, better known as the Chazon Ish. “Literally, it’s called ‘he who is inserted by his fellow man into his throat,’ about oral sex between two men. It doesn’t say it is permitted, but it doesn’t use the word ‘abomination’ ” — used to describe other acts of homosexual encounter — “and I was so happy, I called my friends in Baltimore. This was the first time I had ever seen a loophole that allowed me to have a sex life within a halachic framework.” 

Reconciling the desire for tradition with the opportunities of modern life is an animating force in Jordan’s quest. In his latest music video, “Focus on the Flair,” he alternates between Chasidic costume and drag. In art, as in life, is the ever-present tension between wanting to belong and needing to stand out. Tradition recalls the rewards of community; modernity reinforces the promise of individuality.

“This ultimately boils down to your God-view,” Jordan said. “I believe God is all-knowing and all-understanding. Like, if you’re gonna sit and talk to your therapist, and you think your therapist understands what you’re doing through, then God has to understand.”

Though critics were quick to accuse Jordan of using his coming-out to boost his Y-Love profile, he denied that the announcement was targeted to the release of his new single.

“What, just to get more ‘likes’ on Facebook and viewers on YouTube?” he quipped, adding, “Do I want to become more visible and scream to the world ‘I’m gay’? Yeah. If it boosts my image, that’s wonderful — but I’m out here to change the world, not just sell records.”

As for those in the religious community who have reproved him for repenting his repression, Jordan is not all that bothered. Yes, he’s less observant now and has officially left the Chasidic community. But, he said, “Judaism was in me before I knew what Judaism was. Orthodox Judaism is still my religion. I’m still a Jew, and I still believe in God.”

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May 22, 2012 | 9:21 pm

It’s finally clear why I saw ‘Titanic’ nine times

Posted by Danielle Berrin

My Heart Will Go On... no matter what

It took Daniel Mendelsohn’s discursive and insightful essay on the enduring appeal of the Titanic story for me to realize that it wasn’t my raging teenage hormones that drew me back to the Riviera movie theater over and over again (even if tickets were just $3.75). Rather, it was my inner feminist.

Mendelsohn elucidates in The New Yorker:

Cameron gave his film a feminist rather than a patriotic spin. Rose, of a “good” but impoverished Main Line family, is being married off to the loathsome Cal Hockley, who seals their engagement with the gift of a blue diamond that had belonged to Louis XVI. (“We are royalty,” he smugly tells her as he drapes the giant rock around her neck.) “It’s so unfair,” she sighs during a conversation with her odiously snobbish mother, who, in the same scene, is lacing Rose tightly into a corset. “Of course it’s unfair,” the mother retorts. “We’re women.” Small wonder that nearly half the female viewers under twenty-five who saw the movie went to see it a second time within two months of its release, and that three-quarters of those said that they’d see it again.

Yes, that was me. Except worse; and more so. It also explains, at least in part, why it was worth director James Cameron spending an additional $17 million to transpose the film into 3-D.

Cameron’s picture is about breaking the bonds of family, a point made by means of a clever contrast between its two leading ladies—Rose and the Titanic. At the start of the movie, the ship speeds confidently forward while Rose is described as being “trapped” and unable to “break free” (that corset, that mother); by the end, the ship is immobilized, while the girl strikes off on her own, literally and figuratively. She has to abandon the piece of panelling she’s climbed onto—and tearfully let go of Jack (now a frozen corpse), which she’d promised never to do—in order to swim for help.

Rose, in other words, saves herself; in the end the Titanic is the sacrifice, the price that must be paid for Rose’s rebirth as a girl who acts by and for herself.

Comparing the Titanic story with classic Greek tragedy, Mendelsohn identifies two powerful archetypes that keep luring audiences back to the ill-fated tale.

...the most obvious thing about the Titanic’s story: it uncannily replicates the structure and the themes of our most fundamental myths and oldest tragedies. Like Iphigenia, the Titanic is a beautiful “maiden” sacrificed to the agendas of greedy men eager to set sail; the forty-six-thousand-ton liner is just the latest in a long line of lovely girl victims, an archetype of vulnerable femininity that stands at the core of the Western literary tradition.

