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Ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates has opened the floodgates for Israeli-Arab gang warfare to spill over into the Gulf state.
The post WATCH: Are the Abraham Accords paving the way for Israeli-Arab gang violence? appeared first on World Israel News.
Workers at Barboncino pizzeria in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, are unionizing with Workers United. (Courtesy BWU)
From my seat at the bar of the popular Crown Heights pizzeria Barboncino on Memorial Day evening, I could see Jared Berrien, a pizza chef, or pizzaiolo, who has worked at Barboncino for about a year, stationed outside of the restaurant’s wood-fired hearth. Berrien told me that the volume of orders that come in on a night like this one makes the work resemble an assembly line. I could see he wasn’t wrong: between delivery orders and in-person dining, it was hard to keep track of the number of pizzas he was plating.
“After doing prep work and rolling dough at the start of a shift, I’ll plant myself in front of the oven or toss out dough for the next five to seven hours,” says Berrien. “I’ll be in one spot the entire time, only running off the line to get water or go to the bathroom.”
A week before my visit, workers at Barboncino — both those in the back of the house like Berrien and those in the front, the servers and bussers and bartenders like Mike Kemmett, who flitted from one end of the bar to the other on Monday night, mixing cocktails and helping patrons decide which of the restaurant’s many pizzas to order — filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which is one of the ways workers can organize a union. Organizing with Workers United, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate that is behind the Starbucks union drive, the Barboncino workers hope to become the first stand-alone unionized pizzeria in New York City.
Few food-service workers in the United States are unionized. Should Barboncino Workers United (BWU) succeed, it could kick off other union campaigns among the city’s restaurant workers. Once Workers United organized one Starbucks, that model was quickly replicated across the country; the union hopes that, despite the differences in one campaign at a megacorporation versus many campaigns at smaller businesses, the similarities in the type of work and the worker-to-worker organizing model used in the Starbucks effort might create a domino effect in the restaurant industry.
While BWU has asked for voluntary recognition from Emma Walton and Jesse Shapell, who took over ownership of the restaurant from chef and indie filmmaker Ron Brown late last year, they say that they are prepared for an NLRB election in which all of the restaurant’s workers would vote in a secret-ballot election. Of the roughly forty nonmanagement employees at Barboncino, a supermajority have signed union-authorization cards.
“Barboncino’s ownership is aware some of its employees have shown an interest in unionizing,” Walton told me in an email. “Barboncino will continue, as always, to support its customers, community and employees.”
“We’re going to win the election,” says Alex Dinndorf, a server and busser who has worked at Barboncino for almost two years. “It’s not even going to be close.”
If you ask Kemmett why he and his coworkers decided to unionize Barboncino, he’ll mention an incident he refers to as “poop night.”
It was the summer of 2022, when the restaurant was still owned by Brown, and Kemmett was working when a pipe exploded. The leak led wastewater to flood the basement, mixing with cleaning products and insect removal chemicals that were stored there.
Tasked with cleaning up the mess, Kemmett, a busser, and a dishwasher used trash bags to create “fisherman’s pants” before wading into the almost knee-high water, he says. “We were marching around in the muck, filling up these bins and ditching the water anywhere we could.”
When they finished, Barboncino was still meant to be open for another two and a half hours. They say they were told to resume serving food.
“Which was crazy,” says Kemmett, “because the basement is where hundreds of trays of dough are prepped and stored.”
Workers pause for a drip check in the Barboncino basement. (BWU)
He says that the shift manager that night knew this was an absurd request, but Brown had told him that if the pair refused to resume service, he would consider it a “mutinous act.” (Brown did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.) Kemmett and the busser decided to leave, even if it meant being fired.
He ended up throwing out the clothes and boots he had worn during the shift. On the way home, Kemmett called Brendan O’Connor, a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member who was working at Barboncino at the time. Kemmett wanted help finding a lawyer to defend himself and the busser if they were fired. They kept their jobs (Kemmett says the shift manager helped cover for them), but he and O’Connor spoke again.
“I said, ‘So I didn’t get fired, but this is still wrong,’” remembers Kemmett. “‘Maybe we should do something bigger.’”
Within twenty-four hours, O’Connor had contacted the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee (EWOC), a joint project of DSA and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America that offers organizing assistance to workers who are in the early stages of what might become a union campaign.
