Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein urges Jews to kick anti-Semites ‘in the ass’
The Hollywood film producer said that it's time for Jews to protect themselves.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFHarvey Weinstein (right), co-chairman of The Weinstein Company and recipient of the Humanitarian Award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is introduced by actor Christoph Waltz at the ceremony in Beverly Hills, California.(photo credit: KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/REUTERS)
Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein told a packed audience at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s National Tribute Dinner Tuesday night that the way to combat the new wave of anti-Semitism is to “stand up and kick these guys in the ass,” the Los Angeles Times reported.“It’s like, here we go again, we’re right back where we were [before the Holocaust],” said the 63-year-old Weinstein after accepting the Wiesenthal Center’s Humanitarian Award. “We just can’t take it anymore [from] these crazy bastards.”“I think it’s time that we, as Jews, get together with the Muslims who are honorable and peaceful, but we also have to go and protect ourselves,” he said. “There’s a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s book The Sirens of Titan and it always was the motto of Miramax and now the Weinstein Co. It says, 'Good can triumph over evil if the angels are as organized as the mafia.’”Weinstein was presented the award by the host of the gala, DreamWorks Animation Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and by actor Christoph Waltz, who mentioned that the Jewish producer has made a number of films dealing with Jewish issues and the Holocaust, including Inglourious Basterds, The Imitation Game and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.Waltz won a supporting actor Oscar portraying a Nazi in Inglourious Basterds, which Weinstein referred to, saying, “Too bad movies can’t all be like Inglourious Basterds, where Hitler gets what he deserves.”Weinstein also spoke about his father, who was a sergeant stationed in Cairo during World War II, and aided the Haganah in pre-1948 Palestine. During the ceremony, Katzenberg announced that the Wiesenthal Center, which runs the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, recently raised an additional $50 million toward construction costs of its new museum in Jerusalem, and that the total amount raised to date represents 87 percent of the building's cost.The Hollywood Reporter noted that Katzenberg said the $50 million includes “a gift of $26 million — the largest gift in the history of the Simon Wiesenthal Center — from Dawn Arnall to name the building in memory of her late husband, Roland,” the billionaire businessman and former US ambassador to the Netherlands.The other bequests include “a gift of $10 million from the world-renowned philanthropist and chairman of the Milken Institute, along with his wife, Michael and Lori Milken ... and a gift of $10 million from Larry and Carol Mizel to jointly name the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem campus. A gift of $18 million [came] from one of Canada’s most generous families, Gordon and Leslie Diamond, to name the 1,000-seat amphitheater.”
