Tag: Netflix

Jenna Ortega did the right thing. Will others?

In December, two articles appeared here asking which type of antisemitism was more dangerous for Jews: the kind promoted by Kanye West or Jenna Ortega. The comparison surprised many. The fallen-from-grace hip hop artist Kanye openly loves Hitler, while Ortega, star of Netflix’s Wednesday, seems a nice person who genuinely wants to help those in need. Judging by the controversy that ensued, the question was entirely warranted. The argument was never that Ortega’s an antisemite, but that antisemitism under the social justice guise of anti-Zionism is at least as dangerous as its other forms, because it is so easily accepted. The online outrage entirely validated the point.

The original article argued that Ortega was doing damage to Jews, especially young Jews on college campuses, by pinning a link to the “Decolonize Palestine” website to her Twitter profile. That site has the look and feel of a progressive social justice advocacy page, but the veneer masks a series of talking points completely aligned with Hamas’s.

As it turned out, Hamas agreed and began featuring Ortega’s words on its Quds News Network.

Importantly, the intent was never to demonize the actress. As both articles note, she seems to be a decent person who would honestly tell anyone who asked that she deplores Jew hatred; that’s what made “her hate” so terrifying. The hate was “hers” only because when you post something on social media, it’s yours. That Ortega is actually a good person fooled by slick propaganda made her post all the more frightening.

With the previous articles, the aim was that maybe only a few thousand people would read them and that someone on Ortega’s publicity team would take note. The hope of the second article was more specific, that someone from a Jewish organization would reach out and explain to Ortega, first, that Decolonize is a hate site and, second, the amount of harm this type of propaganda does, especially on college campuses, where anti-Zionists often protest any Jewish organizations, political or not.

For example, someone should have explained to the Scream star that, due to ideology like this, Dyke Marches, like the one in D.C. and the one in Chicago, barred Jewish pride flags, causing LGBTQ Jews to fear for their safety. Or that this ideology caused the Washington, D.C., Sunrise Movement, an environmental organization, to boycott a national demonstration for voting rights due to the participation of liberal Jewish groups, including the Religious Action Center. RAC is the Reform Jewish movement’s political action arm, which advocates for almost all the issues Ortega supports and routinely criticizes Israel. Or perhaps she could have been educated on how American Jewish youth often hide all signs of their Jewishness for fear of being harassed on college campuses.

Hollywood unfriendly to open friends of Israel

What happened behind the scenes is unknown, but, as it turns out, Ortega did the right thing. Or, at least, the closest to the right thing she could do that wouldn’t also be career suicide: she unpinned the tweet from the top of her Twitter feed, meaning that anyone who wanted to see it would have to scroll back to March. This effectively consigned the tweet to oblivion without causing anti-Zionist pages that embedded her tweet to become filled with “tweet deleted” messages, which would have led to outrage from a well-organized, powerful movement that would immediately turn on her. Despite the antisemitic trope, it is hard to support, or even openly not hate, Israel in Hollywood. Gal Gadot was nearly canceled simply for saying during a recent war initiated by Hamas that she wants Israel and its neighbors to find a way to live in peace.

Calls for peace are “propaganda” for “ethnic cleansing.” That’s how these people think. Clearly, the anti-Zionist left/Hamas extremist grouping is dangerous to an actor, especially a rising celebrity.

Confirming the above, just after Ortega did the right thing, Twitter user Amir Amini posted a screen grab of the “Ortega vs. Kanye” article, dishonestly suggesting that the Times of Israel (the article and its headline are solely my own) was attacking Ortega for saying “Palestinians deserve to live.” Obviously part of a media campaign, his tweet was viewed 11.3 million times and retweeted 49 thousand times, creating such a controversy that Newsweek and others covered it, associating Ortega with Kanye not for a few thousand people who read the articles, but for millions who didn’t. This is an injustice to the actress, who took a step to right her mistake.

