U.N. Criticized Over ‘Watered-Down’ Resolution That Fails to Call For Gaza Ceasefire

Global organizations trying to help people starving in Gaza have criticized the U.N. Security Council resolution that called for more humanitarian aid without demanding an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war to facilitate its delivery.

The U.S. vetoed a Russian amendment that would have included ceasefire language, Al Jazeera U.N. reporter Rami Ayari reported. Instead, after delays and debates for days, the final version resolved that the parties must allow safe, unhindered and expanded humanitarian access to Gaza and “create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.”

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The measure passed Friday at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City with 13 votes in favor. The U.S. and Russia abstained from voting. Earlier this month, the U.S. cast the sole veto against a resolution calling for a ceasefire.

The U.N. and humanitarian groups serving more than two million people stuck in Gaza said the new resolution would do little to end suffering and death without an immediate and sustained ceasefire. In less than three months, 20,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed, “the vast majority women and children,” per the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

“This resolution has been watered down to the point that its impact on the lives of civilians in Gaza will be nearly meaningless,” Avril Benoît, executive director of MSF (Doctors without Borders) USA said in a statement.

“More and more member states recognise that a ceasefire is indispensable to addressing the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, yet the Council has yet again failed to call for one.”

During a press briefing after the vote, Guterres told reporters that the only way to stop the “ongoing nightmare” in Gaza was a humanitarian ceasefire. Israel controls aid into the territory and Guterres said the current aid operation lacks the necessary security to succeed, saying “the real problem is that the way Israel is conducting this offensive is creating massive obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid inside Gaza.”

TIME reached out to the Israel Defense Forces for a response. 

The International Rescue Committee called the failure to call for a ceasefire “unjustifiable,” while other groups specifically criticized the U.S.

Oxfam’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Sally Abi-Khalil, said in a statement that “the U.S.’ removal of calls to suspend hostilities shows just how out of touch its policies are with the urgency and terror that Palestinians are experiencing. Its actions in the Security Council demonstrate the U.S.’ increased isolation from the global consensus.”

Amnesty International accused the U.S. of using the threat of its veto power to stall and weaken the resolution, calling the move “disgraceful.” During the meeting, Russia’s ambassador to the U.N. Vasily Nebenzya called out, what he views as, “shameful, cynical and irresponsible conduct by the United States.” He accused the U.S. of resorting to “gross pressure, blackmail, and twisting arms” to get a “rubber stamp” on its version of the resolution.

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said she wouldn’t respond to Russia’s “rant,” pointing out that Russia has created similar conditions in its war in Ukraine.

In explaining her vote, Thomas-Greenfield noted the resolution “does not support any steps that would leave Hamas in power which, in turn, would undermine the prospects for a two-state solution where Gaza and the West Bank are reunited under a single governance structure, under a revamped and revitalized Palestinian Authority.”

Thomas-Greenfield instead pushed for more humanitarian “pauses.” A temporary truce the last week of November allowed aid and the exchange of dozens of hostages and Palestinian prisoners. Negotiations on another truce have reportedly stalled, as Israel has vowed to not stop its war until Hamas is eliminated, while Hamas refuses to release hostages unless the war ends.

Thomas-Greenfield said she was “appalled” that “once again” the council did not include language to condemn Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, where militants killed 1,200 people and reportedly sexually assaulted women. She said the U.S. supports Israel’s right to protect itself, but noted both sides must follow international law and respect civilian facilities such as hospitals and places of worship.

There is growing concern that has not been done in Gaza: In the past two months, Israeli troops stormed a major hospital and the Catholic Church reported Israeli snipers shot dead two Christian women sheltering inside a church, an act Pope Francis condemned.

Benoît criticized that “the way Israel is prosecuting this war, with U.S. support, is causing massive death and suffering among Palestinian civilians and is inconsistent with international norms and laws.”  

TIME reached out to the IDF for response. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said accusations Israel was breaking international law were “hogwash” because the military wasn’t intentionally targeting civilians, saying civilian deaths were “collateral damage” or “unintended casualties.” The IDF previously told TIME it takes “all operationally feasible measures” to protect civilians.

Guterres said Friday there is no effective protection for civilians in Gaza. People who cannot leave the territory without Israel’s permission have fled to a designated “safe” area the size of an airport in a coastal desert. Many had earlier left Gaza’s north, following Israeli evacuation orders, to so-called safe cities in the south, only to have Israel bomb those cities.

Now, more than half a million people are starving, Guterres said. There is not enough clean water. Hospitals are barely functioning.