“Two days later, we were in contact with EWOC and starting the whole process,” says Kemmett.
Shortly after Walton and Shepell took over ownership of Barboncino, the workers circulated a petition requesting a staff meeting. They wanted a raise, disciplinary protections, and input on the restaurant’s employee handbook, particularly as it pertained to handling sexual harassment by customers — an incredibly common complaint in the industry.
Dinndorf says that around three-quarters of the restaurant’s workers signed the petition. A staff-led meeting took place in November, and the workers read testimonies about what a living wage would mean for them. The restaurant’s front-of-house workers receive $10 an hour plus tips, a rate that they say has not increased since Barboncino opened in 2011. They want to raise that to $15 plus tips. Back-of-house workers say that their pay varies widely: an inexperienced young employee might start at $18 an hour, while those more senior may begin at $22 or $23.
Asked about these numbers, Walton wrote, “Barboncino offers a competitive hourly wage that complies with minimum wage requirements.”
A worker moves pizza boxes. (BWU)
Dinndorf says that the owners agreed to a follow-up meeting in January, at which they refused to increase wages or negotiate disciplinary protections, though they later granted raises to some back-of-house workers. By that point, the employees were already speaking with Workers United.
“It was one of the most popular things we’ve done in the campaign,” says Dinndorf of the decision to organize with Workers United. “They offer so much help that we can’t even use it all.” Every Barboncino worker with whom I spoke echoed that sentiment.
Dinndorf also says that the choice to work with Workers United helped overcome divisions between front-of-house and back-of-house workers within the pizzeria, an obstacle in almost every organizing campaign in food service. When BWU began to form, the organizing committee was primarily led by front-of-house workers, who tend to be the prototypical downwardly mobile, college-educated white millennial.
“All of these people who are in the service industry are normally in a kind of antagonistic division of labor together,” explains Dinndorf. “Part of overcoming that was joining a big organization so we can say, if the owners threaten to close the restaurant down, we have lawyers and people who we can trust.”
Berrien was another key to breaking through those divisions. He has more than a decade of experience in kitchens ranging from diners to fine dining; at Barboncino, his duties include making pizzas and salads, prepping the kitchen, making dough, and thinking up specials and the staff meal.
He cites the pandemic as a factor in growing support for unionization among restaurant workers. He lost his job at the time, and he believes similar experiences gave the industry’s workers an understanding of their precarity. He saw that insecurity play out at Barboncino, and it’s what led him to get on board with the union effort, helping convince other members of the restaurant’s back-of-house staff to do the same.
“We had a coworker who was a father, who got fired on the spot because he voiced concerns about management and the way they were running things and that he felt he was getting overworked and not treated right,” explains Berrien of an incident that took place around five months ago. “Another guy was an ex-con who needed a job as a condition of his parole, and he was let go unceremoniously, too.”
Asked about those incidents, Walton wrote, “While Barboncino’s ownership disagrees with these characterizations, Barboncino does not discuss personnel issues publicly.”
The workers want clear disciplinary procedures, such as a three-strikes policy. Kitchens are notoriously intense workplaces, and it’s hard to imagine an environment more in need of a union shop steward that workers can turn to when they have problems on the job. At Barboncino, workers say that the current employee handbook mentions at-will employment a dozen times and that a mandatory arbitration clause has been added as of late that would prevent them from taking the restaurant to court.
Prioritizing protections against arbitrary termination helped win trust among Barboncino’s back-of-house staff, but building unity also required workers like Berrien to talk through his coworkers’ cynicism regarding the possibility of changing the establishment for the better.
“The difficulty with organizing cooks is that we can be used to abuse and adverse working conditions. That can become a sort of badge of honor that we wear as if it’s a cool, badass thing,” says Berrien. “There’s something to be said for that because it builds camaraderie, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to improve things.” He says that some of those who were most adamant that they weren’t interested in the organizing have since become the union’s most vocal members.
The most capable administrators in the country couldn’t work at Barboncino. The president of the United States couldn’t work a Barboncino line.
“On my very first day at Barboncino, I remember seeing around one hundred and fifty [order] tickets in the kitchen, and there was more delivery than I had ever seen in my entire life,” says Dinndorf, who has worked in the service industry for more than a decade. “I thought, ‘This isn’t a pizza restaurant, this is a pizza factory.’ This is industrial, very fast work: to work as a pizzaiolo here is incredibly hard. The most capable administrators in the country couldn’t work at Barboncino. The president of the United States couldn’t work a Barboncino line.”