But the Titanic embodies another strain of tragedy. This is the drama of a flawed and self-destructive hero, a protagonist of great achievements and overweening presumption. The ship starts out like Oedipus: admired, idolized, hailed as different, special, exalted. Sophocles’ play derives its horrible excitement from a relentless exposition of its protagonist’s fall from grace—and from the fact that his confidence and his talents are what prevented him from seeing the looming disaster. Cameron understood this… The director knew that there is an ancient theatrical pleasure, not totally free of Schadenfreude, in watching something beautiful fall apart.

All this is why we keep watching Cameron’s movie, and why we can’t stop thinking about the Titanic. The tale irresistibly conflates two of the oldest archetypes in literature.

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May 22, 2012 | 2:02 pm

Palme d’Or for ‘Amour’?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Amour (2012)

There’s big buzz coming out of Cannes for Michael Haneke’s latest film, “Amour”, an ode to enduring love.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the Lumiere for Michael Haneke’s absolutely brilliant ‘Amour’,” The Wrap.com’s Sasha Stone reported. “No coughing, no walkouts”—something unheard of at the most artistically rich and critically loose film festival in the world.

But Stone had barely any critique of the 70-year-old Austrian filmmaker’s latest, writing:

When you really love someone for a lifetime, it transcends every other kind of love.  Romantic love comes nowhere near it. It is a bond so strong, in fact, that nothing can deter you from doing whatever needs to be done for the one you love. You will endure any test put in front of you, gladly, for a few minutes with your beloved.

Sentimentality is a surprising angle for a Haneke film, an artist best known for bleaker fare like “The Piano Teacher”, about an affair between a teacher and her much younger pupil, and “The White Ribbon,” a strange, disjointed and hauntingly beautiful film about life in a small, puritanical German village prior to World War I.  Of “Ribbon”, which won the Palme d’Or in 2009, Haneke said, “My main aim was to look at a group of children who are inculcated with values transformed into an absolute and how they internalize them. If we raise a principle or ideal, be it political or religious, to the status of an absolute, it becomes inhuman and leads to terrorism.”

“Amour” represents a switch for the politically minded Haneke, though praise for his love story has thus far been comprehensively effusive. The Wall Street Journal called it “the most serious contender” for Cannes’ top award. The festival ends May 27.

The story is about a happily married elderly couple, both retired piano teachers whose relationship undergoes the transformations that come with age and dying. Anne (played by Emmanelle Riva, 85, star of one of my all time favorite films 1959’s “Hiroshima mon Amour”) and Georges (actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, who apparently has not acted onscreen in years) are tested in ways they had not yet experienced when Anne suffers a series of strokes and Georges is forced from partner to caretaker.

Writing on WSJ’s Speakeasy blog, Lanie Goodman observed: “[W]hen their dialogue is no longer possible, the murmurs, cries, and wordless gazes unlock a deeper understanding about the devastating choices we make out of love.”

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May 9, 2012 | 11:28 am

‘Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish’: A love-hate relationship

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Mendy Zafir in a scene from “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish.” Photo courtesy of Vilna City Films

Eve Annenberg’s “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” is a film full of tricky contradictions.

As its title suggests, it is a celebratory showcase of Yiddish language, with about half its dialogue spoken in Yiddish, with English subtitles. A fact that also happens to fuel Anneberg’s big marketing ploy: “I’m coming to L.A. a week early to literally go around to Jewish senior centers and talk them into getting their people to the theater,” she said during a phone interview the week before the film’s Los Angeles premiere on May 11.

Who says pride is a sin?

“Other Yiddish films will come down the pike,” added Annenberg, who attended Julliard and Columbia University’s film school, “but I think people might say ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was the first to use this much colloquial Yiddish in modern narrative in more than 50 years.”

Efforts to revive the Yiddish language and culture have been on the increase in recent years, but usually not at the expense of other aspects of Jewish culture. “Romeo and Juliet” may be Annenberg’s “love song to Jewish culture,” but it is also a kind of angry lament at Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community.