“Humanitarian veterans who have served in war zones and disasters around the world––people who have seen everything,” he said, “tell me they have seen nothing like what they see today in Gaza.”

source https://time.com/6550772/un-resolution-gaza-aid-vote-ceasefire-criticism/

Gypsy Rose Blanchard Is Set to Be Released From Prison. Revisit the High-Profile Case

Gypsy Rose Blanchard pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of her mother, Clauddine ‘Dee Dee’ Blanchard, in July 2016. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison, while her ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, was convicted of first degree murder for carrying out the slaying, and received a life sentence. Now, after serving 85% of her sentence according to Missouri state law, Gypsy Rose is set to be released from prison on Dec. 28.

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Gypsy Rose was the victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Her mother Dee Dee had a mental health condition called Factitious disorder imposed on another, also known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is when a caregiver repeatedly seeks medical attention for the false, exaggerated, or inflicted illness of another person.

The murder of Dee Dee, and her treatment of her daughter, captured interest around the world. The story inspired multiple documentaries, films, and a Hulu miniseries titled The Act, which saw Joey King portray Gypsy Rose and Patricia Arquette play Dee Dee. Gypsy Rose has done multiple interviews from prison. In one, she expressed dissatisfaction over the Hulu series about her life. Elsewhere, in an interview filmed for Dr. Phil in 2017, she said: “I firmly believe that no matter what, murder is not OK, but at the same time I don’t believe I deserve as many years as I got.”

Gypsy Rose married Ryan Scott Anderson in June 2022. She is yet to reveal how they met. However, she has had multiple pen pals throughout her time in prison.

Let’s revisit the high-profile case.

What happened to Gypsy Rose Blanchard?

Dee Dee convinced both Gypsy Rose and the public that Gypsy Rose was extremely ill. She told doctors that her daughter was suffering from cancer, epilepsy, vision impairment, hearing impairment, muscular dystrophy, quadriplegia, and more. As a result, Gypsy Rose was forced to exclusively use a wheelchair, receive meals from a feeding tube, and had her head shaved so that she looked bald.

When Gypsy Rose tried to go against her mother’s will by walking or insisting that she was not ill, her mother would punish her. In the meantime, donations the duo received out of sympathy for Gypsy Rose’s illnesses became a source of income for the family. When Gypsy Rose was believed to be seven years old, the duo received a house gifted to them by Habitat for Humanity.

Gypsy Rose’s age is widely discussed. It was a storyline in The Act because Dee Dee lied about Gypsy Rose’s age to multiple people, including Gypsy Rose herself, in order to further infantilize her. In truth, Gypsy Rose was born in 1991, but her mother falsified her birth certificate so that it said she was born in 1995.

Fast forward to 2012, when Gypsy Rose was around 21 years old, she first made contact with Nicholas Godejohn, then 23, on a Christian dating website. Over the next three years, the two would maintain contact. In June 2015, Godejohn visited Springfield, Missouri, with the intention of killing Dee Dee and running away with Gypsy Rose. Godejohn then went on to check into a motel until Gypsy Rose confirmed that Dee Dee was asleep. Then, Godejohn sneaked into her room and stabbed Dee Dee 17 times, killing her. Afterwards, Godejohn and Gypsy Rose had sex in Gypsy’s room. 

On June 14, Godejohn and Gypsy Rose left Springfield and took a bus to Big Bend, Wisconsin, to hide from law enforcement. Godejohn also posted disturbing content from Dee Dee’s facebook page, which alerted her friends and neighbors and led authorities to discover the body that same day.

source https://time.com/6550568/gypsy-rose-blanchard-prison-release-murder-charge/

Why Finance Will Be Key to the Climate Story in 2024

For decades, finance has been the (often unspoken) lynchpin of climate action. In the U.S., for example, innovative tax mechanisms helped finance wind and solar power, turning them into the powerhouses they are today. In global climate talks, the promise of funds for emerging economies has helped advance climate negotiations in thorny moments.

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Next year, expect finance to take center stage in climate conversations. Even if central banks stop raising interest rates or even lower them, the cost of raising capital will remain high, making finance a key challenge for project developers to overcome. Meanwhile, emerging global economies will continue to demand that funds flow to finance their transition—industry watchers expect that negotiators at next year’s U.N. climate summit in Baku will hash out a new collective goal for finance to flow to the Global South.

Financing new technologies—especially in emerging economies—can prove difficult even in less-complicated economic times. But recent developments in the world of global finance also present an opportunity for firms willing to think creatively.

The core reason that finance is so important to clean-energy deployment is the primacy of up-front costs for infrastructure in the industry. Those construction costs usually need to be financed. Fossil-fuel projects also have upfront costs, of course, but they tend to be lower, as the cost of producing energy from fossil fuels is largely attached to purchasing gas, oil, or coal when it’s needed—which typically does not rely on financing.

A few factors are now bringing these realities to a head. First, higher interest rates have shaken up the numbers for projects that penciled out well even just a year ago. And, second, emerging economies have come under increased pressure to stem emissions—but can’t actually afford the cost of borrowing that would enable them to do so.