When I tell Berrien about Dinndorf’s assertion regarding the president, he laughs in agreement. “It’s skilled labor.”
The workers emphasize that their qualms are with the food-service industry writ large, rather than Barboncino specifically. In fact, they say that it is the pizzeria’s relatively decent working conditions that inspired them to organize.
“We have all worked jobs that were so much worse than Barboncino, and we’ve all had more abusive managers,” says Kemmett. “When speaking with people who have been through worse, we say that the reason we should organize Barboncino is because it’s a good place to work and it could be better. This could be a place where you have real stability.”
“Support for unionization within the industry is bubbling over; it’s volcanic,” adds Dinndorf. “But people are afraid of retaliation.”
It’s a reasonable fear. Starbucks is currently violating labor law at locations across the country, firing dozens of pro-union workers and closing profitable stores that have particularly strong unions. A restaurant owner could do the same. And these are high-turnover businesses, which adds to the difficulty of unionizing them; there’s a reason few unions have tried it before. Asked why pro-union sentiment exists among food-service workers given these obstacles, BWU members mention the inspiration they and their counterparts at other restaurants have taken from the Starbucks unionization drive, citing in particular the youth-led nature of that organizing.
“Organizations like EWOC and Workers United are radicalizing a generation of young people,” says Dinndorf. “This is the accumulation of people being radicalized by work. It’s the product of a lifetime of hard managers.” He recounts feeling near elation upon leaving the group’s first organizing-committee meeting. Says Dinndorf, “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m not at work, but I’m with my coworkers talking about all our problems with our jobs.’ It felt like a complete subversion of what it means to go to work.”
The workers also point out that recent shifts in the US economy have made low-wage service work a long-term job rather than the youthful gig many still view it as. The number of people working these jobs for decades rather than a year or two continues to grow, and with that comes a need to make the work more sustainable. Plus, there is the cost of rent. As housing prices continue to rise in New York, something has to give.
“People talk about our generation as being apathetic, but when we’re organizing, I don’t see any of that,” says Dinndorf. “A lot of people don’t know what a shop steward is, but once they do know about it, they want one. And Barboncino is the prototypical restaurant — if we can organize, any other nearby restaurant can too, and they’ll do it twice as quickly as we did.”
The official union button of the Barboncino union. (BWU)
“This is the first thing I’ve ever done in the industry that has been fulfilling,” says Kemmett. “It makes me feel like I’m actually capable of improving things.” He laughs, adding, “I have a reputation for being a grumpy bartender, but these days, I’m pretty peachy at work.”
On Monday night, the owners weren’t on site, and the workers, wearing union buttons they’d made over the weekend, chatted with me and the patron seated next to me at the bar. She was friends with one of them and had stopped into the pizzeria to find out what it means for a restaurant to unionize; she hadn’t known such a thing was possible.
As I ate a cremini and fennel sausage pizza and discussed the ins and outs of union-button design with Kemmett, a soundtrack heavy on 2000s hits played over the restaurant’s speakers. BWU members sang along as they navigated behind the crowded bar. (When Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” abruptly stopped playing, a chorus of boos erupted from the staff.) Some of them had come from what they described as a very positive organizing meeting earlier in the day, and spirits were high. They say tips have been better than usual this week, and customers are writing supportive messages on their receipts. If this is what a unionized restaurant looks like, I’d guess the city’s workers are about to organize a few more of them.
Yulia, an extremely rare and endangered seal who became an overnight celebrity two and a half weeks ago when she was found resting on a beach in Tel Aviv, has been spotted again ashore in Rishon LeZion, despite leading marine biologists’ predictions that she would not return.
The post WATCH: Defying leading experts’ predictions, celebrity seal still in Israel appeared first on World Israel News.
Rabbi Baruch Dov Povarsky, Rabbi Gershon Edelstein’s successor as head of the world famous Ponevezh Yeshiva, compared the late Lithuanian Charedi leader to Moses in his eulogy during Tuesday’s funeral.
Below is a video of the late rabbi’s modest home.
The post WATCH: Small and modest home belonging to late rabbi ‘on par with Moses’ appeared first on World Israel News.
An overwhelming majority of Middle East scholars support boycotting Israel, according to a survey.
By Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner
Over 100 Jewish and non-Jewish organizations on Tuesday issued a fervent letter urging university leaders to reject a boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) resolution being proposed by the American Anthropological Association (AAA).
The measure, which accuses Israel of being an apartheid regime and committing crimes against humanity, will be considered via electronic ballot from June 15-30, according to the website of Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions (AnthroBoycott). Passing the resolution would make AAA the first major academic professional association to endorse the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement since the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) did in 2022.
“An academic boycott, unlike an economic boycott, seeks to suppress the open exchange of ideas, collaboration, and scholarly discourse,” the letter says. “The AA resolution, if passed, not only threatens the core principles of academic freedom but also poses significant risks to the educational opportunities and experiences of your students and faculty, the reputation of your institution and the inclusivity and diversity of your campus community.”
The letter, drafted by AMCHA Initiative, adds that the boycott would have an “irreversible impact on students and faculty” and that “research has shown a clear correlation between academic boycotts and the incitement of anti-Jewish hostility and antisemitism.” Citing these concerns and more, it called on university leaders to denounce all academic boycotts, dissociate with AAA if the resolution passes, and “implement safeguards” that would prevent academic boycotts on their campuses.
Signatories of the letter include Academic Engagement Network (AEN), B’nai B’rith International, EndJewHatred, National Association of Scholars, StandWithUs Center for Combating Antisemitism, Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Zionist Organization of America.
An overwhelming majority of Middle East scholars support boycotting Israel, according to a survey published in Nov. 2022, which shows that only nine percent of 500 responding experts from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the American Political Science Association (APSA) would “oppose all boycotts of Israel.” 91 percent “support at least some boycotts.” 36 percent also favor “some boycotts” but not against Israeli universities.
Established in 1902 and based in Arlington, Virginia, the American Anthropological Association, which has over 10,000 members, has considered boycotting Israeli universities before. In 2015, a measure similar to the resolution AAA members will vote on in June was defeated by 39 votes, with 4,807 votes cast.
80 major Jewish organizations spanning the American political spectrum signed a blistering letter imploring members of AAA to reject the BDS resolution. Drafted by the Alliance for Academic Freedom (AAF) and The Academic Engagement Network (AEN), it said that Israeli universities “work hard to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence” on their campuses and foster viewpoint diversity, which, it noted, includes “support for Palestinian voices.”
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The three agreements signed include a mutual recognition of drivers’ licenses and a maritime agreement designed to encourage direct trade links between the two countries.
By Andrew Bernard, Algemeiner
Israeli Transportation Minister Miri Regev on Monday signed a series of deals between Israel and Morocco in the latest example of deepening ties between Israel and the Arab kingdom.
“I am sure that together we will strengthen and bring the relations between the countries and in the Middle East to new heights,” Regev wrote of the visit, the first by an Israeli Transportation Minister to Morocco.
Her Moroccan counterpart Mohamed Abdeljalil is expected to reciprocate the visit in September.
The three agreements signed include a mutual recognition of drivers’ licenses and a maritime agreement designed to encourage direct trade links between the two countries. The third agreement is a memorandum of understanding to increase cooperation in road safety and sustainable mobility, with Israel and Morocco agreeing to form a joint team focused on transportation innovation, including drones and self-driving cars.
Morocco formally established normal relations with Israel in 2020 as part of the Abraham Accords framework that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries. As part of the negotiations to achieve that deal, the Trump administration agreed to recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara territory.
Regev told i24 news on Tuesday that Israel would also be taking a position on the Western Sahara issue.
“Relations with Morocco are of the utmost importance to Israel, and I am sure that the government will take a position on this issue very soon,” she said.
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Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen is in Slovakia as part of efforts to improve ties with the E.U.
By JNS
Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen met with European counterparts in Slovakia on Tuesday and called for unity in countering the Iranian threat before it is too late.
During the closed-door session in the capital Bratislava, Cohen also discussed strengthening the Abraham Accords and relations with the E.U. bloc.
He is the first Israeli foreign minister to address the Slavkov/Austerlitz format—a regional cooperation forum consisting of Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
The meeting included Ministers Alexander Schallenberg of Austria, Jan Lipavský of the Czech Republic and Miroslav Wlachovský of Slovakia.
