Meet the Oscar-Winning (Twice!) Rabbi Whose Blessing Hollywood Seeks Each Awards Season
Marvin Hier (second from right) with (from left) 20th Century Fox chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos, Netflix chief content officer TedSarandos and director Brett Ratner, photographed Feb. 8 at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
A version of this story first appeared in the March 4th issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Below are excerpts from the online edition:
[Rabbi Hier is] the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, America's first Holocaust museum, and overseer of its offshoot organization, the Museum of Tolerance…Buthe's also Hollywood's go-to guy when A-listers are in need of advice, spiritual or otherwise…
"To build a great constituency for tolerance that will be able to stand up to the bigots, the haters and the terrorists," is how he describes his life's mission — or his abilityto marshal Hollywood talent to aid his causes. He may well be the most powerful religious figure in L.A. He's certainly the best connected…
As he recounts in his just-published memoir, Meant to Be, he developed a fascination with Jewish history, particularly the Holocaust, while growing up on New York's Lower East Side…
Moriah's [the Center’s film division] 14 films, several of which can be viewed on Netflix, have been narrated by the likes of Michael Douglas, Sandra Bullock, Christoph Waltzand Nicole Kidman — free of charge. The company...is now at work on its 15th release, a doc about Ben-Gurion.
Indeed, Hier's next project could be his biggest blockbuster yet: a $200 million, 180,000 square-foot Museum of Tolerance in the center of Jerusalem, which is scheduled to openits doors in late 2017.
