Fin: Remembering Jerry Cohen, dueling Hollywood Israel petitions, and the non-toxic Philadelphia Phillies

This week’s notes column

Jacob “Jerry” Cohen taught a course at my alma mater Brandeis University on The Idea of Conspiracy in American Life, but he didn’t believe in conspiracy theories. His argument, after all, was that if a nefarious deed required af vast conspiracy, human nature indicates that not everyone will always do their part to perfection, much less keep their mouth shut forever. 

About 20 years ago, Cohen was honored at Brandeis, I believe for the 40th anniversary of his time there, and the event was a surprise party. When he arrived, an appreciative Jerry told everyone that the event had illustrated a key aspect of his life’s work: It may have been a surprise, “but I knew about this thing weeks ago.” 

Cohen, an American Studies professor at Brandeis for over five decades, passed away on Sunday. On top of being an all-time great character and mainstay of that institution, Jerry was one of the most important teachers I’ve ever had, instilling a lot of values and ways of thinking that remain with me today. 

His course about “The Sixties” is legendary at Brandeis, and that, the conspiracy class and a couple of others included his famous lecture about the Kennedy assassination and why he believes Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. His take on conspiracy theories helped prepare me for 9/11 trutherism, QAnon, and numerous other festivals of nonsense that would arrive over the next 25 or so years. 

Jerry’s backstory was compelling as well. He was born and raised in New Jersey, and claimed to have briefly joined the Communist Party in the late 1940s, but that he broke with them because they wanted him to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers after the signing of Jackie Robinson, and he wished to retain his Yankees fandom. 

Later, he was a proud participant in the 1960s civil rights movement, with the Congress on Racial Equality. He would become an expert on the 1960s- and also on how the promise of the 1960s went wrong- a perfect topic for when I took the class myself in the Clinton era when everyone was obsessed with that decade. A father of five sons, Jerry was also an accomplished singer, having appeared at Carnegie Hall, and also delivering Kol Nidre at the campus Yom Kippur services.

His politics would drift to the right over time, although as of the late ‘90s, he called himself a conservative while stating that he had never voted for a Republican for president. 

Jerry Cohen didn’t have any social media presence, and we mostly lost touch over the years. But I did get to have a long phone call with him about 4 years ago when I wrote something for the alumni magazine about the university’s Transitional Year Program, of which he was the founding director (after student protests, which demanded he be replaced with a Black director, exactly that happened, although Jerry hung on at Brandeis for a about a half-century after that, as did the program.)

When I heard comedian and Brandeis alum Josh Gondelman tell a story on a podcast last year about how students at his college thought one of their professors looked like Dr. John Hammond from Jurassic Park and would hum that movie’s theme song when he arrived in class, I figured he meant Jerry. 

Jerry’s passing arrives with Brandeis in the news, as usual for bad reasons. Weeks after the university’s 75th-anniversary celebration, this time it’s the administration backing Israel, the student government refusing to pass an anti-Hamas resolution, and the university president upset the two have been conflated.) At any rate, I’m guessing Hamas doesn’t value the opinions of Brandeis University especially highly.

I have yet to see a published obituary for a man who, along with Herbert Marcuse, Jonathan Sarna, Abraham Maslow, and a handful of others, is among the most important professors in the history of the university. But I for one will greatly miss this one-of-a-kind figure.

You must remember You Must Remember This 

The best movie podcast in existence, Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This, this week wrapped up its wildly ambitious, two-part, 21-episode “Erotic ‘90s” series. It looked at the many controversial films involving sexuality in that decade, from Basic Instinct to Indecent Proposal to Showgirls, while also showing that, my God, so many male film writers were insufferable pigs back then. Why did every critic feel the need to get mad at Alicia Silverstone for being young and hot, and write about it? 

The season wrapped up with a two-part examination of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and made clear that the film started two trends that are prevalent today: First, just about everything reported by the media about the film, during its years-long production process, wasn’t true. Cruise and Kidman did not play “married psychiatrists,” Cruise did not cross-dress in the film, and that disgusting rumor about Harvey Keitel? Not true either. 