“We discussed the joint fight against the Iranian nuclear issue and I said that we are close to the point of no return. We must act in cooperation against the reign of terror in Tehran,” Cohen posted to Twitter following the meeting.
“In addition, we discussed strengthening ties between the countries of the Abraham Accords. We continue to strengthen relations with the countries of the European Union, an important and strategic step to promote the interests of the State of Israel,” he continued.
Cohen kicked off his Central European trip on Sunday night in Croatia, on Monday meeting in Zagreb with Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and other top officials. Foreign Minister Gordan Grlić-Radman joined Israel’s top diplomat at the Zagreb Holocaust Memorial.
Cohen also met with the country’s President Zoran Milanović.
He will also visit Austria and Hungary before heading back to Israel. While in Budapest, Cohen will attempt to reach a final agreement on Hungary moving its embassy to Jerusalem. He is expected to meet with his Hungarian counterpart Péter Szijjártó and possibly with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
It is Cohen’s seventh visit to Europe since he assumed office on Dec. 29, part of an effort to improve ties with the European Union.
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The former secretary of state called the accusation “total nonsense.”
By JNS
Henry Kissinger, who served as national security advisor and secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations, denied that he intentionally delayed critically needed military supplies to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, speaking during a Channel 12 interview broadcast Monday.
According to U.S. Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., former Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, in his 1976 book “On Watch: A Memoir,” Kissinger stalled the airlift and then blamed the delay on Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger.
“I do not mean to imply that he wanted Israel to lose the war, He simply did not want Israel to win decisively. He wanted Israel to bleed just enough to soften it up for the post-war diplomacy he was planning,” Zumwalt wrote.
“It’s total nonsense,” Kissinger told Channel 12‘s Amit Segal.
Kissinger, who turned 100 years old on Saturday, said the reasons for the delay had to do with technical issues, a political scandal involving the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew and the fact that the U.S. was under the initial impression that Israel was winning.
“To make the airlift of a country available to a war-making country that is in the middle of a war is not something that is normally done, has in fact never been done,” he added.
“It was also the week in which Vice President Agnew resigned, so it takes a special Israeli attitude to even ask that question, if you forgive me,” Kissinger said.
“I mean, this was a huge step we took. It saved Israel,” he said.
“If you look at the days of the war … until Tuesday morning [Oct. 9], we thought Israel was winning and was crossing the canal. It was only Tuesday afternoon that [Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Simcha] Dinitz came back to the United States. And it was not until Tuesday evening that I could reach Nixon because of the Agnew [crisis],” Kissinger said.
“We told the Israelis they could pick up any equipment with El Al. On that day we promised Israel that we would replace all its losses, and therefore said expend all equipment that you need, because we’re here. On the fourth day [of the war, Oct. 9,] we started trying to get an airlift going,” Kissinger said.
On Oct. 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. Neither U.S. nor Israeli intelligence foresaw the attack. After Israel suffered severe setbacks, it began to turn the tables. However, Israel faced a shortage of essential military material. The U.S. promised to resupply Israel but there was a delay of eight days, never adequately explained until the revelations in Zumwalt’s book.
Zumwalt’s explanation became widely accepted, particularly as Kissinger pressured Israel for territorial compromises after the war, Channel 12 noted.
Intense pressure from Kissinger has been blamed for first forcing Israel to lift its siege in Sinai of the Egyptian Third Army, which it had encircled and cut off from supplies, and then turning Israeli military victory into political defeat through a series of so-called “disengagement agreements” that saw Israel retreat to the Mitla and Gidi passes (January 1974) and then, in a second agreement (September 1975), surrender those passes, as well as its position on the Gulf of Suez coast and the Abu Rodeis oilfields in southwestern Sinai to Egypt.
On the Syrian front, U.S. pressure led Israel to withdraw from a position threatening Damascus and from a slice of the Golan Heights.
The post Kissinger denies holding back resupply during Yom Kippur War appeared first on World Israel News.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars in You Hurt My Feelings. (Jeong Park / A24)
There’s a feeling of blank surprise in watching writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s new film You Hurt My Feelings. Not only because it’s such a weak, limp, plodding comedy — even with Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing the lead. The real surprise is watching this type of film, one that seems to have become so totally obsolete in the 2020s, you can’t even believe you’re seeing a new version of it.