The Co-Founders of “Decolonize” Let the Truth Slip

Read the rest of this article at the Times of Israel. (No paywall)

Jenna Ortega becomes Hamas poster child, Jewish organizations silent

In a further illustration of what happens when people with seemingly good intent spread propaganda about things they don’t understand, Jenna Ortega, the American actress who rose to fame as Wednesday Addams on the eponymous Netflix series, has become – literally – a poster child for Hamas via their Quds News Network.

Shamefully, American Jewish organizations have said nothing.

Ortega’s Tweets

As noted previously, the actress shared a link to the “Decolonize Palestine” website. At first glance, it seemed in keeping with previous social media posts – she’s championed the cause of Planned Parenthood, Ukrainians, the women of Iran, and children in Iraq and Yemen. However, while she supports women rising up against Islamic theocrats in Tehran, the “Decolonize” link was essentially a list of talking points in line with Hamas, an organization funded in large part by Iran and which imposes an Iranian-style theocracy on Gaza. Some of what appears on the site has been disavowed even by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, which the site calls “subcontractors for Israeli control of Palestine” (as does Hamas).

Lest anyone think that Israel’s new right-wing government is the problem, the “Decolonize” link Ortega promoted goes out of its way in its “myths” section to argue that this is wrong. Instead, any Israeli government, even if it were composed entirely of left-wing pro-Palestinians, would be the same, since, we’re told, “a colonial society will also produce a colonial ‘left’, and even a colonial ‘peace’ movement. This was exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin.”

Needless to say, the site is full of anti-Semitic tropes, portraying Jews as shadowy operators, lurking behind the scenes to exert control. Take any 19th-century anti-Semitic work, replace “Jew” with “Zionist,” and you’ll have something that looks like “Decolonize Palestine.”

Ortega’s tweet has been shared nearly 10,000 times, and has received more than 32,000 likes. For context, the top 25 percent of Twitter users receive on average only 37 likes and a single retweet per month. Each retweet and each like exposes the link to an even greater audience, and, because she has the tweet “pinned” to the top of her profile, people continue to see it for the first time each day.

The Face of a U.S.-Designated Terrorist Organization

Read the rest of this post at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Jenna Ortega vs. Kanye: Who’s more dangerous on antisemitism?

Who’s more dangerous to the safety of Jewish people, Kanye West or Jenna Ortega?

Easy, right? Kanye is an open Jew hater. He creates tweets that are both incomprehensible and threateningly anti-Semitic, spews Black Hebrew Israelite and Nation of Islam propaganda, and declares his love for Hitler and the Nazis. He even appeared to cause discomfort for even Alex Jones, the guy who attacked the survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting. Ortega, who plays Wednesday Addams in the current Netflix series, is, according to those who work with her, genuinely nice. While West uses his social media for self-aggrandizement, unhinged rants, declarations that he is a god, and, most troublingly, Jew hatred, Ortega uses hers to promote her work and humanitarian causes. She seems to genuinely want to help others.

And therein lies the problem.

The anti-Semitism of the well-intentioned but uninformed

West understands antisemitism perfectly well. He hates Jews. Whatever else is going on in his addled mind, that much is clear. Jenna Ortega presumably sincerely believes that antisemitism is evil, no less so than sexism, homophobia, hatred of Muslims, or other forms of racism and xenophobia. The idea that she promotes anti-Jewish causes would likely make her shudder. The problem is that, like millions of other well meaning Americans, she has no real understanding of antisemitism, and therefore is unlikely to recognize it in at least some of its forms. And, also like millions of other Americans, she likely doesn’t do much investigation into a cause before she posts it to social media. (The number of celebrities who at least in part handle their own social media is astounding.)

Earlier this year, someone forwarded a link to a group chat, horrified that “the girl from Scream” (the Netflix series hadn’t yet been released) would post something like it. (My friend, a Russian-speaking Israeli Jew, used far more vividly descriptive and colorful language which I avoid repeating here.) The link was to a Jenna Ortega Tweet that read simply “Decolonize Palestine,” with an embedded link to a website bearing the same moniker.