Indeed, at COP28 in Dubai, developing countries argued that they could not pledge to bigger decarbonization without adequate finance. At COP30 in 2025, all countries are supposed to come with new national commitments to cut emissions. COP29, held next year in Baku, will test whether the money is there to give countries the confidence to commit. “The bridge is finance,” says Cassie Flynn, the Global Director of Climate Change at the United Nations Development Program.

What sort of numbers might get tossed around in Baku? The most recent financial commitment, made at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, called on wealthy countries to send $100 billion in annual climate finance to the Global South beginning in 2020. Whether that promise was eventually met depends on who you ask—but no one thinks $100 billion will be adequate going forward.

Much of finance conversations to come in 2024 will likely center on funds from governments of wealthy countries like the U.S. and institutions like the World Bank, but the real goal will be mobilizing private capital using a blended finance structure. In short, that approach combines capital from the private sector with concessional money—from, say, governments or philanthropy—that accepts lower returns or takes the first loss on a project that goes belly up.

Firms that get these structures right will position themselves as leaders in a market poised to grow rapidly. BlackRock, for example, launched a fund in 2021 that combined money from governments and philanthropies along with capital from institutional investors to demonstrate how such a project can be structured successfully. The firm says that the fund received “huge interest” both from investors looking to earn a market-rate return and impact investors looking to take on additional risk to catalyze the market. Now governments and private institutions alike just need to create the product offerings to match.

source https://time.com/6549989/climate-finance-cop29/

A Closer Look at All of Us Strangers With Director Andrew Haigh

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the movie All of Us Strangers.

All of Us Strangers is a ghost story, a meditation on the creative process, and a minor-key romance all rolled into one staggering package. Its many layers defy easy explanation. “For me, it’s just about the difficulty of being in the world and the complications of having relationships and carrying all those things that you pick up along the way in your life,” writer and director Andrew Haigh says. 

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The film, which comes to theaters Dec. 22 after a successful run on the fall festival circuit, is an adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers. The book follows a solitary middle-aged screenwriter who reencounters his long-dead parents and begins paying them regular visits while developing a relationship with a woman in his apartment building. Haigh, best known for HBO’s Looking and the swoony gay drama Weekend, made both protagonists men. Fleabag breakout Andrew Scott plays Adam, the writer drawn to his past as he attempts to start a new script. His suitor is Harry (Paul Mescal), an alluring neighbor who surfaces right as Adam discovers a sort of portal that allows him to commune with his parents (played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell).

Depending on your interpretation, All of Us Strangers can be both heartbreaking and hopeful. In order to move forward, Adam must shed the anguish of what he hasn’t been able to share with his kin—all that was left unsaid when they died in a tragic accident 30 years earlier. Haigh, 50, shot part of the movie in his own childhood home near London. He talked to TIME about how it came together and why he resisted an unequivocally happy ending.

Read more: The 10 Best Movies of 2023

TIME: Was there something that felt especially vulnerable once you made the decision to shoot in your childhood home? Or was that just kismet?

Haigh: It was crazy, but I do think it was sort of kismet. I knew I wanted to try and put myself into this story in a way that I felt would unlock something more universal. If you allow yourself to be vulnerable, you hope that that vulnerability comes across onscreen and speaks to other people’s vulnerability. If I’m trying to transmit a feeling, then I need to be open about allowing myself to be up there on the screen. 

When you started pursuing the project, was it immediately clear that the only way for you to make this was to change the leads to two men?

Absolutely. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. It was definitely wanting to explore and express how I feel about a certain generation of gay men, basically my generation. I’ve wanted to do that for a while, but I could never quite find the right story to do it. And then telling it in the form of this strange ghost story about, essentially, what haunts us felt like the perfect way to explore a certain generation of people and what happened to us in the ’80s and ’90s. Connecting that with a story about grief and about a need to reconnect with parents felt like this perfect osmosis.

Andrew Scott was cast first. Once you had Andrew on board, what was the essence of what you were looking for in Harry?

I always go about casting not even thinking about anybody else until I know who that central protagonist is. My films have a single protagonist, even though the other roles are very fundamentally important. I had to get that role of Adam right. I knew that with Andrew, he had that vulnerability. We talked a lot about this idea of someone keeping all of this pain inside and then it finding ways to just leak to the surface. I think he’s so brilliant at showing those moments when his fear or his pain or anxiety—or his love or his joy—break to the surface. With Harry, it is about finding someone that can open Adam up. He’s ready to listen to Adam, which is the same thing Adam is trying to get from his parents. And then at the same time, he has his own secret story that needs to be softened by Adam by the end. When I met Paul, he just understood all of that. I think they’re great together. They feel like they’re meant to be with each other. 