“For the longest time, I was a little bit anti-Orthodox. Sexist, racist, anti-Zionist; I was just like ‘they [stink]’,” Annenberg told Heeb magazine in January 2011. Her feelings are undisguised in her film. “Fraud,” one subtitle declares, is a “Hassidic family business.”

In one scene, a payot-sporting, black-hat wearing Yeshiva bocher fakes being crippled to beg for money. Later, he removes his fake peyot and is shown smoking a joint as a naked African American girl crawls out of his bed. 

The celebration of one culture; the denigration of another.

The film’s milieu, which divides the reputed shadiness of the religious community from “normal Brooklyn,” where people do things like read Shakespeare, is bound to offend. But its edginess is all the more provocative, since much of it is based on truth.

Several years ago, Annenberg was walking down Fifth Avenue in New York one night and found herself bewitched by the sound of music emanating from the Millinery Synagogue on 6th Avenue and 39th Street. She was invited upstairs to a mysterious party called Chulent, organized by Yitzchak Schonfeld and designed to accommodate the “narrow margins where secular and [Ch]aredi, atheist and Chasidic, deepest depths and most foolish foolery, overlap,” according to the Web site neohasid.org. In simpler terms, the late-night party “basically is a drop-in lounge for folks that have traveled (or strayed) from the Chasidic world.”

For Annenberg, it was the only social activity in New York that ran late enough to allow her to first put her dying mother to bed. “That’s how I met them,” she said of the young, former Orthodox men and women who conversed mostly in Yiddish — though they also spoke Hebrew, Aramaic and English (“in that order”), which they had learned in their yeshiva studies. For various reasons, they had all broken away from the Orthodox community to try to make their way in the secular world; but for some, it was easier dreamed than done. With virtually no secular-world skills, many resorted to petty scams as the easiest way to make a living.

Then they met Annenberg.

The 40-something filmmaker was so taken with the young Yids, she hatched the idea to make a movie in Yiddish. “I’m a shallow girl,” she said. “I would look at these guys dressed in their Orthodox gear and think, ‘Ohmigod, look how beautiful they are.’ ” The most famous love story in Western culture seemed a natural fit, not to mention the uncanny cultural parallels — naive youth, rigid families, communal feuds and arranged marriages.

Annenberg recruited a small group to help her translate “Romeo and Juliet” into Yiddish (she deemed a translation from the 1930s too outdated). Then she hired them as actors. Their absolute inexperience with Shakespeare so fascinated her, she taped the translation sessions and made them a subplot in the film. “It was like something out of a Jewish version of ‘Hair,’ ” she said.

But when she posted the excerpts from the sessions on Vimeo, a local Orthodox blogger was so aggressively outraged, one of her actors dumped the tapes out of shame. 

“They were so fascinating,” Annenberg said of the Shakespeare sessions. “Their excitement over the material and the fun of it. But in the ultra-Orthodox world, men and women don’t socialize the way we were socializing; we’d sit and talk and study together, and I think that was discomfiting.”

The actors who play Romeo and Juliet in the film even had a real-life romance — their first. The entire film was shot in 30 days for $175,000, and it won an audience award when it premiered at the Berlin Jewish Film Festival last year. Now, several of the formerly floundering ex-Orthodox are pursuing film careers.

But the journey wasn’t entirely blessed. In the middle of the shoot, Annenberg was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, had a double mastectomy on a Wednesday and returned to the editing suite the following Monday.

“I was really, really lucky,” she said.

Perhaps God liked her movie, I suggested.

“Or not,” she joked. “I can’t tell you how many Orthodox Jews told me, ‘If only you had kept the Sabbath’ ... if only you hadn’t played ‘Avinu Malkeinu’ during the love scene!’”

“Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” opens May 11 in Los Angeles.