You Hurt My Feelings is the one about the small cluster of affluent white people in an upper-class enclave of New York City who live incredibly well doing those kinds of jobs virtually nobody gets to do anymore. There’s Beth (Louise-Dreyfus), a pop memoirist/fiction writer, who also teaches writing at the New School. There’s her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), an “incredibly overpaid” therapist. Beth’s sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), is a successful interior decorator, and her husband, Mark (Arian Moayad), is a stage and film actor.
But they’re so whiny and discontented about their professions they’re all vaguely planning to quit and do “something else”?
Something else? Like what? You don’t want to be a writer living in luxury anymore, after getting a bit of criticism on your latest manuscript, so you become . . . a princess? An astronaut? A movie star? I don’t know — what do people who have everything do about their hangnail problems when they’re convinced hangnails are an outrage and they’re entitled to far better, hangnail-free lives?
After a whole kerfuffle over Beth’s wounded feelings when she overhears her husband Don telling pal Mark that he doesn’t really like Beth’s new book, she’s gradually persuaded that everybody tells white lies to get along with the people in their lives, a grade school–level observation that never develops further. The main characters all learn small lessons about human frailty and the value of love and acceptance, and then carry on with their cushy jobs and fine dining and theatergoing and occasional charity work. Just when Beth and Don have finally accepted that their son Elliott (Owen Teague) works a mere ordinary-person job at a lowly pot dispensary, he finishes the first draft of his screenplay and presents it to them. Saved from professional mediocrity!
Amber Tamblyn and David Cross play a couple regularly consulting Don the therapist — the worst therapist ever, judging by what we see. After the couple demands $33,000 worth of reimbursement for two years’ worth of unsuccessful marriage counseling, he finally gets up the gumption to tell them they clearly hate each other and ought to divorce. He can’t seem to figure out that incessant, sneering combat is the basis for their entire relationship and that they like it that way. He really ought to get out more, or at least watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
This was all once Woody Allen’s dish — affluent white people living in material luxury in Manhattan, making themselves neurotically miserable over their personal relationships and minor downturns in the upturns of their fabulous careers. But there’s one key difference separating Annie Hall (1977), say, from something like You Hurt My Feelings. Pariah though he is now, it must be acknowledged that Woody Allen was once funny as hell, and that required a certain amount of real insight. Allen didn’t respect his own comic ability, as he himself admitted, and he ruined his filmography making increasingly solemn, high-minded, would-be-philosophical crap. But once upon a time, he was a formidable wit.
It makes sense that Holofcener’s filmmaking is descended from Allen’s, because she practically grew up on Allen’s film sets. Her stepfather, Charles H. Joffe, was the producer of almost all of Allen’s film work, giving Joffe the peak experience of accepting the Best Picture Oscar on Annie Hall.
In fact, to be fair, Holofcener’s life is very much like her film characters’. They’re “special” people who have money and are wired into the art and entertainment industries and who really can decide to give up successful sculpting for songwriting, or successful songwriting for acting. Her father was sculptor-songwriter-actor Lawrence Holofcener, and after divorcing him and marrying Joffe, her mother Carol Joffe became a set decorator, earning Academy Award nominations for two Woody Allen films, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Days (1987).
With a background like this, Holofcener can honestly be seen as making “slice-of-life” films, however rarified. Critics love them because they’ve been trained to adore this kind of film, with its complacent New Yorker sensibility. It’s funnier than the movie is — the automatic critical praise of the film’s supposedly incisive, mordant humor, and the way it’s seen as taking on burning issues like middle-aged malaise. Even when Holofcener’s just wallowing around among familiar figures, generating lukewarm chuckles while treating them all fondly, she gets credit for being a bold satirist: “No American director’s more committed to exposing the smugness and self-aggrandizement of bourgeois urbanites.”
I’d had hope, when I first read a summary of You Hurt My Feelings, that Holofcener really meant to delve into the complicated necessity of lying, a kind of following up on Jane Austen’s line in Pride and Prejudice, “Honesty is a greatly overrated virtue.” But her idea of taking on the role lying plays in relationships goes no further than things like “exposing” how Beth and Don consistently lie about liking the presents each gives the other, or how Sarah lies to Mark about some of the performances he gives, though in her actual opinion, they’re not always so hot.
Such marshmallow instances of lying are hardly worth any kind of moral extrapolation. And such sluggish, laugh-free films as this can hardly even be called a “comedy.”