By Nate Bloom
Contributing Columnist
“Lee” is a bio-pic about Lee Miller (1907-1977), a top model and top fashion photographer before WWII who became a top WWII photographer and reporter. It opens in theaters on Sept. 13.
ANDY SAMBERG, 46, has a supporting role as DAVID E. SCHERMAN (1915-1997), a Life magazine photographer. He frequently teamed up on WWII photographic stories with Lee (played by Kate Winslet). She primarily worked for Vogue magazine.
They both did outstanding work as they photographed at Dachau and at Buchenwald concentration camps right after they were liberated.
I gather, from the film’s trailer, that it recreates a famous Miller/Scherman moment. On April 30, 1945, they managed to get into Hitler’s private apartment in Munich (Miller knew where it was). There, Miller got the “dust of Dachau” off her by taking a bath in Hitler’s bath tub. Scherman took a famous photo of her in the bathtub. The photo was a sort of conquest over Hitler (It was artfully done with no nudity). By coincidence, April 30 was the day Hitler committed suicide.
“AI and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special” airs on ABC on Sept. 12 (8 p.m.) and is posted the next day on Hulu. Her most famous guests are Bill Gates and FBI director Christopher Ray.
Her first guest is SAM ALTMAN, 39, the billionaire CEO of Open AI. He explains how AI works in layman’s terms and discusses the immense personal responsibility that must be borne by AI executives.
AZA RASKIN, 40, and Tristan Harris, the co-founders of Center for Humane Technology, walk Winfrey through the risks posed by AI, which can be powerful and superintelligent. They tell Winfrey how we need to confront those risks now.
Raskin’s father, JEF RASKIN (1943-2005) was a major computer pioneer. He was the leader of the Apple MacIntosh project in the late ‘70s. He met Steve Jobs when Jobs was still working out of his garage. Jef mentored Aza, and, at time of Jef’s death, Jef and Aza were colleagues.
In my last column, I wrote about a bio-pic about President Ronald Reagan (“Reagan”), which opened on August 30. I focused on a real person in the film, Benjamin Kretchman.
ELYA BASKIN, a Jewish actor who played Kretchman in the film, wrote for Fox News: “Kretchman managed to escape the USSR and traveled around the U.S. giving speeches, trying to enlighten Americans with the real life of his country.” Baskin went on to say that Kretchman spoke to the small, Illinois church (1927) that a 17-year-old Reagan attended.
I saw “Reagan” last week and the Kretchman scene was very short. A title (like a subtitle) appeared on Kretchman: “Defector from the Soviet Union.” Then Baskin, as Kretchman, said a few sentences about how the Russian Communists were shutting down churches.
The film didn’t mention that Kretchman was Jewish. But Paul Kengor, who wrote the book the film was based on, did say that Kretchman was Jewish in a 2007 article he wrote about “how much Reagan liked Jews” for the Jewish Press, a conservative, “very Jewish” newspaper.
Here’s the bottom line from public documents and books: Kretchman was born in Russia. But, according to his WWI draft card, he was living in Chicago in Sept. 1917, months before the Russian Revolution broke out. His draft card also said he was living in the McCormick Seminary, then-and-now a Chicago Presbyterian seminary.
You can access compilations of Presbyterian magazines (in book form) on Google Books. These go back a century or more. Kretchman is described as a Reverend and the “Superintendent of the Mission to the Jews” (1919, Montreal). He was in Montreal for about a year.
Kretchman does say in an official document that his native tongue was Yiddish and, in his naturalization form, he says his “race” is “Hebrew.” I have no doubt that Kretchman was born Jewish. But he chose to become a very active Christian.
I don’t know if Mr. Kengor knows about his identity as “Reverend Kretchman” and withheld that information in his Jewish Press article. I doubt that Mr. Baskin knows any of this.
Kretchman, an apostate Jew and devout Christian, would have no reason to leave America and visit militantly atheistic Russia after the Soviet Reds won a civil war (1918-20). Even if he did visit Russia, he was not a “Soviet defector.” He was living in America before and after the 1917 Revolution.
I simply don’t know if Kretchman held himself out as a Soviet defector to church audiences. But it didn’t take me very long to find out that he wasn’t a defector. Others could have checked, too.