Also, it pioneered the trend in which any movie with sex in it always gets talked about as the most transgressive, sexy motion picture to ever exist (the hype cycle for Don’t Worry Darling last year was essentially identical). This includes the constant rumor — always false — that the actors really did have penetrative sex on camera. And sure, Eyes Wide Shut didn’t actually feature on-screen sex between the two stars, but that did add sting to the movie’s last line. 

And speaking of things in that era that didn’t happen- yes, the podcast finale explores the Richard Gere gerbil rumor! Short answer: It’s not true, because “gerbiling” isn’t real, despite the false rumor being attached regularly to both Gere and seemingly a different local TV news figure in every major city. Although I once participated in a media roundtable with Gere and about 15 other reporters, and I’ve often wondered what would have happened if someone had asked about the gerbil (no one did.) 

On the dueling Hollywood Israel petitions 

In Hollywood, there appear to be rival petitions about Israel/Palestine, in which a bunch of famous people signed one calling for the release of hostages by Hamas, and a bunch of other famous people called for a cease-fire. The WGA, meanwhile, put out no statement at all, mostly because I’m guessing half the membership believes one thing about the conflict and the other half believes the opposite. 

Personally, I don’t care which Hollywood celebrity signed which petition, and no one’s signing of that petition affects my opinion of them whatsoever. 

I don’t think either petition will have any particular effect on what happens going forward, and the gists of the two petitions are both within the bounds of what’s defensible and not beyond the pale. If the petition said “The slaughter on October 7 was justified” or “Everyone in Gaza deserves to die,” I would feel very differently. I am wondering, though, why the “release the hostages” letter is addressed to President Biden- he’s not the one who has them. 

Also, I’m not sure which argument I find more distasteful- that Jordan Peele has betrayed the ideals of Get Out by signing the release-the-hostages petition or the implication that the influence of his (half) Jewish wife made him do it. 

Jon Stewart is canceled! 

It was reported last week that Apple will not be moving forward with a third season of the talk show The Problem With Jon Stewart, with the New York Times reporting that Apple and Stewart came to a disagreement over the show’s treatment of such topics as China and artificial intelligence. 

If this is true, it’s pretty damning. But that said… I never got the impression that Stewart’s Apple show was connecting, or making much impact. When I watched it, the analysis and interview clips were sometimes insightful, but I never found anything the show was doing especially funny. When Stewart was on The Daily Show, his work was vital and commanded the zeitgeist, and I never got that impression about his Apple show.

I’ve been having this argument with people for years, but one more time: the Jon Stewart Daily Show was very good at a couple of things: Getting people to laugh, and making a certain type of liberal make sense of things and feel better, especially during the Bush years. What the show was never able to do, because it wasn’t its job, was defeat Republican candidates or pursue meaningful social change. And the oft-stated arguments that Stewart should run for president himself, or that Trump never would have been elected in 2016 if not for Stewart’s Daily Show retirement the year before, are both self-evidently ridiculous. 

The Phillies and non-toxic masculinity 

The Philadelphia Phillies’ playoff run ended in Game 7 of the NLCS on Tuesday, in what was, somehow, the first Game 7 the team had ever played. They were, however, a likable team that doesn’t appear anywhere near the end of their run. 

During the playoff run, I noticed something else: These Phillies seem to behave in a certain way, as men, that’s something new in Major League Baseball. As I said it last week, “There's a great essay to be written about this Phillies team and their positive expressions of masculinity.”

It turned out that a writer named Megan Angelo, for Vogue, had written that very piece, about ten days before that tweet. I’m really not used to such insightful Philadelphia sports commentary, coming from someone named “Angelo.”

In it, Angelo pointed out that the 1993 Phillies team that she loved when she was young… were a bunch of damned degenerates, and this year’s Phils are very different: 

“ The version of manliness the ‘93 team beamed into every young mind in the tristate area involved grapefruit-size hunks of tobacco, chewed and spat; caveman screams; the tearing of shirts, straight down the center. As their own owner once put it: “You wouldn’t want your daughter to marry them.”... But the 2023 Phillies, who stand to clinch the division title tonight? They’ve done more than make my season. They’ve restored my faith in tradition altogether, proven that things can be handed down and still live up to their time. They are not an ounce less dynamic or tough or awe-inspiring than my childhood idols, but they are so, so different.”