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April 25, 2012 | 3:37 pm

Music moguls to artists: Don’t boycott Israel

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Photo by WENN.com

On a recent Tuesday, a group of 30 leading music executives, talent agents and entertainment lawyers gathered for lunch in the downstairs conference room at the law offices of Ziffren Brittenham in Century City. Together, the group represents the likes of Lady Gaga, Celine Dion, Aerosmith, Jennifer Lopez and Justin Timberlake — to name a few.

Organized by the nascent group Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), a nonprofit seeking to counter artist boycotts of Israel, the meeting would include an educational PowerPoint presentation and an informal discussion with Los Angeles’ Consul General of Israel, David Siegel.

Cueing up the first slide, adorned with photos of famous musicians — Carlos Santana, Roger Waters, Elvis Costello and the alternative rock band The Pixies —  David Renzer, the former Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Publishing Group, asked, “What do these artists have in common?”

The room remained quiet. Renzer clicked to the next slide, displaying photos of jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, alt rocker Cat Power and UK-based electronic artist Joker.

Then, in his most equanimous voice, Renzer offered the big reveal: “They’ve all boycotted Israel,” he said. He repeated, for added effect: “They’ve all canceled their tours to Israel.”

The music industry executives, producers, lawyers and agents included Jody Gerson, co-president of Sony/ATV Music Publishing; Ron Fair, former chair of Geffen Records; and Rob Prinz, head of music at United Talent Agency. But few of them were aware that Israel faced an international campaign to create a cultural boycott of the country.

Renzer described the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), a loose collection of self-described “pro-Palestinian” activists who use every means — from sophisticated Web sites to tables on college quads — to spread a pro-boycott message.

“This is a very well-organized, very well-funded movement,” Renzer told the group.

“It doesn’t have clear leadership or a major hierarchy,” Siegel added. “But the goals are very, very clear: Boycott, delegitimize, dehumanize. They’re not about peace, and it’s not about debating Israel’s policies. It’s really about undermining our right to be a state for Jews.”

The next slide showed images encouraging the boycott of Israel: a Coca-Cola can inscribed with the words “Killer Cola,” an Israeli flag overlaid with a no-smoking symbol and the words “Boycott Apartheid Israel,” and another food label that reads “baby blood fresh Gaza.”

“I just want to point out,” interjected David Lonner, a former William Morris agent and founder of the Oasis Media Group. “That ‘baby blood fresh Gaza’ thing? That’s not anti-Israel. That’s plainly anti-Semitic. That’s as vile as anything you’d see in Nazi Germany.”

Next, Renzer showed videos of BDS in action: a divestment debate on a college campus; a street boycott of London’s Ahava retail store, a distributor of skin-care products from Israel’s Dead Sea; and a video of the BBC cutting off its live broadcast of the Israel Philharmonic’s performance at Royal Albert Hall last fall, after pro-boycott demonstrators disrupted the concert.

“This is an example of the stuff that gets put in front of artists,” Renzer said, adding that just this month, Oscar winner Emma Thompson joined three dozen other actors, directors and writers in protesting the inclusion of Tel Aviv theater troupe Habima in a Shakespeare festival at London’s Globe Theatre. Not only musicians are targeted, Renzer said, “This is about culture.”

“Well, where’s our music video? Where’s the counter publicity?” griped an angry Gary Stiffelman, a partner at Ziffren Brittenham, who has represented Eminem, Britney Spears and Michael Jackson. “Don’t the Jews still control the media?”

Everybody chuckled.

“It just shocks me that this ragtag group is doing a better job at the PR battle than Israel,” Stiffelman said. “There should be a global campaign! I don’t see it. I don’t see counter-PR happening on YouTube.”

Siegel chimed in: “It takes a network to fight a network. You don’t see Abbas making these videos; you see Westerners doing it. It’s much better to do this at the local level,” he said, prodding his audience with eye contact. “You don’t want government bureaucrats doing this; believe me, I’ve seen those videos.”

Roger Waters

Siegel went on to list some of Israel’s accomplishments in science, technology and the arts. Most people don’t know of them, he said, because the BDS movement wants to “pull an Iron Curtain over Israel.”

“Israel can’t be like Vegas,” Siegel said. “What happens in Israel can’t stay in Israel.”