Was Harry’s scraggly look your idea, or did something about Paul conjure that? 

I mean, I love a bit of facial hair. It also just made sense for this character. He hasn’t looked after himself, or he’s decided not to bother. It doesn’t take much to go out on the queer scene and see people that have a certain look. But you make all these choices. For example, there was a choice for him and the Jamie Bell character to both have mustaches. People always say they’re never surprised that a straight man goes for someone that’s like their mom, and it’s the same with gay people. We probably go for elements of our dad. When you’re talking about a story that’s about this interaction between parental love and romantic love, it also feeds into that idea.

In the scene where Adam submits to Harry’s advances, they’re on the couch. The camera pans up and down and emphasizes the way they are caressing each other’s thighs. What kind of direction did you give the two of them for that? 

Sex scenes are so difficult to shoot. What you have to do is make sure that each actor knows what the intention of that scene is. What does Harry need to do to make Adam feel comfortable? Because it’s clear that Adam is holding something back. So what can he do to soften that in order for them to connect? It’s very written-out in the script, like when Adam laughs that he’s forgotten how to breathe because he hasn’t kissed for a while. You’re getting to know him there. You understand his reticence and his nervousness. It’s not that he’s a prude. He just hasn’t made out with a guy for a while. I knew I wanted it to feel very sensual in terms of touch and feel and sound. We highlighted the sound of skin touching skin so you can feel this sort of tender electricity. It has to feel sexy and intimate and a bit dirty in a good way.

Read more: The 10 Best Movie Performances of 2023

There’s a misdirect when Adam first stumbles upon his father in the thicket. Because we don’t yet know who he is, it feels like they’re cruising each other in that moment, which also has appropriate generational implications. How did the dots come together for that scene? 

In a messy way, in my head, I knew that I wanted it to feel almost erotic or spine-tingling or strange somehow. There is a sense that he’s drifting off into the past. When your sexuality plays such a big part in your self and your past, it just made sense to bring that into that scene. I tried not to listen too much to the arguments in my head about how it should feel, so when the dad appears, looking like he does at roughly the same age Andrew is now, you can’t help but feel a certain tingle of sexuality to it. You know later on that his parents don’t actually know that he’s gay, so it’s also foreshadowing that thing that’s going to have to be revealed later on down the line. 

The sequences where he returns to the home do have the feel of a magical portal. How did you facilitate that? 

We didn’t want it to feel surreal. We didn’t want it to feel anything like a flashback, but somehow you are being drawn into an idea of the past without it being too nostalgic. It is about colors being a bit richer, and using dissolves and zooms. The sound design changes. I always gave the analogy of when you’re bored at school and drifting off to sleep. You sort of felt like everything was shifting around you, but you’re not fully asleep. They were also in ’80s costumes, but it’s not so far removed from what Adam or Harry wears. Time has sort of vanished. The idea of “what is past or present?” has lost all meaning. It’s all mushed up together, like how memory works. Memories can suddenly appear to you in the present even if they’re from 20, 30, or 40 years back.

What’s happened to Adam when we meet him is a confluence of things: He’s revisiting his parents, who are the same age he is in the present day, while this relationship is beginning. Are Adam’s encounters with Harry what allows him to reconnect with his past, or is reconnecting with his past what allows him to accept Harry into his life?

That’s interesting. I think it’s a bit of both. To start with, when he doesn’t let Harry into the apartment, the desperate longing that Adam has to connect with someone brings his parents back into existence. There’s a subconscious longing that needs help in order to move forward. They feed on each other. Seeing his parents again, and feeling that warmth and comfort, allows him to then want to connect with Harry. But having sex with Harry feeds into what becomes the next scene with the parents, which is when he comes out to his mom. At first, there’s no talk about his sexuality. And then, in pushing forward with Harry, it makes him realize this has to be uncovered with his parents. I spent quite a lot of time trying to see them as informing and helping each other, rather than one thing leading to another thing. It was all of it twisting up together and getting more complicated and messy. 

One way to interpret the film is through the screenplay Adam is writing. He has writer’s block and tries to draw out memories through old photos and music videos he’s watching. How much of that element is important to you?

You could definitely read it as that, but as a person, he’s wanting to write to understand himself. That’s what so many writers are doing. He’s delving into his past, and then the past comes alive. For me, writing this script was a similar thing. There’s another level going on in the story about the art of creativity and how it can work as a way to express your interior self, and if you want to see the whole film as an expression of that, I’m fine with that.

You could look at the end of the movie as cynical or downbeat, like an affirmation that, yes, queer life is alienating and isolating. That’s not my takeaway, but what do you think of that potential interpretation? 