She goes on to note that these Phillies care about their clothes- but more importantly, they care about each other. Also, they occasionally kiss each other and dance in the locker room to a popular gay club anthem that also gets played in the ballpark after every big win. It’s a very different era, of America, and more than that, of Philly fandom- post-Super Bowl LII, Philadelphia is a very different, less negative, and less hostile place. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer, earlier this week, also noticed the same thing, with writer Zoe Greenberg writing a piece about how “The Phillies are ‘in love with each other.’ It’s stoking a new kind of fandom.”

“Beyond the superficial, these players seem to have a deep affection for one another, which has, in turn, unlocked deep affection from a wide-ranging collective of veteran baseball fans, newcomers, women, and non-binary people, queer people rethinking sports, and sports diehards rethinking sexuality,” Greenberg writes, in a piece with a rare note at the bottom stating that three other Inquirer staffers “contributed to this article, as did their Phillies group chats.”

“No one is claiming that the players, who are almost all married to women, are living secret lives. Yet if there are homoerotic undertones to a shirtless Bryce Harper saying 'You’re so sexy' while pouring beer on Kyle Schwarber in a crowded locker room, or the team ecstatically shouting the lyrics to “Dancing on My Own” — which Hesson described as “a gay man’s moody cover of an electropop ballad that was already considered to be a gay anthem” — it’s all welcome. These players just genuinely love a Cher cover."

That’s a much more healthy sensibility than that of ex-Sixer Dwight Howard, whose trajectory has gone from “earnest Christian rookie” to “father of five children by five different women” to “accused of same-sex sexual assault.” 

This week’s writings

An unusually busy week this week. It’s still the Philadelphia Film Festival for a few more days, plus another conference, and a lot more.

Here at the Substack, I argued that the digital release of Sound of Freedom should not go forward, I looked back on 25 years of Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, reviewed David Fincher’s The Killer, and three PFF films: Dream Scenario, Bucky F-cking Dent, and Rustin.

For Broad Street Review, I reviewed two other PFF films, American Fiction and Stand Up & Shout: Songs From a Philly High School.

For Splice Today, two more movie reviews, of Anatomy of a Fall (good) and Five Nights at Freddy’s (not so good.) The former features this fantastic song:

For Living Life Fearless, I looked at the silly question of whether Killers of the Flower Moon is “too long.”

For 19FortyFive, I looked at consternation about John Fetterman’s Israel stance, Trump storming out of court, and why we’re not actually in a “civil war.”

And finally, last Sunday I spent the day at the Jewish Priorities Conference, at the Weitzman Museum in Philadelphia, and covered it for the Jewish Exponent. The story isn’t on the web yet, but you can read it in the digital magazine here.

The conference had been planned for months, to discuss the way forward for the Jewish people, but then of course the October 7 attacks happened and there had to be some adjustment. If you’re Jewish, the over-under on the number of panelists on Sunday who have written books you’ve read or given speeches you've attended is about 5-to-10.

A couple of takeaways that didn’t make it into the story: There was a LOT of talk that sounded remarkably similar to how Bush-Cheney figures spoke between 9/11 and the start of Iraq- a lot of we will win the war because we must win, and we must win because we will win.

Also, a woman got up and decided to start yelling during one of the panels, and has as often been the case, she happened to be sitting right near me when it happened. The woman appeared to be attacking the panel from the right, with something along the lines of “How can you talk about politics when Jewish babies are in cages in Gaza?” After about 10 minutes of arguing, was ultimately escorted out.

So if anyone thinks Jews are in lockstep, that’s never the case, even at a conference that didn’t include any non- or anti-Zionists.

That’s it for this week. Next week, more from PFF, a look back at a couple of movies set in Washington, and more. As always, thank you for your support.