This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “From partial blindness to producing sensations,” a cover story published in the February 2018 issue of B-Tank Magazine. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published non-fiction writer. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
Entertainment Visionary Takes the Long View on the Business of Art
By Barbara Finkelstein
Film producer Daniel Finkelman spent his first Shabbos in the United States at 770 Eastern Parkway, central headquarters of the Lubavitch chassidic movement. Newly arrived with his parents and younger brother from Israel, eleven-year-old Daniel found himself seated alongside Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. In Russian, his parents’ native language, Finkelman asked the Lubavitcher rebbe to bless his eyes.
“I must have been a sorry sight,” Finkelman says. “I had a handkerchief wrapped around my head to sop up the goop that flowed non-stop from my eyes.”
In Israel, a noted ophthalmologist had diagnosed Finkelman at the age of seven with uveitis, a rare inflammatory disease of the eye that produces a painful allergic reaction to sunlight. Shortly before the family’s move to Brooklyn in 1989, the doctor made a grave diagnosis: The bookish, computer-loving boy would be blind before he was out of his teens.
The rebbe offered up a hopeful but mysterious blessing in Russian and Yiddish: “In everything, everything, everything, you should have success.”
What happened in the apparent wake of the rebbe’s blessing stumped Finkelman’s Israeli doctor, his little brother and his parents — especially his father, a physician trained in Saratov, Russia.
“One morning about a month after that Shabbos, the disease was gone,” Finkelman says. “I went outside. I took off my medical sunglasses. My eyesight was normal.” He all but did a cartwheel.
For years Finkelman puzzled over the rebbe’s words, yet he saw them as an oracle — a hard-to-decipher prophecy that had trumped his ophthalmologist’s prognosis.
“I can be a cynic and say that medicine and technology eventually would have cured me,” Finkelman says. “But given the sequence of events in my youth, I feel, humbly, that I was the recipient of a great miracle that came about through the rebbe’s blessing.”
Around the World
Now 39, Finkelman has built a career in entertainment based on sight, vision and perception.
He has produced and directed dozens of music videos, documentaries and several feature films, all of them touching on Jewish themes. Indeed, he is probably most famous for movies whose genius lies in his power to see beneath the surface of family relations, individual suffering and age.
Holocaust Survivor Band, which debuted in The New York Times’ Op Docs video series, shines a light on Saul Dreier, a drummer, and Reuwen “Ruby” Sosnowicz, an accordionist, who teamed up in their late eighties to play South Florida weddings, bar mitzvahs and concerts. The five-minute documentary, directed by Joshua Z. Weinstein, showcases the two survivors’ brotherly relationship and the love of performing that “makes them alive.” The video’s popularity has helped land the two musicians gigs from Berlin to Las Vegas, where they accompanied actor Dudu Fisher during his vocal act at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino.
Finkelman partnered with Weinstein again on “Menashe,” a family drama set in a fictional hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood. He began raising production money in 2015 by turning to Adam Margules, son of Cecelia Margules, one of Finkelman’s creative partners. Once the Brooklyn businessman, actor and BizTank mogul came on board, Finkelman had no trouble attracting other investors.
The first American Yiddish-language movie produced since the 1930s, “Menashe” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. It has also been shown in Australia, China, Istanbul and Singapore.
How It All Began
Finkelman’s first job could not have been farther from the world of moviemaking. After a serendipitous introduction to chassidus through a friend in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Finkelman spent a year at a Tzfas yeshiva. In Israel he met a young woman named Tzippy. After they got married, they moved to the U.S. To support his young family, he took a job in a Queens, New York, Chabad school as the principal of secular studies.
He recognized the importance of the work, but he had been drawn since childhood in a different direction.
“I was always a film buff,” Finkelman says. “Even at the Chabad school, I was making music videos whenever I could. As a person who experienced four and a half years of partial blindness, my whole heart was in the projection of light on a screen, not in teaching.”
Finkelman continued to ponder the Lubavitcher rebbe’s blessing. He believed that each pronouncement of “everything” indicated an area in his own life where vision — literal and metaphoric — would bring him personal and professional success. The first “everything” was the restoration of his eyesight. The second gave him insight into the importance of living a religiously observant life.
