In Reversal, Gingrich Calls for Withdrawal of Film Attacking Romney and Bain

Misleading and exaggerated claims in a film portraying Mitt Romneyas a heartless job killer led Newt Gingrich to ask on Friday that the group behind it change or withdraw it, even though Mr. Gingrich is the intended beneficiary of the film.“I’m calling on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film,” Mr. Gingrich said at the opening of a campaign office in Orlando during a swing through the critical primary state of Florida. “They cannot run the film if it has errors in it.”

But the group running the video, the pro-Gingrich “super PAC” Winning Our Future, made no move to alter the work. Late Friday, it released an open letter to Mr. Romney saying it would alter its advertisement only if he would answer a series of questions about “your version of events,” including when he formally relinquished a “controlling interest” in Bain and when he received a final check from Bain relating to any investment in which he had an interest.

The video — parts of which first showed up online last week and on South Carolina television stations on Thursday — is dominating the campaign dialogue as the primary fight intensifies in the state.

By calling for the ads to come down or undergo changes, Mr. Gingrich was potentially getting to have his cake and eat it too, reaping the benefits of attacks that have been nationally branded as false while publicly distancing himself. Yet he also faced the risks of being associated with an attack by a group that has a former close aide, Rick Tyler, as a senior adviser.

The harsh nature of the film’s attacks had led many Republicans to call on Mr. Gingrich to disavow it. First pressed to do so last week, Mr. Gingrich declined, saying the use of the video is fair game, especially after a group supporting Mr. Romney, Restore Our Future, savaged him with ads in Iowa.

But in questioning the advertisements’ accuracy on Friday, Mr. Gingrich was providing an early test of the benefits and risks to political candidates like him who, with little of their own financing, are being sustained by super PACS, which can use unlimited resources to help candidates and attack their opponents as long as the campaigns do not coordinate with them.

So far, these groups are running nearly as many advertisements per day as the candidates themselves, according to an analysis by Kantar Media/CMAG, which reports that they are spending far more than the actual campaigns because they do not get the same discounted rates from stations that candidates get. Winning Our Future is heavily in the mix, having received a $5 million commitment from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

Mr. Gingrich’s comments on Friday came after a host of news reports disputed the film’s accuracy, including The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column, which gave it the worst possible rating of “Four Pinocchios.”

The video, “King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” is riddled with inaccuracies, half-truths and omissions, according to a review of corporate documents and interviews with industry analysts.

The film is a political screed in the classic sense, a digital prosecution against Mr. Romney as a “corporate raider” whose business was “killing jobs for big financial rewards.” Over forbidding music, the baritone announcer says, “Nothing was spared; nothing mattered but greed.”

But Mr. Romney was not counted among the infamous corporate raiders of the 1980s, like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. While his claim on the campaign trail to have created a net 100,000 jobs has come under question, and many did lose jobs because of Bain’s dealings, Mr. Romney’s tenure there was not marked by the wholesale liquidation of businesses that the film suggests.

“They are not pillagers,” Steven N. Kaplan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago, said of Bain. “They were operational engineers.” If anything, he said, Bain Capital stood out from its rivals in the 1980s and 1990s for eschewing quick-fix financial wizardry that drained companies of assets. Instead, it favored building teams of experienced industry experts who could turn companies around.Yet in the first detailed case it presents, the film blames Mr. Romney for the personal pain caused by a washing machine plant closing in Florida. But that closing took place several years after Mr. Romney left Bain — and after Bain had sold the business, which it had bought from Raytheon, to the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan.

A woman interviewed in the film asserts unchallenged that Mr. Romney has 15 homes; he has 3.

The film also suggests that “Romney and Bain” greedily extracted tens of millions of dollars from KB Toys, tipping the retailer into bankruptcy, leading to 15,000 layoffs and driving the 80-year-old chain out of business. But Mr. Romney had retired from Bain Capital in early 1999, about a year before the firm purchased KB Toys, making the movie’s claims that Mr. Romney “bought” the chain incorrect.

The film strongly suggests that KB’s 2004 bankruptcy was caused by “staggering” debt created by Bain, which as the chain’s owner gave itself a hefty payout with borrowed money.

