The recordings stated that the museum would make a good target for a terror attack because of its new Kurdish exhibit.
A fighter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) holds an ISIL flag and a weapon on a street in the city of Mosul June 23, 2014.. (photo credit:REUTERS/STRINGER)
The Jewish Heritage Museum in New York has increased security measures in response to threatening audio recordings from Islamic State, according to NBC New York.
NYPD officers and police dogs could be seen outside the museum on Sunday night, according to the local news organization.
JEWISH GROUP ASKS WHY HOLLYWOOD LOVES CHARACTERS WITH DISABILITIES ON SCREEN, BUT NOT ON SET
BY JTA/RUDERMAN FOUNDATION
OCTOBER 3, 2017 09:35
Report finds that 95 percent of top TV show characters with disabilities are played by non-disabled performers.
Marlee Matlin honored by The Ruderman Family Foundation. (photo credit:EREZ UZIR)
When the indie film “Blind” hit theaters in July, it wasn’t just its star, Alec Baldwin, who made headlines for his portrayal of a novelist blinded in a car crash.
A Boston-based Jewish family philanthropy made the news, too — for criticizing the choice of casting Baldwin for the role.
The problem? Baldwin isn’t blind.
“Alec Baldwin in ‘Blind’ is just the latest example of treating disability as a costume,” Jay Ruderman, president of the Ruderman Family Foundation, said when the film was released. “We no longer find it acceptable for white actors to portray black characters. Disability as a costume needs to also become universally unacceptable.”
The statement was picked up everywhere from Variety and Rolling Stone to the Guardian. (The film’s director, Michael Mailer, later called Ruderman’s criticism unfair.)
For Ruderman, whose foundation promotes inclusion of people with disabilities (and also works on Israeli and American Jewish issues), the criticism is part of a broader push to have Hollywood change its act on casting and hiring those with disabilities.
The campaign, which began in July 2016 with the release of a report about Hollywood’s poor record on inclusion, more recently included a challenge to TV networks ahead of pilot season to include more actors with disabilities.
Now a growing cohort of Hollywood A-listers is lending its support to the cause, including Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin, who is Jewish and deaf; producer and writer Scott Silveri of “Friends” and “Speechless” fame; and producer Wendy Calhoun of “Empire” and “Justified.”
In early September, Ruderman Family Foundation officials spent three days in Los Angeles meeting with top Hollywood executives and casting agents to press the issue.
“The real discussion of inclusion in Hollywood is finally beginning to take shape now that studios are opening their doors to the discussion,” said actor and disability activist Danny Woodburn, a little person whose most famous role was as Kramer’s friend Mickey Abbott on “Seinfeld.” “People with disabilities have often been overlooked by my industry, and so it is important to me to affect change in this direction.”
Woodburn will be one of the speakers at the Ruderman Inclusion Summit to be held Nov. 19-20 in Boston. The conference, which is expected to draw about 1,000 professionals, corporate leaders and advocates to discuss disabilities inclusion in all segments of society, will include a panel discussion with actors and Hollywood executives about inclusion.
Among the speakers will be Matlin, who became famous for her Oscar-winning debut in the 1986 film “Children of a Lesser God” and later for her recurring role on NBC’s “The West Wing.” The first and only deaf actress to win the Oscar for best actress, Matlin is an outspoken disability advocate who was instrumental in getting legislation passed in Congress in support of TV closed captioning.
But Matlin’s success is the exception to the rule.
While Hollywood is concerned about authenticity and racial diversity, disability is not on its radar, according to the findings of the July 2016 Ruderman White Paper on Employment of Actors with Disabilities in TV. That report found that 95 percent of top TV show characters with disabilities are played by non-disabled performers. Over the past three decades, about one-third of all the Oscars for best actor have gone to able-bodied performers playing a character with a disability.
They include Daniel Day-Lewis for his 1989 performance as an artist with cerebral palsy in “My Left Foot”; Tom Hanks as the “slow witted” Forrest Gump; Al Pacino as a blind man in “Scent of a Woman”; Jamie Foxx as the blind Ray Charles in “Ray”; and Eddie Redmayne as physicist Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.”
Despite those successes, roles featuring characters with disabilities are few and far between. While about 20 percent of Americans have disabilities, only 2.4 percent of speaking characters in movies and 1.7 percent of TV characters have a disability, according to the 2016 report. The percentage of actual actors with disabilities is even lower.
Then there’s the problem of films portraying disabilities as a liability, such as “Me Before You” in 2016. Based on the novel by Jojo Moyes, the movie is about a successful banker who becomes paralyzed in a motorcycle accident and commits suicide rather than live with his disability.
Calhoun, a writer and executive producer whose credits include the Fox hit series “Empire” and FX’s “Justified,” says that developing unique stories about characters with disabilities is an opportunity to create groundbreaking entertainment for a large, underserved audience.
People with disabilities should be included “from the writer’s room to the production crew to onscreen talent,” Calhoun said. “I believe content grows much richer with authenticity.”
To encourage Hollywood to prioritize inclusion, the Ruderman Family Foundation issued a formal challenge in February to the creators of 151 television pilots on 39 broadcast, cable and internet delivery platforms to audition and cast more performers with disabilities for the 2017-18 pilot season.