But what was the third “everything?”
The answer lay in Finkelman’s earliest encounter with chassidic thought, especially with the concept of l’chatchila ariber (לכתחילה אריבער).
“It means ‘go straight to the top,’” Finkelman says. “Don’t go step by step. I remembered that same mindset from ‘Dead Poets Society,’ where Mr. Keating, the English teacher, advises his students, ‘Carpe diem.’ Seize the day. I would go straight to the top guided by my love and passion — without any resources, connections or classroom training. And I would seize the day now.”
Finkelman had love and passion aplenty and — just as important — a role model in his entrepreneurial brother, Eli, the co-founder of TelTech, a software development company that produces security solutions used by the Secret Service, FBI and other intelligence operations.
“Eli had basically schooled himself in computing technology,” Finkelman says about his brother. “When it came time to co-found his company, he seized the day. When I told him I wanted to go in a completely different career direction, he was one hundred percent behind me.”
The third “everything” was now clear. It pointed to a career in film and music entertainment that Finkelman hoped to use as a kind of recruitment tool for young Jews. To cushion his family finances, though, he invested in an art dealership that produced sentimental paintings of the Lubavitcher rebbe for the Lubavitch community. It was a lucrative decision that gave him time to contemplate the subject of his first video.
Song Power
Like his brother, Finkelman embarked on a self-education program, acquainting himself thoroughly with film gear, editing software and production work. When he found a video project in line with his artistic and educational vision, he would be ready for it.
That first opportunity came with the indictment and sentencing of Sholom Rubashkin, the former owner of Agriprocessors, a slaughterhouse and meat-packaging factory in Postville, Iowa, and, Finkelman says, the victim of federal overreach.
“I’m sitting in my car and thinking how the fingerprints of prosecutorial misconduct are all over this case,” Finkelman says about a sentence for “fraud” — a variable legal construct challenged in Rubashkin’s case by some hundred legal scholars — that put the business and philanthropic leader behind bars for twenty-seven years. “At the same time, it was amazing that the injustice of Rubashkin’s conviction could unite such diverse Jewish communities, from Modern Orthodox-Yeshiva University-pro-Zionist-Young Israel types to Satmar anti-Zionists, from Sephardim in Deal, New Jersey to Ashkenazim in Lakewood.”
To ease his anxiety, Finkelman popped a CD of Mordechai Ben David into the car player. The first cut was the 1980s version of “Unity Song.”
What would it take to rework “Unity Song” into a song of support for Rubashkin?
Finkelman decided to ask the leading figures of current-day Jewish entertainment to appear in a video he would call “Unity for Justice.”
Armed with nothing but outrage and commitment, Finkelman approached Mordechai Ben David, Lipa Schmeltzer, Gad Elbaz, Nissim Black, Avraham Fried and other high-profile performers with a simple introduction: “Hello. My name is Danny Finkelman. I am a film producer. I’m making a video. Would you be in it?”
Chutzpah? Naïveté?
Whatever the magic sauce, it got Finkelman’s film career cooking. The “We Are the World”-style video in 2011 produced an artistic and entrepreneurial match between Finkelman’s philosophical commitments and a host of inspirational Jewish singers that shapes his work to this day.
Working with actors, screenwriters, concert producers, singers and investors, Finkelman has gone on to produce or direct a long list of documentaries, movies and music videos that continue to instruct and delight his fans. His most recent is “Set Me Free,” a three-and-a-half-minute music video produced in conjunction with Amudim, a crisis intervention organization. It features Australian-born Israeli hip-hop artist DeScribe, a recovering drug addict and suicide survivor whose music has been called a lifeline for at-risk young people in Jewish and non-Jewish communities.
And the Winner is . . .
Finkelman is on record that he plans on winning an Academy Award before his forty-sixth birthday. Another dream goal: A Netflix-like platform that houses videos, reality shows, talk shows and other artistic products that address some aspect of the Jewish experience.