Decolonize? Was this a clumsy attempt at supporting a two-state solution? I clicked the link.

And I was horrified.

Check out the rest of this post at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Netlfix’s Farha: irredeemable anti-Semitic propaganda

If you make it through the entirety of Farha, the controversial Jordanian film about a young Palestinian girl during the conflict of 1948, and then watch the credits, you’ll find something curious. The extras are listed as residents of the “Gaza Refugee Camp” in Jerash, Jordan. This movie, supposedly in solidarity with the plight of Palestinian Arabs, was made in and financed by a country that keeps hundreds of thousands of them locked in refugee camps. The filmmakers, along with the Jordanian and other governments, care less about Palestinians than about using them as a tool to demonize Israel and Jews.

Farha is nothing more than propaganda, and boring propaganda at that. The film is grotesquely one-sided, even slanderous, in its depiction of the military units that later became the Israel Defense Force. While the situation around the creation of the State of Israel and the conditions that led to the hundreds of thousands Palestinian Arabs displaced from their homes are varied and complex, Farha paints a Manichean picture, in which benevolent Arab villagers are mercilessly slaughtered by carnage-loving Jews.

The plot, centering on the eponymous teen girl, is simple. Farha wants to leave her village in Mandatory Palestine to go study in the unnamed “city,” presumably Jerusalem. Alas, it’s 1948, and the devious Jews attack her town. Though her father tries to send her away with her uncle and his family, she flees the escape car to stay with him. To keep her from danger, he locks her in a food storage cellar, promising to return. The rest of the movie tediously chronicles Farha’s days in the cellar. For most of the movie, the viewer desperately waits for anything to happen while watching a girl mill about in a basement. Farha cries, goes to sleep, wakes up, her lamp runs out of oil, she runs out of water, she collects rainwater, and on and on…and on.

While supposedly based on true events, there is very little actual historical detail presented. Early on, Farha and her cousin see a convoy of British soldiers as they are leaving the country, prompting her and other village kids to mock the soldiers and cheer their withdrawal. The average American, unfamiliar with the conflict, must surely wonder: why are these British soldiers there? Why are they leaving? Those who know a bit more might suspect that the villagers were cheering some kind of Arab victory in pushing the British out. That seems to be the notion the filmmakers want to present, but it’s a false one. Few Arabs actually sided with the British – indeed, Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was an open supporter of Hitler and recruited Arabs to fight in the Third Reich’s army – but the Jewish military organizations the film slanders were the ones who actually expelled the British, as documented in Menachem Begin’s The Revolt.

The film’s fudging of the historical record is the least of its flaws, however. Much more important is the blood libel. In the film’s central scene, Farha, watching through an opening in the cellar door, sees Jewish soldiers capture an Arab couple from the village. The Jews – the filmmakers, who aim for historical accuracy nowhere else, do not neglect to ensure that the proto-IDF are speaking Hebrew – laugh and taunt the woman. Believing her to be pregnant, the fighters place a bet as to whether the baby is a boy or a girl, deciding to gut her to find out. However, a baby cries out from above; they realize the woman has actually just given birth and hidden the baby. The Jews then find the newborn and their two other children. After more taunting, the soldiers line everyone but the baby against the wall and shoot them.

As they prepare to depart, the commander tells his subordinate to kill the baby, but not “to waste a bullet.” The soldier places the baby on the ground, throws a towel over it, and leaves. Later, when Farha breaks out of the cellar, she finds the baby dead, covered in flies.

Farha is one-sided and engages in blatant antisemitism: but is its core story true? Probably not. According to the film’s opening, it was “inspired by true events.” But “inspired” is a weasel word; which part was true, and which was simply inspired? And of the events that the filmmaker actually believed to be true, was it really? Perhaps there was a girl who hid in a food cellar. There is no documentation of anything that happened, and new scholarship tells us that many well-known “truths” of Israeli brutality were nothing more substantial than rumors that swirled during wartime, later amplified by various interests. 

