TORONTO — By now, most people have heard about the controversy that erupted last month when hundreds of people signed a letter of protest against the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) City to City Spotlight on Tel Aviv.
Natalie Portman, helped to counter protest
But what many people don’t know is that it led UJA Federation of Greater Toronto to pursue a rather unusual partnership with the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles to enlist its help in mobilizing Hollywood A-listers – such as Natalie Portman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Lenny Kravitz, Lisa Kudrow and Halle Berry – to counter the protest.
“Federations are co-operating with each other all the time on various issues… on marketing techniques, on fundraising techniques… but it is very rare for two federations to collaborate on an advocacy initiative, because in many cases, advocacy is local,” said UJA Federation spokesperson Howard English.
“But in this case… It was more than an advocacy issue. It was a mobilization initiative that crossed time zones and national boundaries. It showed us how powerful the concern for Israel is and how deep the opposition is to the tactics of those who conspire against Israel’s security and Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”
In the days leading up to the festival, which ran from Sept. 10 to 19, filmmaker and York University film professor John Greyson announced that he had pulled his film from the festival to protest the decision, because he said the spotlight was “complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.”
Soon after, more than 1,500 filmmakers, entertainers and authors – including actors Viggo Mortensen and Danny Glover, and musician David Byrne – endorsed an online letter titled “The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation,” to protest the decision to celebrate Israeli culture.
This sparked a response from other celebrities to support TIFF’s decision to highlight Israeli film, which left some wondering how the Hollywood stars were mobilized so quickly.
“We knew that once the Toronto Declaration was issued and published that the response would be most effective coming from members of the film industry, coming from the peers of those who were at the forefront of the Toronto Declaration,” English said.
He added that because Hollywood is North America’s entertainment capital, the decision to work with the Los Angeles federation “was natural” and made in less than an hour, just a day or two after the protest letter surfaced on Sept. 2. “Once that decision was made, we knew we had a very short amount of time to recruit the names.”
John Fishel, outgoing president of the Los Angeles federation, said the two organizations collaborated on the text for the ad, which appeared in the Toronto Star, National Post and Variety magazine
Titled “We don’t need another blacklist,” it said, “Anyone who has actually seen recent Israeli cinema, movies that are political and personal, comic and tragic, often critical, knows they are in no way a propaganda arm for any government policy. Blacklisting them only stifles the exchange of cultural knowledge that artists should be the first to defend and protect.”
Fishel was excited by the number of people – about 185 – who signed on.
“We used our networks out here to get the core group, and then they started to reach out to clients and colleagues, friends and so forth, both on the talent end and behind the scenes,” he said.
“The names just kept pouring in… I think up until the day [the ad] went to press, even after the deadline, people called us and wanted to be on the list.”
English said the names that ran in the Star ad on Sept. 15 were rounded up in just three days.
“The speed with which all this took place showed the tremendous force of opposition to what the Toronto Declaration signers really stand for. Despite their increasingly weak attempts to say that they were not proposing a blacklist, that is exactly what they were proposing. The whole notion of a blacklist really struck an emotional chord among the entertainment industry personalities who signed our ad,” he said.
English said that in Toronto, Canadian film producer Robert Lantos’ assistance in mobilizing members of the entertainment community was “invaluable.”
He said Lantos, who was one of the first to speak out against the protest and wrote an article in the National Post on Sept. 11, “displayed his extraordinary dedication to this cause… In between takes on the set of Barney’s Version, the movie he’s producing, he was calling and e-mailing and writing and doing everything within his body and soul to help the cause.”
Fishel said many celebrities support UJA and Israel, and some even donate to the cause, but they’re not always willing to issue public statements of support.
“There are always exceptions to every rule, but I thought this time, because of the situation, because of the blatant falsehoods and the buzzwords in the original statement and because it looked like a censorship type of thing, it rose above the issue of the delegitimization of Israel, and we did see a phenomenal response to it.”
Fishel added that if the effort to collect names had continued for another week, the number of signatories would have doubled. “I think it was a wake-up call for many of the people in the Hollywood community that it was time to stand up and be counted.”