The results of the Ruderman TV Challenge were released in September, with CBS and Fox the leaders in hiring and auditioning actors with disabilities. CBS has 11 series and pilots employing performers with disabilities. At Fox, 61 percent of the network’s dramas (14 of 23) and 69 percent of its comedies (nine of 13) auditioned performers with disabilities for the past and current TV seasons.
“Fox came out and said, ‘Not only are we going to audition people with disabilities for our pilots, but we will audition for all our active shows,’” Ruderman said. “That shows that the message is getting through and they’re taking it seriously.”
The ABC series “Speechless” includes a lead character played by a wheelchair-using actor with cerebral palsy. Ruderman credits Silveri, the show’s creator, who recently become an outspoken advocate for inclusion in TV.
Meanwhile, this summer’s box office hit “Baby Driver” included a deaf actor, CJ Jones, in a major role. Jones is the first black deaf actor to be cast in a major movie.
But there’s far more room for improvement.
When “Stronger,” the new film starring Jake Gyllenhaal as double amputee Jeff Bauman, who lost both legs during the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, opened Sept. 22, Ruderman again expressed dismay with the casting choice.
“I have nothing against Alec Baldwin or Jake Gyllenhaal, who are both great actors,” Ruderman said in an interview. “Our position is not that every role of disability has to be played by an actor of disability, but that at least film and TV people should audition people with disabilities.”
In the long run, Ruderman is optimistic.
“Like any civil rights movement, people like change but they don’t like to be challenged,” he said. “I truly believe that within a decade you will have major stars who have disabilities. Hollywood is being challenged and they are responding to it.”
(This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with the Ruderman Family Foundation, which, guided by Jewish values, advocates for and advances the inclusion of people with disabilities throughout our society. This article was produced by JTA’s native content team.)
"New Dimensions in Testimony" is an exhibit designated for future generations to be able to learn about the Holocaust from survivors even after the last of them passes away.
3 minute read.
Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visits the Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem November 15, 2007. (photo credit:REUTERS)
With a slew of recent incidents clearly indicating that antisemitism is on the rise in the US and in Europe and the voice of Holocaust deniers resounding louder and louder, the need to preserve the memory of World War II's atrocities has grown ever more pressing in recent years.
But the commemoration of the genocide of 6 million Jews is becoming a very challenging task in a world where the number of survivors who can recount first-hand testimonies is diminishing by the day.
A new exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City addresses this problem in a creative way, utilizing modern technology to help ensure that even decades after the last of the world's Holocaust survivors passes away, people will still be able to engage in conversation with survivors, ask them questions and learn their stories.
The exhibit, aptly titled "New Dimensions in Testimony," is the result of a collaboration between the Steven Spielberg-founded Shoah Foundation and the Institute for Creative Technologies, both based at the University of Southern California.
While the idea of using 21st century tools to bring to life historical accounts, and in particular ones from the Holocaust, did not originate with this exhibit, it is certainly pioneering in the scope of testimonies and the level of intimate interaction it suggests.
The Shoah Foundation and the Institute for Creative Technologies recorded close to 52,000 interviews with survivors from the Nazi era and the recordings have been condensed and adapted so that visitors to the museum can sit in front of the display and ask the survivors on the screen questions that would prompt the relevant responses.
The concept designer behind these virtual interviews, Heather Smith, told ABC News: "What we've found is that it personalizes that history. You connect with that history in a different way than you would just seeing a movie or reading a textbook or hearing a lecture."
The exhibit offers two such conversations with Holocaust survivors Pinchas Gutter and Eva Schloss, facilitated by language-recognition technology and high-definition video and audio techniques.
"Anne was really a very sophisticated little girl," Schloss says when asked about her step-sister Anne Frank, whose famous journal recounts the story of her life in hiding with her family and was published posthumously by her father Otto Frank, who married Schloss's mother in 1953. "You should not stand by”: Holocaust survivors speak out against hate (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Schloss herself is 88 years old and lives in London. She went into hiding with her family during the war in Amsterdam, but they were captured and sent to Auschwitz. In 1945, she was liberated from the death camp by the Russian Army. Schloss has told her story to schoolchildren in talks she has held as well as in books, including one called "Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank."
According to concept designer Smith, Schloss's testimony could be experienced in a variety of formats, including holographic technologies that are still in development.
The other account is by Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter. Sitting on a red chair, Gutter can be seen in the exhibit facing the camera and talking about his story as well as his present living situation. The 85-year-old survivor lives in Toronto, Canada, and the technology used by the museum can now allow visitors to hear from him answers to a whopping 20,000 questions.
A question about the Nazi death march, for instance, prompts Gutter to recall: "We marched for two and a half weeks. And only half of us arrived at Theresienstadt. The rest were either killed or died on the road."
Smith explains that the new technology is also expected to impact how the history of the Holocaust will be taught in future classrooms. "The vision was to ultimately have a classroom of kids or one child or one adult actually in a room and sitting across from a Holocaust survivor and I wanted them to feel as if it was as real as possible," she said.
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