What’s more, filmmaker Darin Sallam said that there were “parallels” between her film’s story and the life of Anne Frank. This analogy is by definition antisemitic, as the logical conclusion is that, if this girl is Anne Frank, the Israelis are to be taken as the Nazis. According to the definition of antisemitism agreed upon by the United States and dozens of other countries, comparisons between Israelis and the State of Israel to Nazis is antisemitism.

Liberal democracies tend to produce better movies than authoritarian regimes. Compare, for example, this misfortune of a film with the Israeli series Fauda. The latter, about the current stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is layered and rich, and every character on any side is a multi-faceted human being with complex motivations. Fauda is not without bias; it is as pro-Israel as Farha is pro-PLO. The difference is that in the world of Fauda, the Israelis are on the right side of the conflict, but they are imperfect, and the Palestinians are real human beings caught between sides in a situation they wouldn’t choose for themselves. In Farha, the Arabs are good and the Jews are monsters who like to kill.

Given that Farda’s “true” story is highly unlikely to be so, the closest we come to a crime against humanity is the producers and Netflix causing anyone to endure this film. Stripped of its anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment, the film is just a bore, its brief 92-minute runtime seeming to stretch to hours.

The libel against Jews and Israel is clearly the only reason anyone has taken notice of this film. Admittedly, lead actress Karam Taher turns in an excellent performance, but even that cannot rescue what is ultimately a wretched propaganda film with no redeeming values.

“No Good Nick” – Darkness and Redemption

I would never have watched the new Neflix sitcom No Good Nick, but I’m a straight guy who went to high school in the 1990s. Of course, I had a crush on Melissa Joan Hart, first Clarissa, who explained it all, and then the original Sabrina, who was casting spells just as The Craft made it cool to do so. And I was a child in the 1980s, so I watched The Goonies enough that Mikey – uh, Sean Astin – became indelibly etched into my childhood memories, long before the same happened for millennials after watching the tedious Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Given my background, I thought the new sitcom (still a viable form of entertainment in the 1990s) No Good Nick, which stars Hart and Astin as an upper-middle-class mother and father in Portland, would be decent fare to watch after a long day, when I was too tired to read or to watch something more intelligent. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. All in the Family) four-camera situation comedies have always been cheap, lowest-common-denominator entertainment for the masses, no thought required. What I found, however, was a darkly intelligent show that asked challenging questions under the veneer of saccharine family comedy.

Expecting bland escapist entertainment with blast-from-the-past actors, I was drawn in and binge watched both seasons (released, strangely, within a few months of each other by Netflix). The story, which sounds gimmicky, becomes incredibly dark incredibly quickly, though it is presented in the sunny, smiley colors that one might find more reminiscent of Alf or Family Ties than anything with the themes Nick handles. The titular character (played by the wildly talented new actress Siena Agudong) is a 14-or-so-year-old girl who shows up at the Hart-Astin (sorry, “Thompson”) house, announcing that they are her distant relatives, and that she has been sent to stay with them by the foster agency after her parents died in a car accident.

Unlike the Thompsons, who take Nick in and set her up with a bed in their daughter Molly’s (Lauren Lindsey Donzis) room, we learn that Nick is actually a con artist, and that the woman acting as her social worker is actually her foster mother. Both her foster parents are bumbling criminals who use Nick and their other foster kids to run crime-rings. Also: Nick’s father is actually alive, but in jail. Unbeknownst to the foster parents, he is running Nick behind their backs, using her as his girl on the outside to criminally raise money to pay for his, as we’re told early on, legal fees. The Harbaugh’s, Nick’s foster parents, are masters of navigating America’s corrupt foster care systems, deftly placing people on “the inside.”