But that is an oversimplification. While the borrowing did hurt KB’s finances, the chain had been struggling for years and ultimately fell victim to a vicious price war in 2003 between discount chains like Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us, which began selling toys at below cost. KB called this “the single overwhelming factor” that undermined its business in a bankruptcy filing.

To further build the case that Bain had misbehaved, the film says that the firm’s profit from the KB deal “was described by The Boston Herald as disgusting,” leaving the impression that the newspaper had run an editorial that was critical of the transaction.

In fact, it did not. The Herald ran a news article that quoted a laid-off KB employee calling Bain’s profit from the investment “disgusting,” a distinction that the movie deliberately masks to give a single employee’s assertion greater authority.

The movie provides little, if any, information about the companies and their fate beyond a few facts and figures. But what it leaves out is at times crucial to seeing the long-term impact of Bain’s actions.

Israelis Facing a Seismic Rift Over Role of Women

JERUSALEM — In the three months since the Israeli Health Ministry awarded a prize to a pediatrics professor for her book on hereditary diseases common to Jews, her experience at the awards ceremony has become a rallying cry.

The professor, Channa Maayan, knew that the acting health minister, who is ultra-Orthodox, and other religious people would be in attendance. So she wore a long-sleeve top and a long skirt. But that was hardly enough.

Not only did Dr. Maayan and her husband have to sit separately, as men and women were segregated at the event, but she was instructed that a male colleague would have to accept the award for her because women were not permitted on stage.

Though shocked that this was happening at a government ceremony, Dr. Maayan bit her tongue. But others have not, and her story is entering the pantheon of secular anger building as a battle rages in Israel for control of the public space between the strictly religious and everyone else.

At a time when there is no progress on the Palestiniandispute, Israelis are turning inward and discovering that an issue they had neglected — the place of the ultra-Orthodox Jews — has erupted into a crisis.

And it is centered on women.

“Just as secular nationalism and socialism posed challenges to the religious establishment a century ago, today the issue is feminism,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University. “This is an immense ideological and moral challenge that touches at the core of life, and just as it is affecting the Islamic world, it is the main issue that the rabbis are losing sleep over.”

The list of controversies grows weekly: Organizers of a conference last week on women’s health and Jewish law barred women from speaking from the podium, leading at least eight speakers to cancel; ultra-Orthodox men spit on an 8-year-old girl whom they deemed immodestly dressed; the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform; protesters depicted the Jerusalem police commander as Hitler on posters because he instructed public bus lines with mixed-sex seating to drive through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods; vandals blacked out women’s faces on Jerusalem billboards.

Public discourse in Israel is suddenly dominated by a new, high-toned Hebrew phrase, “hadarat nashim,” or the exclusion of women. The term is everywhere in recent weeks, rather like the way the phrase “male chauvinism” emerged decades ago in the United States.

All of this seems anomalous to most people in a country where five young women just graduated from the air force’s prestigious pilots course and a woman presides over the Supreme Court.

But each side in this dispute is waging a vigorous public campaign.

The New Israel Fund, which advocates for equality and democracy, organized singalongs and concerts featuring women in Jerusalem and put up posters of women’s faces under the slogan, “Women should be seen and heard.” The Israel Medical Association asserted last week that its members should boycott events that exclude women from speaking on stages.

Religious authorities said liberal groups were waging a war of hatred against a pious sector that wanted only to be left in peace.

That sector, the black-clad ultra-Orthodox, is known in Israel as Haredim, meaning those who tremble before God. It comprises many groups with distinct approaches to liturgy as well as to coat length, hat style, beard and side locks and different hair coverings for women. Among them are the Hasidim of European origin as well as those from Middle Eastern countries who are represented by the political party Shas.

As a group, the ultra-Orthodox are, at best, ambivalent about the Israeli state, which they consider insufficiently religious and premature in its founding because the Messiah has not yet arrived. Over the decades the Haredim angrily demonstrated against state practices like allowing buses to run on the Sabbath, and most believed the state would not survive.