Talk turned to producing a pro-Israel promotional video, then, inevitably, questions followed about who might pay for it. “Couldn’t Israel underwrite a campaign managed by laymen to create these videos?” Stiffelman asked. Siegel’s answer: “Right now there are three anti-missile batteries protecting Israel’s south. In order to defend the entire country, Israel needs 15. So there are very immediate demands on Israel’s resources.”

“What people respond to is pop culture,” said Hanna Rochelle Schmieder, president of Lyric Culture, a company that licenses rights to famous music lyrics and prints them on everyday apparel. “They like Lady Gaga, they like Justin Bieber. Music brings people together.”

“It’s all a question of image,” Siegel agreed. For many in the younger generation, being associated with the anti-Israel cause can be “way more cool.”

“We need to make Israel cool,” Atar Dekel, cultural attache for the Israeli Consulate, concluded.

CCFP is the first group led by industry insiders to try to counter negative messaging about Israel targeted toward the artistic community. Although the music community has been the biggest target to date, with musicians routinely getting bombarded with anti-Israel agitprop, the BDS movement has also arisen in the film and theater worlds, most visibly during the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, when a group of artists tried to stop the festival’s spotlight on films from Tel Aviv.

Israel is no stranger to challenges, both at home and abroad. But at a time when its image as a vibrant, democratic society is constantly threatened, the presence of world-class entertainers, many of whom have large, impressionable audiences, can help make life there seem, and feel, more normal. These days, however, luring mostly liberal-minded artists to a country whose reputation is often defined by its detractors can be a challenge. As Esther Renzer, co-founder of the pro-Israel advocacy organization StandWithUs, put it, “This is a battle for hearts and minds.”

CCFP was created to demonstrate to artists that Israel is a decent place. And that whatever their opinion of Israeli national policy, the boycott and divestment efforts unfairly punish the Israeli public. Shuki Weiss, one of Israel’s leading music promoters, told The New York Times in 2010 that the boycott was akin to “cultural terrorism.”

But while some high-profile musicians have succumbed to pressure to cancel their Israel tours, many prominent artists are still performing there — Lady Gaga, Elton John, Rihanna, Paul McCartney and Leonard Cohen are just a few who have taken the stage there in recent years. This summer, 46 musical acts are scheduled, including Madonna, who will debut her World Tour in Tel Aviv, as well as Rufus Wainwright, Herbie Hancock and Lenny Kravitz. For the classical palate, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will perform; for spectacle, Cirque du Soleil.

But elsewhere, there may be trouble ahead. CCFP is already monitoring a situation arising with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, scheduled to perform in Israel in September, who have become the subject of an intense Internet campaign to cancel. If you Google “Red Hot Chili Peppers Israel” the third hit from the top is a Facebook page demanding the Peppers “Defy Injustice, Cancel Israel.” At press time, it had 700 “likes.”

“Maybe this [boycott activity] is an aberration,” record producer Fair said. “Maybe it’s a small thing, and it won’t spiral out of control. But it’s another thing to watch. It’s another swastika painted on the front door of a Jewish institution. That’s how I look at it. I think it’s straight-up anti-Semitism with a new twist.”

CCFP first germinated in the summer of 2010 on a Master Class trip to Israel organized by The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. It was around this time — just weeks after the Gaza flotilla raid prompted an international uproar — that musicians like Elvis Costello and The Pixies began to cancel. David Renzer and his friend Steve Schnur, worldwide head of music for Electronic Arts (EA) video games, got to talking about what they could do.

Schnur had just come from an Elton John concert at Tel Aviv’s Ramat Gan stadium.

Carlos Santana

“Elton walked on stage and said, ‘They’re not gonna stop me from coming here, baby,’ ” Schnur recalled. “I was on the verge of tears, because someone was speaking up when all others were protesting. And the press was turning [the flotilla incident] into a forum for significant misinformation, and people have a tendency to believe what they read.”