I understand that that can be an interpretation. Personally, I don’t feel that. There is hope in the fact that he has understood that, basically, he is capable of being in love and being loved and being there for someone else that might need him in that moment. By the end of the film, to me, it is basically saying that what is important in life is love in whatever way you manage to find that, whether it’s in a relationship, whether it’s with your parents, whether it’s with a friend. You go through life finding love, losing love, and finding it again. Now, look, there’s a version of this story where it ends in a much happier place, for sure. I needed to bring it to a level beyond that. Just a nice, simplistic, happy ending doesn’t quite work for me with this. I like a happy ending, don’t get me wrong.

I would say you’re not exactly known for happy endings.

No, I’m not. That’s very true. I actually don’t like a happy ending in my films. I like a complicated ending. Listen, life is very complicated, and it usually ends in a complicated place for all of us. Most of us lose our parents, and half of us might end up losing our partner before we’re gone. Life is about dealing with loss. But the love that comes from that is the essential, important thing.  

One of the most emotional scenes is when Adam’s father says, “I’m sorry I didn’t come into your room when you were crying.” But what got me was Adam’s response: “It’s okay. It’s been so long.” There’s a lot in the way he repeats those words: “It’s been so long.” What was it like to write that scene? 

I think a lot of queer people find that scene very emotional. A lot of us feel that our parents probably knew that we were different at a very young age, and why couldn’t they help us? But at the same time, we didn’t want them to help us because we were terrified of what would happen if we announced who we were. That uncomfortableness and that pain is always there, and we’re always told, “Well, it was a long time ago. We should move on from that.” Everyone else can move on, but it doesn’t mean we’re able to forget how we felt growing up. I wanted lots of things to be happening within that scene that are compassionate to both of those characters. It’s about realizing why the dad wasn’t able to help him. There are no simple answers from that, but at the end of that scene, there is some emotional resolution that he gets. 

How did you land on Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love” for the final scene?

That song was always in the script. In fact, most of the songs are in the script. But as an 11-year-old kid, I bought the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album. I used to sing that song in my bedroom, not really even knowing why I loved it so much. It’s actually quite a subversive love song because it’s written by a bunch of gay dudes in the ’80s in a really tough time as AIDS was devastating communities. I always knew I wanted to get it into a film, and it made perfect sense for it being at the end of this. 

source https://time.com/6449265/all-of-us-strangers-andrew-haigh-interview/

The Classic Christmas Movie That Offers a Lesson About Antisemitism in America

Marching through somber streets, men in uniform confiscate items, entering houses for further looting, all legalized by a leader waving his fist and spewing anger. Germany in the 1930s? No, the classic Christmas movie Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, which aired originally in 1970.

Written and directed by the men who brought Americans Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and the Little Drummer Boy, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town was a classic story of good versus evil. It used Nazi imagery and symbolism to craft an origin story for Santa Claus—the story’s hero and the pinnacle figure of capitalist, secular Christmas. Needing an antihero for Santa to thwart, the film capitalized on a decade in which news stories, early Holocaust scholarship, and representations in popular culture made Americans far more aware of the Nazis and their heinous crimes. Many Americans have watched it almost every year since.

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Yet, while the story is beloved, it points to a cultural problem that has helped perpetuate antisemitism. The movie reminds Christian Americans of the Nazi crimes and uses them to convey villainy, without engaging antisemitism or Jewish people at all. Christmas presents, not Jewish people, are the victims of the vaguely German antihero. This is a common practice in movies, television, and novels, and it has left Americans understanding the evil of the Nazis without fully grasping who they targeted, why, and how the antisemitism at the root of the Holocaust continues to reverberate for Jewish communities around the world.

Despite early efforts after World War II to punish the Nazis, such as the Nuremberg Trials, as well as the creation of the state of Israel, collective memory of the era failed to grasp fully the horrors of the genocide perpetrated against Jewish people. One problem was that some audiences Christianized the victims to be able to empathize and identify with the tragedy.

In the 1950s, the reaction to the best-selling The Diary of a Young Girl epitomized how popular memory of the Holocaust was incomplete, with the public not reckoning with the full scope of the Nazi atrocities — especially who the victims were and why they were targeted. Readers tended to ignore Anne Frank’s Jewishness, viewing her as Anglicized and as forgiving them: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” Frank wrote before having seen a death camp.

Read More: Inside the Biden Administration’s Response to the Spike in Antisemitic Attacks

A turning point arrived in 1960, when Israel captured Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, and flew him to Jerusalem to stand trial. Survivors provided eyewitness testimony, including photographs, and the world rediscovered the tragedy. Planes air-shipped video-tapes of the proceedings to New York every day to ensure that the American media covered the trial.

That year also marked the translation of Night by Eli Wiesel from Yiddish into English. The book offered a depiction of a ghetto, a deportation, a death camp, and a death march, from the perspective of a Jewish survivor with an instinct for literary framing. Night became a mainstay of literature and history curricula. Historical memory of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were on the rise. 