The feeling was mutual. The original Haredi communities in Europe were decimated in the Holocaust, and when Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, offered subsidies and army exemptions to the few in Israel then, he thought he was providing the group with a dignified funeral.

“Most Israelis at the time assumed the Haredim would die off in one generation,” said Jonathan Rosenblum, a Haredi writer.

Instead, they have multiplied, joined government coalitions and won subsidies and exemptions for children, housing and Torah study. They now number a million, a mostly poor community in an otherwise fairly well-off country of 7.8 million.

They have generally stayed out of the normal Israeli politics of war and peace, often staying neutral on the Palestinian question and focusing their deal-making on the material and spiritual needs of their constituents. Politically they have edged rightward in recent years.

In other words, while rejecting the state, the ultra-Orthodox have survived by making deals with it. And while dismissing the group, successive governments — whether run by the left or the right — have survived by trading subsidies for its votes. Now each has to live with the other, and the resulting friction is hard to contain.

“The coexistence between the two is breaking down,” said Arye Carmon, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem research organization. “It is an extreme danger.”

Mr. Carmon compared the strictly religious Jews of Israel to the Islamists in the Arab world, saying that there was a similar dynamic at play in Egypt, with tensions growing between the secular forces that led the revolution and the Islamic parties now rising to prominence.

“Today there is not a city without a Haredi community,” said Rabbi Abraham Israel Gellis, a 10th-generation Jerusalem Haredi rabbi, as he sat in his home, an enormous yeshiva on a hill outside his window. “I have 38 grandchildren and they live all over the country.”

But while the community has gained increased economic might — there is a growing market catering to its needs — what is lacking is economic productivity. The community places Torah study above all other values and has worked assiduously to make it possible for its men to do that rather than work. While the women often work, there is a 60 percent unemployment rate among the men, who also generally do not serve in the army.

It is this combination — accepting government subsidies, refusing military service and declining to work, all while having six to eight children per family — that is unsettling for many Israelis, especially when citizens feel economically insecure and mistreated by the government.

“The Haredi issue is a force flowing underground, like lava, and it could explode,” Shelly Yacimovich, a member of the Israeli Parliament, and leader of the Labor Party, said in an interview. “That’s why it must be dealt with wisely, helping them to join modern society through work.”

While change has begun — thousands of Haredi men are learning professions, more are getting jobs and a small number have joined the Israeli Army — the community is in crisis. Many ultra-Orthodox leaders feel threatened by the integration into the broader society by some of their followers, and they are desperately holding on to their power.

“We have to earn a living,” said Rabbi Shmuel Pappenheim, a reformist Haredi leader from the town of Beit Shemesh. “We are a million people with a million problems. The rabbis can shout a thousand times against it but it won’t help them. And so we have the extremism — on both sides.”

Dan Ben-David, executive director of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, said fertility rates in the Haredi community made the issue especially acute; the very religious Jews are the only group in Israel having more children today than 30 years ago.

“They make up more than 20 percent of all kids in primary schools,” he said. “In 20 years, there is a risk we will have a third-world population here which can’t sustain a first-world economy and army.”

And, Mr. Ben-David added, what children learn in the ultra-Orthodox school system — largely unregulated by the state as a result of political deals — is unsuited for the 21st century, so even those who wish to work are finding it hard to find jobs.

“Their schools do not give them the skills to work in a modern economy and no training in civil or human rights or democracy,” Mr. Ben-David said. “They don’t even know what we are talking about — what we want from them — when we talk about discrimination against women.”

The Haredi community thinks this is a wild misunderstanding of its views.

Rabbi Dror Moshe Cassouto, a 33-year-old Hasid, lives with his wife and four sons in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim, one of the centers of Haredi life in Israel. He never looks directly at a woman, other than his wife, and he believes that men and women have roles in nature that in modern society have been reversed, “because we live in darkness.”

His goal is to spread the light. “God watches over the Jewish nation as long as it studies Torah,” he said.

Still, the spitting and Nazi talk horrify him. He says hard-liners have caused harm to the Haredim.

Asked about the recent troubles, Rabbi Cassouto shook his head and said, “A fool throws a stone into a well and 1,000 sages can’t remove it.”