Renzer and Schnur held an informal meeting, which also included Ran Geffen-Lifshitz, CEO of Media Men Group, a music publishing company based in Tel Aviv, and Doug Frank, former president of music operations for Warner Bros. Pictures. They decided they could use their connections to reach out to artists who were planning to perform in Israel.

“The initial mission was: Make sure no one else cancels,” Renzer said during an interview with CCFP co-founder Schnur last fall.

“We were in a position that we could contribute,” Schnur added. “And it’s easy to write a check, but it was time to get my hands dirty.”

They also felt the need for urgency. “We saw the boycott movement was getting some wins,” Renzer said, referring to the initial spate of cancellations, which also included spoken word artist and poet Gil Scott-Heron. After pro-boycott activists disrupted Scott-Heron’s concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall, he announced his tour would “end in Athens, not Tel Aviv,” according to The New York Times.

Costello, the most prominent artist to cancel, publicly vacillated before his final reversal. He initially told The Jerusalem Post that abandoning plans to play in Israel to protest the government was misguided. “It’s like never appearing in the U.S. because you didn’t like Bush’s policies or boycotting England because of Margaret Thatcher.”

But as pressure mounted, Costello changed his mind.

According to a post on his blog, Costello’s decision had nothing to do with being anti-Israel and everything to do with not wanting to get caught in a political tug-of-war.

The Creative Community for Peace was designed to preempt those battles before they start.

“It was frankly a bit of a race at first,” Schnur said about how CCFP got its start. Before officially launching in late 2011, they teamed with Geffen-Lifshitz, who began providing a monthly list of artists scheduled to perform in Israel. From that, they wrote a letter, and sometimes made a phone call, to thank each artist for planning to go to Israel. They also received material support from the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs (whose co-founder Esther Renzer is David Renzer’s wife) and a $50,000 start-up grant from The Jewish Federation.

“Our job was to get ahead of [the boycott] and make sure they didn’t cancel,” Schnur said. “What we felt was that we were going to have to take this on musician by musician, artist by artist.”

Their efficacy was quickly tested when singer Macy Gray was subjected to online intimidation so intense that it escalated into death threats. In fall 2010, just after she announced her Israel tour dates, a group of supposedly pro-Palestinian activists began posting on her Facebook page, accusing Israel of apartheid and other human rights abuses. Genuinely perplexed, Gray asked her online audience to weigh in. She received more than 10,000 responses.

“The dialogue that she created became very intense, and also became quite sinister and threatening,” her manager, Merck Mercuriadis, said during a phone interview.

As an African-American, Gray was particularly sensitive to accusations of apartheid, Mercuriadis said. Gray finally decided to go, but it took a village. And it was only after a protracted and agonizing period, during which Gray consulted with members of the Jewish community — including the Renzers, Schnur, then-Consul General of Israel Jacob Dayan and media entrepreneur Dan Adler — as well as individuals from the Palestinian community. Mercuriadis said it was Adler “who became a real confidante to Macy,” and who put Gray in touch with Palestinians so that she could hear from both sides, which ultimately convinced her that performing in Israel was good for both communities. While in Israel, she visited the Palestinian territories, and with additional financial support from the Renzers, Schnur and Adler, donated a ambucycle to United Hatzalah, an organization of medical volunteers serving both Israel and the territories.

Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber’s 30-year-old manager, was also menaced online when Bieber announced his Israel shows.

“There were threats on my life,” Braun said. Threats that said, “If Justin Bieber comes to Israel, we’re gonna kill the Jew manager.”

But the tough-talking Braun, whose sister is in medical school in Tel Aviv, said he was indifferent to the threats. “I reacted like, ‘I knew this was coming; let’s go to Israel,’ ” he said. “You can’t go through life afraid. It’s not a good way to live.”

The Pixies

The death threats turned out to be the least of Braun’s troubles with Israel, since Bieber’s one-week visit included a public kerfuffle with the Prime Minister’s Office and enough paparazzi haggling that Bieber took to Twitter to complain about it. Of the botched meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Braun said that Israel can be a little too eager (and perhaps sometimes a little too crafty) in using Hollywood celebrity for an image boost. Besides, he said, “The statement [of support for Israel] was made when my guitarist walked on stage at the beginning of the show and played ‘Hatikvah’ to 40,000 people in the style of Jimi Hendrix,” he said.