The first season of No Good Nick, which debuted on Netflix in April, kept itself firmly within the format of a TV sitcom. It was episodic for the most part, had the typical four-camera setup, and even had a live studio audience. But watching it, one can’t help but ask: who is the intended audience? Men exactly my age with a fondness for Melissa Joan Hart? But surely “people who bought the October 1999 edition of Maxim” isn’t a large enough demographic to sustain a whole show . No Good Nick isn’t really for kids, either, and it’s far darker than the average sitcom viewer is likely to enjoy. It is hard to imagine someone who looks forward to piffle like the dreadful Fuller House, also on Netflix, enjoying Nick. This is a production in which the protagonist is a 14-year-old girl who’s being used for criminal purposes by evil foster parents, her jailed father, and other characters, like the mobster she routinely meets up with in a seedy bar. While it is amusing to watch Nick come up with plots to raise money – she steals expensive wine from the restaurant owned by Hart’s character, Liz Thompson, and replaces it with cheap swill labeled as expensive wine, for example – the real strength of the first season is in watching a girl trying to navigate between ripping off the Thompsons and falling in love with them as a family, all the while trying to handle myriad layers of guilt: guilt at stealing from the people who took her in, as well as guilt towards her father, both for sometimes failing him in raising money and, especially, for beginning to see the Thompson’s as family.

But if the bleak comedy masked as slapstick keeps the viewer perplexed but entertained in the first season, the second season, released Aug. 5, goes much further. I would be creating spoilers if I were to say too much, but starting about midway through the second season, we learn Nick’s real backstory, and the Thompsons are part of it. Their clan, which until that episode, entitled “The Italian Job”, had seemed like the typical perfect sitcom family, are, while operating within the confines of the law, themselves far from perfect and, in being so, are in large part responsible for the destruction of Nick’s life with her father, a fact of which they remain blissfully unaware until the end of season two.

Especially starting here, at “The Italian Job”, the series remains both true to sitcom form – and blows it up at the same time. Astin’s perfect suburban father, always spouting platitudes about the importance of family and sticking together, also embodies the dark side of those beliefs: must love of family come at others’ expense? Is life a zero-sum game?

The series raises further unexpected questions: are we always ultimately responsible for our actions? What is our responsibility to each other beyond those within our immediate circles? Going even further: what is the nature of people? Is humanity irredeemably flawed? Are even seemingly selfless acts somehow motivated by greed? (Molly, who becomes Nick’s best friend, sort of, runs their school’s “Volunteer Club,” an obvious lampoon of middle-class philanthropy and social media influencers.) Or, perhaps, people are inherently good, pushed to evil deeds by their surrounding influences, and everyone is trapped by the bad choices of everyone else.

In one poignant scene, Nick, talking with her father, discusses the revenge she’s just exacted, and how she actually began to enjoy it. “It was hard at first,” she says. “But then it got easier and easier, and I didn’t even have to think about it…and for a minute, I enjoyed it. What does that say about me? I’m a bad person.” But we, the audience, know she’s not: she’s the character with the strongest moral compass, the only character who seems to grapple with the ethics and morality of each decision she makes that doesn’t involve a quick con.

Does our world determine us? Or do we determine our world? Maybe the answer is neither, but maybe our choices define who we are. As Nick notes in an emotional conversation with someone who truly has been wronged and who has just as truly wronged her, “All of those were your choices, and [no one] made you do any of them.”

Nick does something most sitcoms do not do: underneath one-liners and perfectly set-up jokes, it deals with the world as it is, with all of its flaws and all of its potential for redemption; with its greed and abuse, and with the loving kindness somewhere in each person; with its zero-sum competition and the innate human desire for love and cooperation. Though much of the show’s humor is rooted in darkness and the notion of “homo homini lupus”, it turns out to be, more than anything else, a show about redemption, even if not everyone is redeemed and not every redemption is full.

Perhaps even sitcoms can be redeemed.

Television Review
No Good Nick
Starring Sienna Agudong, Melissa Joan Hart, Sean Astin, Lauren Lindsey Donzis, Kalama Epstein
Now streaming on Netflix