Even so, Wiesel’s book revealed how Holocaust memory was often tailored to the interests of Christian audiences. He emphasized his struggles with faith, which helped to connect with Christian audiences for whom belief in God is a central theological question.

In 1965, the award-winning film The Sound of Music also reflected how, even as the Nazis’ crimes had become more visible, Holocaust memory often excluded the tie between antisemitism and the Nazi regime. Sometimes, Jewish victims themselves were missing entirely, as was the case in The Sound of Music, which featured Nazi villains without ever depicting or even mentioning Jewish people.

The rise in consciousness meant that when the filmmakers behind Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town needed an antagonist and a backdrop to convey evil, the Nazi trope was well known among Americans. They knew it would work to feature an evil bad guy with a German-sounding name — Burgermeister Meisterburger — and a German-accented voice. 

The inciting incident in the movie occurs when Meisterburger, the Mayor of “Sombertown,” trips on a toy and breaks his “funny bone.” “I hate toys,” he declares, “and toys hate me. Either they are going, or I am going, and I am certainly not going.” He growls to his right-hand man, Grimsley, “Take this down.” 

He breaks into song, proclaiming, “Let it be known throughout the land from sea to sea / there will be no more toymakers.” He delivers the melody with an air of authority, with Meisterburger’s grimacing voice carrying a catchy tune while proclaiming violence against all toys: “Outlaw the dolls and sink the boats / they bring me only woes.” Grimsley transcribes Meisterburger’s whims and issues a formal decree: “Toys are hereby declared illegal, immoral, unlawful, and anyone found with a toy in his possession will be placed under arrest and thrown in the dungeon.” 

To make Meisterburger and his regime sufficiently sinister, the filmmakers had them resort to tactics that mimic some of what the Nazis did. The anti-toy decree functions in Sombertown like the 1935 Nuremberg Laws did in Germany. Empowered by the law, men in uniform patrol the streets, confiscating possessions and instilling fear among townspeople. At one point they even publicly burn toys. 

Crucially, the film replaced Jews with toys. Rather than depriving Jewish people of the rights, privileges, and physical safety of citizenship as happened in Germany, Burgermeister banned the people of Sombertown from having toys. “If you find so much as a marble or half a jack, the whole house is under arrest,” he ordered, searching each home before dawn with armed men in tow.

Read More: Ken Burns on His New Documentary ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’

That’s the backdrop against which Santa Claus a.k.a. Kris Kringle sneaks into houses by night to hide toys and circumvent the authoritarian, oppressive regime. Kringle’s team — a penguin, a winter warlock, and the future Mrs. Claus — and the townspeople brave and spirited enough to challenge authority join him in hiding toys. Just as people in Nazi Germany hid Jews, to protect lives, Kringle and his allies hide toys, to protect, presumably, Christmas.

Yet, once again, as with the Sound of Music, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town uses the Nazis as villains while decoupling them from their primary victims: Jewish people. In this case, the goal was to elevate Christmas and advance the secular, cultural aspects of the holiday. After all, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town was not a Holocaust movie and never claimed to be.

But the choice reflected the way in which Nazis had come to play a key role as a villain in American collective consciousness without widespread understanding of the antisemitism at the root of their crimes. Fighting Nazi-reminiscent monsters has become a common plot element in all sorts of movies, books, and more.

Nothing’s wrong with using a historically horrific regime and their evil as inspiration for fictional bad guys. In fact, it makes sense, because it conveys to the audience how uniquely evil the antagonist is. But the tradition of doing so with the Nazis has left viewers unaware of the history of antisemitism, how the Holocaust looks from a Jewish perspective, and how that understanding shapes Jewish fears in 2023. When Jewish people sound the alarm about the rise of antisemitism, many downplay it. They don’t grasp the historical memory shaping Jewish perceptions. 

Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town is a classic: the plot is catchy, the music is memorable, and the characters are iconic. It also premiered at a formative moment for Holocaust memory in the U.S. When retreating to the nostalgia of a mid-20th century classic, viewers should enjoy it while also considering who’s included, who’s erased, and how those choices shape the present.

Rebecca Brenner Graham is a history teacher at the Madeira School, an adjunct professorial lecturer at American University, and a Cokie Roberts fellow at the National Archives. Her forthcoming book, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany, will be published by Kensington in 2025. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.

source https://time.com/6548383/christmas-movie-holocaust-memory-antisemitism/

Warner Bros. Discovery in Merger Talks With Paramount Global

Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. held talks on a possible merger with Paramount Global, potentially combining two of the biggest media companies in the world, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The talks are preliminary and may not lead to an agreement, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are at such an early stage.