“Right now finding content is my biggest challenge,” Finkelman says. “I’m running around the clock trying to develop long and short films, but I know there’s tremendous creative talent out there.”
Finkelman likens his hosting platform to the crowdsourcing initiative that BizTank entrepreneur Joel Klein announced in the December issue of B-Tank magazine.
“B-Tank is performing the mitzvah of bringing parnassa to people in our community,” Finkelman says. “This is an issue people get intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. Under the auspices of Sparks Next, my production company, I’m building an entertainment platform called Sparks Go that addresses the same needs of the frum Jewish community.”
Not a day goes by when Finkelman doesn’t get a request from a young person asking for a way into the Jewish entertainment industry. As much as possible, he tries to match strivers with Sparks Next internships. Indeed, one of his most popular adepts is Meir Kay, a YouTube videographer who “went straight to the top” after posting light-hearted motivational videos that garnered millions of views.
As one of the most high-profile filmmakers in the frum world, Finkelman tries to demonstrate a mix of leadership and business acumen.
“At first I didn’t know how to do that,” he says. “When I started Sparks Next, I couldn’t find my hands and feet. Theory is great, but nothing prepares you for what happens on a real set more than action.”
As a producer, Finkelman had to learn how to orchestrate a vast number of moving parts. Pre-production work requires selecting a scriptwriter, scouting out locations, assembling a crew and casting the actors, to name a few non-financial tasks. Production involves renting out the most suitable gear for the shoot. And post-production means tying up loose ends, largely by ensuring good communication among the film editor, supervising sound editor, film lab and production accountant.
Chief among his best practices as a director: “Be decisive.”
In his early days, Finkelman says he was overwhelmed by the business side of his artistic life. Learning how to delegate tactical tasks to interns or crew members has left him free to focus on his creative and financial responsibilities.
Among his biggest challenges is cultivating a work-life balance.
“One of the lessons I learned from my brother is delegation,” Finkelman says. “In his own work, Eli found that greater productivity comes from trusting other people to do what they’re good at. That lets you get more sleep, more vacation time, and a chance to open your mind to other talented people with vision.”
More easily said than done, Finkelman concedes. “In my line of work, I can end up working ’round the clock. When I’m on a deadline, I might even sleep in my office. Keeping my word is that important to me.”
With a production schedule that has taken him in one twelve-month period to Morocco, South Africa, Ukraine (three times) and Israel (five times), Finkelman, admittedly, misses a daily family life. Recently he promised his wife that he would do his best to be home for Shabbos. Proof of his seriousness: He flew back to New York from Israel in the middle of a two-week production gig.
Lest he give the impression that he shoehorns his religious life into odd moments here and there, Finkelman begins his day at dawn by attending a daily shiur, a course of study that will lead to his obtaining semicha. During that hour, he and fifteen other men shut off their cell phones and focus their attention on their learning.
“It straightens me out for the whole day,” Finkelman says.
A disciplined work schedule, integrated with family life and Judaic education, has paid off materially and spiritually.
“I truly believe that one person will benefit from my work,” Finkelman says. “And if I can change one individual’s life, I will feel that my life was well lived. I want to know that I helped a young man or woman decide not to go down a path of destruction. When you watch one of my videos, that’s the passion behind it.”
Two recent film shoots provide evidence of the impact that Finkelman has had on people who come into his orbit.
Shortly after the Hypercacher Supermarket siege in 2015 by an Islamist gunman, Finkelman was in Paris filming a video. A Jewish woman who witnessed yarmulke-headed actors dancing in the street told Finkelman that his crew’s camaraderie was so infectious that she lit Shabbat candles for the first time in her life. In late 2017 a production staffer on Finkelman’s “Let the Light Shine On” video crew was moved by the participation of the Holocaust Survivor Band and was similarly inspired to put tefillin on for the first time in his life.
The movie producer who spent four and a half years on the verge of blindness has learned to take the long view for himself.
And his community.
Barbara Finkelstein has contributed to B-Tank since 2017. She is at work on a book about mental illness and housing in the Bronx.
