Do You Have A Question?
Yet another reminder that Jews Don't Count. Also, what I'm listening to, watching, and reading.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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Hit Me Up!
For a while. now, I’ve been meaning to do an “Ask Me Anything” feature, and Thanksgiving week seemed as good a time as any. So, anything you want to know about politics, foreign policy, music, movies, my ranking of the best Halloween candies, the one true faith, etc., put a question in the comments below or send me a note, and next week I’ll answer away. No question is off-limits; no issue is too small or too big.
Jews Don’t Count
So there is finally a piece of good news out of the Middle East: Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal that would lead to the release of 50 Israeli hostages in Gaza in return for a temporary cease-fire and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The Israeli hostages who will be released are women and children, and I just need to point out that people who kidnap children and use them as political bargaining chips deserve their own special place in hell.
In other news, more celebrities are outing themselves as anti-Semites.
Susan Sarandon, a five-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner (for best actress, in 1995’s “Dead Man Walking”), was dropped by United Talent Agency after making comments at a pro-Palestinian rally last week. An agency spokesman, Richard Siklos, confirmed Tuesday that the agency no longer represented Sarandon but declined to elaborate.
United Talent dropped Sarandon after she made remarks at a rally in New York City last week. “There are a lot of people that are afraid, afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence,” she said at the rally, where she called for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t give this story or Susan Sarandon much attention, but there’s something quite instructive about her comments.
First, there’s Sarandon’s distinct lack of humanity for Israelis and Jewish-Americans. Sarandon had little to say on her Twitter feed about October 7, but once Israel responded militarily, she seemingly couldn’t stop accusing Israel of genocide. If your condemnations are reserved for Israel’s response to October 7 and not the atrocities that happened that day … you’re telling on yourself that Jewish suffering is not your concern. If you go a step further, as Sarandon did, and revel in the suffering of Diaspora Jews, who have nothing to do with the Israel/Palestine conflict, then you’re outing yourself as an anti-Semite. The correct response to violence directed at American Jews because of events happening in Israel is that it’s wrong and racist to place the onus on Jews for the actions of Israel (just as it would be wrong to scapegoat Chinese-Americans because of Beijing’s actions on COVID-19). Sarandon went in a different direction.
But what I find even more telling about Sarandon’s comments is what she says about the Muslim-American experience in the United States. First of all, in America, there are far more hate crimes directed against Jews than Muslims. But beyond that inconvenient fact, being a Muslim in America is often better than being a Muslim in a Muslim country.
Indeed, author Asra Nomani brilliantly eviscerated Sarandon’s comments on Twitter:
“Let me give you ‘a taste’ of what it ‘feels like’ to be a Muslim in America: My dad didn’t have to become a second-class indentured servant to one of the many tyrants of Muslim countries…My mom?… Being Muslim in America meant she got to live FREE with the wind in her hair…You think the Muslim dictatorship of Qatar allows a pathway to citizenship for Muslim slaves, servants or Palestinian Muslims? Hell no…”
But in Sarandon’s woke worldview, people of color are always victims, and those with white skin (like American Jews, though not Israelis) are the bad guys. This is the simplistic liberal paternalism that is driving so much of the exaggerated and over-the-top criticism of Israel … and the excusing of Hamas’s actions.
Hamas ultimately can’t be held responsible and lacks agency because Muslims and brown people, in general, are perennial victims. They are the oppressed, never the oppressors. In the places where they are oppressors (like Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States), it’s because of support from the United States or our bad behavior (Iran). And Jews can’t be the oppressed population because, well, they have white skin. It would never occur to Sarandon that Jewish-Americans are six times more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than Muslim-Americans, because, from her perspective, Jews are just another group of white people.
As the brilliant David Baddiel put it on Twitter:
Susan Sarandon relishing the idea of Jews in America suffering racism because finally they might know what it feels like to be a *proper* minority - as obviously no US Jew can have possibly experienced that before - is perhaps the most Jews Don't Count thing that's ever happened.
What I’m Watching, Listening to and Reading
I used to make this a weekly feature in my Boston Globe newsletter, and I’ve been meaning for months to bring it back, so here we go!
Watching
So, of the new movies that are out right now, I've seen two: The Killer and Killers of the Flower Moon. Both are by directors David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, who, truth be told, I find problematic.
Fincher is a stylish and distinctive filmmaker, but I find that his films lack emotional depth. The Killer is no different. It’s a riveting movie with amazing set pieces, and Michael Fassbender is excellent, but I walked out of the film entertained but empty. Fincher films are like really great desserts — delicious at the moment but not all that memorable.
It's how I felt after Fincher's other movies, like Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room" and Gone Girl. All of them are entertaining (except Seven, which I truly hated). The two exceptions are The Social Network, a great, very un-Fincher-like film, and The Game, which is both incredibly stylish and has an emotional core. He reminds me a lot of Michael Mann, who also makes distinctive, auteur-like films where style comes before substance — but Mann is simply more interesting.
As for Scorsese, I'm probably in the minority here, but I find his work uneven. Some of his films are among the best ever made. Goodfellas and Raging Bull are obvious examples. I'm also a big fan of The Departed and this 80s shaggy dog tale After Hours, but films like Gangs of New York, Casino, Mean Streets, or Wolf of Wall Street fall more into the flawed but occasionally brilliant category (I've never been a Taxi Driver fan but I haven't seen it in years so I'm reserving further comment until I rewatch it).
