Weinstein approached me ‘Jew to Jew’: Jewish moments from She Said

JODI KANTOR discusses the Jewish threads in a new film based on the investigation into Harvey Weinstein.

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.  “And that was just not going to be the case.”

Now, that exchange has been immortalized immortalised in She Said, a film adaptation of the non-fiction 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  Zoe Kazan as Kantor and Carey Mulligan as Twohey, is an understated thriller that has drawn comparisons to All the President’s Men.  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 long-time 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  organisations. She’s now a “proud member” of a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn.

“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,” she said.

“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.

Kantor said Weinstein also hired Israeli private investigators Black Cube to try to waylay her investigation. “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.”

On the other hand, Kantor said shared Jewish background helped her develop her relationship with Irwin Reiter, Weinstein’s accountant of 30 years, who 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.” 

Photo: Carey Mulligan, left, as Megan Twohey, and Zoe Kazan as Jodi Kantor in She Said. (JoJo Whilden/Universal Pictures)