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David Zaslav, chief executive officer of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., met with Bob Bakish, his counterpart at Paramount Global, on Tuesday in New York to discuss a possible deal, Axios reported earlier. He has also spoken with Paramount Chair Shari Redstone, whose family company owns a controlling stake in Paramount, the owner of CBS and other television properties.

A combination of the companies would unite famous Hollywood properties, including the Paramount and Warner Bros. film and TV studios, and put a number of pay-TV and broadcast stations, such as HBO and CBS, under a single roof. 

A merger of the two large media companies would likely face intense scrutiny by federal regulators who have challenged numerous combinations under the Biden administration. According to Axios, Warner Bros. executives say they could complete such a merger because their company doesn’t own a broadcast network like Paramount’s CBS.Play Video

Both companies have struggled as consumers have canceled cable-TV subscriptions in favor of a new generation of streaming services. The streaming businesses are expensive to run, and haven’t made up for shrinking profits at traditional networks. Programming costs, especially for sports, have been escalating.

People familiar with Paramount’s thinking say the board has been more open to strategic alternatives, such as an alliance with another media giant, or even a sale to a private equity buyer or technology company.

Paramount has been selling noncore assets, such as its real estate and Simon & Schuster booking publishing business. Bloomberg News reported Wednesday that the company was once again holding talks about a sale of the Black Entertainment Television network, this time with a management-led group.

Paramount is controlled by the Redstone family, which owns a majority of the voting stock through National Amusements, a family holding company. Shari Redstone has also held discussions about a sale of her family’s stake in Paramount with film producer David Ellison and RedBird Capital Partners.

Warner Bros.’ Zaslav has shown a great appetite for deals, merging his Discovery cable networks with the Scripps channels and later acquiring Warner Media from AT&T Inc. in a $43 billion merger.

The latter deal included tax benefits that bar Warner Bros. from doing new acquisitions until April 2024, two years after the AT&T transaction was completed.

Shares of Paramount were down more than 1% in extended trading. Warner Bros. was down almost 1.5%.

source https://time.com/6549800/warner-bros-discovery-paramount-global-merge-talks/

Maestro’s Scenes from an Open Marriage

“I know exactly who you are. Let’s give it a whirl,” are the confident words said by Felicia Montealegre Cohn to Leonard Bernstein toward the beginning of Bradley Cooper’s Netflix biopic Maestro. Cooper directs himself as Bernstein; Felicia is embodied by Carrie Mulligan, whose naturally expressive (often sad) eyes tend to say more than her words. They happen to sparkle in that scene, as Leonard and Felicia walk through a garden and into a life that they would share for more than 30 years.

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What exactly Felicia knew is a question that hangs in the air for much of the film’s runtime. Where some biopics exact a laser focus on a brief period of their subject’s lives (The Queen, Jackie) and others attempt to cram so much in that they take on the fool’s errand of summing up an entire human experience in a few hours (Respect, Blonde), Cooper (who wrote the Maestro script with Josh Singer) splits the difference by spanning decades with a particular eye toward Bernstein’s love and family life. Few and far between are incredible shots of Cooper’s Bernstein composing and conducting, some of which underscore Cooper’s virtuosity as a performer, as he sweatily commands an orchestra for minutes of unedited film. Maestro is less the recounting of an illustrious career than an affair of the heart.

When Felicia agrees to take the plunge with Leonard, she’s already met David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer, one of the many openly queer actors cast here to play a queer character, alongside Michael Urie as Jerome Robbins and Gideon Glick as Tommy Cothran). Leonard calls him “sweetie” and touches him affectionately within eyeshot of Felicia. The audience has already been introduced to David, who’s in bed with Leonard when he gets the call to stand in for conductor Bruno Walter for the performance at Carnegie Hall that’s framed as Leonard’s big break. Later, he encounters David and his wife in Central Park and Leonard tells their infant child, “I slept with both of your parents. I love too much, what can I say?”

Read more: Leonard Bernstein Comes to Life, Gloriously, in Maestro

As the film progresses, Leonard openly flirts and carries out affairs with men, sometimes to Felicia’s consternation. At a party, she complains to friends about the “cookie-cutter boys” that often surround her husband; moments later she catches him kissing a hot young thing named Tommy whom he eventually takes on as a lover, at times inviting him along to hang out with his family. Leonard sits between Felicia and Tommy during the opening night of his musical Mass. He and Tommy clasp hands and earn a side eye from Felicia, the wedge in their relationship telegraphed in an instant. Mulligan’s wonderful performance is at its most astonishing when she’s completely silent and the emotion gushes forth.