For example, when I first saw Wolf of Wall Street, I so hated it that I turned it off in the middle. But then I watched it again and found a few things that I really liked about it. But even if I can see its positive attributes, it's still a film that left me cold. Unlike Goodfellas, which leaves no real question that the people involved are terrible and immoral, Wolf crosses the line from observing bad behavior to reveling in it. I recently watched Shutter Island, and though, generally, I wouldn't say I liked it, there are elements of the film that are fascinating — the set design and the dream-like feel of the movie are gorgeous. But it's a creepy, weird film that was utterly predictable.
For me, Scorsese is interesting even when he makes bad films. Objectively, The Departed has a lot of flaws (and the final shot of the scurrying rat almost ruins it), and yet it's so well done and distinctively Scorsese. The film's underlying theme: the contrast between the image we present to the world and who we are at our core — i.e., the lies we tell ourselves — is powerfully told and defines every character in the film. It's a movie with a lot of meat on the bones that's perhaps not readily apparent on the first viewing.
That gets me to Killers of the Flower Moon, which tells a similar story — but this one is more about the lies Americans tell themselves about who we are and how we built this nation. Killers … is a film about the assault on the Osage people by rapacious white men who stole their oil by marrying and then murdering their women (also their men). The problem — and this review by Angelica Jade Bastien tells the tale better than I could — is that Scorsese is so focused on excoriating the white man that he forgets the Osage. It's a film about evil white men, told by evil white men, in which the Osage are there to act as victims. Their humanity is seemingly an afterthought. It's akin to the white paternalism I described above, though not as odious.
Beyond that fatal flaw, Killers .. is kind of a mess. The prism of the movie is the love affair between Ernest and Molly Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio and the extraordinary Lily Gladstone), but it's not all that interesting of a story — and it wasn't worth 3:30 hours of my time. As a general rule, I don't like long films, and I feel that if you're going to make me sit through a long film, make it worth my while. And I don't mean that it's good but that it's a film, in its breadth, that justifies its length. Oppenheimer was the perfect example of that kind of film. Killers … does not justify its length. The same was true of his recent film The Irishman, another Scorsese movie that I didn't like, largely because it was simply too long.
I plan to catch up on a bunch of Scorsese films I've either never seen or haven't watched in years (Kundun, Age of Innocence, The Aviator, and The King of Comedy). I'll report back soon.
I recently watched Bullets Over Broadway with my kids and forgot its brilliance. It is one of Woody Allen's funniest, with fantastic performances by Dianne Wiest and Chazz Palmentieri.
I would like to recommend a good TV show, but nothing is jumping out. A friend recently recommended Murder at the End of the World, which is interesting but predictable. I recently found myself watching reruns of The Sopranos when I exercise, and it's as good as I remember it.
A few months ago, friend of the newsletter, Jonathan Kirshner, sent me his list of the best films of 1973 (50th anniversary and all). With the notable omission of the extraordinary Day of the Jackal, it's a fantastic list. However, the one that stood out for me was Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which I'd never seen before. Sam Peckinpah directs it, so it's super violent, but it also tells a story of the ultimate consequences of violence on a man's soul (the allusions to Vietnam are hard to ignore). It is a riveting film featuring a performance by James Coburn that is otherworldly. I think I posted this recently, but the death scene with Slim Pickens packs an extraordinary emotional punch.
Listening to and Reading
I only have a little to add on the listening front besides what I've posted in the Musical Interludes.
I'm not a huge podcast guy (I generally listen to sports podcasts), but if you're not listening to Andrew Hickey's A History of Rock 'n Roll in 500 Songs, you are missing out. This week's episode is Astral Weeks, one of my all-time favorite albums, and I can't wait to sit down with this one.
On the reading front, everything I'm reading these days is about Afghanistan and probably won't be of much interest to most of you. I'm on a listserv where someone recently asked about good books on Israel/Palestine, and I immediately thought of Shlomo Ben-Ami's Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, one of the better takes on the post-Oslo period. Walter LaQueur's A History of Zionism is also quite good, as is my friend Dahlia Schiendlin's recent book "The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel. I've heard good things about Nathan Thrall's Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, but I haven't read it. I recently read David Leonhardt's Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, which has some interesting elements, but for those familiar with post-war American politics and economics, will feel a bit like a rehash. My biggest pet peeve is that he argues Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 campaign offered a roadmap for Democrats to piece together a post-civil rights political coalition — a claim I debunked in my book on the 1968 election.
Musical Interlude
You are spot on regarding Sarandon. She's just another bigoted. ignorant American who has no idea of how complicated the Middle East is. The suffering of the Palestinians can't be discounted, but Hamas is another group of subhumans who care nothing of their people. And as far as I am concerned, neither does any country in the Middle East. Israel is being led by an ignorant, bombastic man who has done them no good, but a response was needed after the attack by Hamas. What's to come is anybody's guess.
I have never understood the universal hatred of Jewish people that has existed forever. But somethings cannot be explained. Love your column! Keep up the good work.
Hi - I'd really like to understand why there isn't more of an uproar on the left about the ascendency of Mike Johnson to Speaker. He is such an extremist - and believes that God has put him in this position to make (what Johnson believes) God's law be the law of the U.S. It's frightening how there has been so little directed attention paid to what is a huge threat to American democracy as we know it. But even when things are reported they just disappear a few days later. No one pays a price for their actions hardly at all anymore. (not sure if this is where you wanted questions.... so apologies if this is the wrong spot for this).