Not to mention that Bieber, a religious Christian, had Yeshua — the Hebrew name for Jesus — tattooed on his body.

Considering the many colorful experiences artists have in Israel, CCFP’s raison d’etre may come off as a little sensational, or sound like fear-mongering.

But as Geffen-Lifshitz pointed out, “If you boycott Israel in art, the next thing is boycotting Israeli manufactured goods, then a boycott of Israel as a tourist destination. Then a boycott of anything that has anything to do with Israel. We have to nip this in the bud.”

Still, he admitted that American Jews sometimes get more excited by the perils facing Israel than do Israelis. Overwrought worry may be one of the psychological costs of living in the Diaspora, a sense that Israel is perennially in peril and needs saving.

“We want to present a balanced point of view,” David Renzer said, defending the group’s integrity. “We don’t want to be right wing or left wing. But we do start with an initial premise, which is, Israel is not apartheid. It’s an easy sound bite to make that accusation — it’s a little more complicated to give the reasons why it’s not.”

But the point, really, is that music goes beyond politics. It is personal, emotional and can cut across language barriers, boundaries and borders, and spread messages of openness and peace. As Braun simply put it, “Music is the most influential thing in the world.”

“People who live in Israel are music fans and have a right to hear the music they love,” Schnur said.

“Musicians that play there don’t have to agree with the current or previous policies of the Israeli government — but they can go there and speak toward it or against it. Where else in the Middle East can an artist do that?”

You can visit Creative Community for Peace on their Website or on Facebook.

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April 18, 2012 | 3:23 pm

Should ‘Girls’ just get married?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

William Bennett. Photo by Wikipedia/Gage Skidmore

A recent spate of pop culture depictions of vapid, loveless sex has some convinced feminism has failed.

William Bennett, a CNN contributor and the author of “The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood” has decided he is an authority on women.

On the “disheartening and dismal” portraits of “liberated sex” offered up by popular culture nowadays he wonders: “[H]ow could women be happy with what is described in “Fifty Shades of Grey” and [Lena Dunham’s HBO series] “Girls”?

“Girls” paints a grim portrait of general ennui and loveless sex, but as Porochista Khakpour points out, what’s appealing is that it’s real.

[W]hat is most delightful about “Girls” is not the premise, but rather, the smart writing and the surface details. Behold the spectacle of everyday pimples and bad tattoos and unshaven skin and some fat and really awkward sex — what you see in your real life but rarely mirrored back in any pop cultural depiction.

She knocks “Sex and the City” for imposing layers upon layers of aesthetic flourishes on its women, a resentment not quite tied to envy but exhaustion. Who should want to dress to the nines just to go to Whole Foods? But you must look your best in case he might be there. Dunham’s “Girls” are too bored with their wussy boyfriends to bother.

“And so the world discovers the big secret, that we women are funny and smart and, without a ton of makeup and couture, we actually have appeal.”

We actually have appeal!

But all Bennett sees is the vapid, demoralizing sex and it’s enough to convince him that feminism has failed. If only we skipped “Sex in the City” and read real literature like “Middlemarch,” then we’d learn, home is where the heart is.

Consider one of the most well regarded writers of the Victorian era, Mary Ann Evans, better known to us by her pen name, George Eliot. In her novel, “Daniel Deronda,” she says of love, “For what is love itself, for the one we love best?—an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.” In an enfoldment of immeasurable cares in a real and true love, there is immeasurable intimacy too, including a richly satisfying sexual intimacy that finds no equal or parallel in a callous and casual hookup culture.

It is worth pointing out that this desideratum—deep sexual satisfaction—is found most often, as has been empirically verified over and over again, in what is often called, derisively, traditional marriage.

I agree with Eliot; not with Bennett. Because while the best love is the truly, madly, deeply committed kind, anyone who’s ever been hurt knows a casual hookup can go a long way in helping heal a broken heart.

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