Cooper finds great narrative power in what’s left unsaid. Comments on Bernstein’s vocational multivalence—as a composer and conductor, who had feet in the worlds of classical music and Broadway musicals—play like double entendres that speak to his busy love life. When a TV interviewer notes that it’s “difficult to classify” Leonard, he responds in the affirmative, contrasting his public and private lives. “And if you carry around both personalities, I suppose that means you become a schizophrenic and that’s the end of it,” he says.

Leonard and Felicia’s marriage lasted from 1951 to her death from cancer in 1978, and yet the film’s lack of labels feels extremely contemporary. Bernstein had sex with women and men, but his sexuality is never specifically given a name in the film. Nor are the terms of his arrangement with Felicia—she clearly knows he’s carrying on affairs with men, but how not OK she is with all of this is something that’s suggested rather than explicitly stated. In one third-act scene, she announces, “I’ve always known who he is,” but the audience is only allowed glimpses. And that’s the way, it seems, Felicia wanted it. 

When their oldest daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) catches wind of “gossip” about her father, Felicia warns him: “Don’t you dare tell her the truth.” In an ensuing scene, neither Leonard nor Jamie explicate said rumors—he just chalks the chatter up to jealousy. The vagueness with which Cooper presents Bernstein’s sex life dovetails with Felicia’s perspective (there’s no indication she was ever in the room during any of Leonard’s extracurricular sex, nor that they discussed the finer details of it) and narratively illustrates the mysterious quality of sexuality, how even its possessors and those around them might not know what it all means, just that it is. In this case, vague gets at something specific.

In real life, Felicia did label Leonard—at least once. In a note to him, printed in the 2013 collection The Bernstein Letters, that is estimated to have been written mere months after they married, she stated bluntly: “You are a homosexual and may never change.” That was not a referendum on their relationship—in fact, the premise of the letter was to illustrate how “this whole bloody mess which is our ‘connubial’ life” was, in fact, “not such a mess after all.” At least in that early part of their marriage, Felicia adopted a laissez faire approach to loving a man who loved men. She wrote: “You don’t admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?” And then later: “I am willing to accept you as you are.”

Today, one of the agreed-upon essential aspects of a healthy open relationship is a clear setting of terms (and if one member of the relationship requires a changing of said terms, that should be made clear as well). Maestro is missing that, which is hardly a surprise given how little nonmonogamy was discussed in the ‘50s. Perhaps Leonard and Felicia’s relationship was not open, per se, but merely ajar. Perhaps he took a sentiment like, “I know exactly who you are,” as license to be whatever he wanted and ran with it, carelessly overlooking its consequences for the wife he loved and failing to circle back to figure out a more tenable arrangement when things clearly got to be too much for her. Felicia’s feelings on the matter seem to have been treated as collateral damage if they were treated like anything at all.

Read more: The 100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades

It becomes clear as the film progresses that what she didn’t know was exactly who she would be as a result of this open lifestyle. That she didn’t fully account for her own needs in giving him permission to fulfill his. One never knows how such an arrangement will affect a shared life until one’s in the thick of it; this is not untrue of any marriage or lifelong commitment, regardless of its specific terms. We see his dalliances wearing on her and his absences causing tension. During an incredible scene, all captured in one static medium shot in a giant apartment whose windows overlook the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, she warns him: “It’s so draining to love and accept someone who doesn’t love and accept themselves. And that’s the only truth I know about you. If you’re not careful, you’re going to die a lonely, old queen.” The real Bernstein reportedly underwent years of therapy in search of a cure for his sexuality.

If we are to use modern language to evaluate the Bernsteins’ arrangement, we’re left to question just how ethical their ethical nonmonogamy was. Leonard clearly dipped in and out of their relationship as the ‘70s dragged on, but recommitted upon Felicia’s cancer diagnosis. The film is framed with scenes of a late-in-life Bernstein waxing nostalgic about his devotion to Felicia. Devoted is perhaps how he saw himself ultimately. Crucially, the editor of the aforementioned book The Bernstein Letters, Nigel Simeone, writes in the introduction that Felicia “was unquestionably the greatest love of his life.”

After Felicia’s death, we see Leonard instructing a student, with whom he later dances at a party, sweatily and drunkenly. It’s, in a way, business as usual for Leonard, who is now freer than ever to pursue the kind of connections he craved. This doesn’t negate the scenes of him lovingly serving his dying wife. It does, however, recall an earlier scene at one of his Thursday rehearsals (which allowed spectators), in which he describes to the crowd the importance of an artist letting go of “anything that’s restraining him.” He continues: “I have to live the rest of my life, however long or short that may be, exactly the way that I want.”

Bernstein’s own words bestow the film with an epigraph that only grows in poignancy upon viewing: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.” As we know, many things can be true at once. And with that wisdom, Cooper suggests, Bernstein conducted his life.

source https://time.com/6549262/maestro-open-marriage-ethical-nonmonogamy/