‘Centered’: A new documentary, to screen locally, profiles Senator Joe Lieberman
By current standards, Joe Lieberman wasn’t just an anachronism. He was a dinosaur.
As shown in a lovingly crafted and deservedly complimentary documentary, “Centered: Joe Lieberman,” the long-serving senator from Connecticut always put country above politics — even when it threatened his job.
That alone makes this a revelatory and important film, because it serves as a reminder of the dissonance between the way government operated then and, sadly, now.
It’s important, too, because when he was chosen as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, Lieberman became the first Jew on a major party national ticket. Given the antisemitism raging today, that seems not just like a different time, but a different geological era.
The film covers all the bases. Lieberman’s time at Yale (undergraduate and law school), his first marriage (to Betty Haas, from 1965 to 1981), his second, to Hadassah (from 1982 until his death last March), his three children, and his early campaigns for local office. (Bill Clinton, then a Yale law student, was a Lieberman volunteer).
While he generally aligned himself with Democratic proposals — he worked to repeal the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy and cast a pivotal vote for the Affordable Care Act, after fighting to eliminate the public option — he also crossed party lines to work with Republican colleagues to support the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
He ran afoul of fellow Democrats on a number of issues, including his support of both Iraq wars. Party faithful primaried him (does that sound familiar now?), putting up Ned Lamont, a wealthy antiwar candidate who defeated Lieberman in the primary but lost to him in the general election. Lamont is now the governor of Connecticut.
Lieberman was true to his beliefs, not his party, so much so that he endorsed Republican John McCain’s run for the presidency against Barack Obama. In fact, Lieberman reportedly was McCain’s first choice for running mate, but was ultimately rejected for fear that his support of a woman’s right to choose would alienate conservative voters. (McCain then selected Sarah Palin, and we all know how that went.)
I spoke to the film’s director, Jonathan Gruber, 56, on Zoom; he was in Atlanta, where he was showing the film at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. Although he does many other things — projects that have aired on National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and PBS — Mr. Gruber made several noteworthy Jewish films before “Centered,” including “Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray” (2011, about the Civil War), “Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story” (2012), and “Upheaval: The Journey of Menachem Begin” (2021).
“Centered” came about after a friend told Mr. Gruber a story of a relationship he witnessed in Joe Lieberman’s home:
His friend “was in the kitchen with the Secret Service detail protecting Joe and Hadassah when Joe was Al Gore’s running mate. Apparently, the Secret Service had a love affair with Joe and Hadassah. They were always making sure the Secret Service was well fed and asking, ‘Are you being taken care of?’
“Something just clicked. I thought what a great story inside a bigger story, which is that this person was dedicated to what he thought was right and believed you could be civil and disagree without being disagreeable. In the polarized political world we have today, I thought it was an important story to tell.
“I think his values are so important to portray to people today, about leaders, leadership, and faith.”
Mr. Lieberman, of course, was observant, and in one of the first scenes he dons a tallit.
Mr. Gruber interviewed Mr. Lieberman for his Menachem Begin story, so he had access to the by-now-retired senator. He didn’t want to do it at first,” Mr. Gruber said. “But we convinced him.” Lieberman sat for seven hours of interviews over two days, a month apart. He also visited Yale with Mr. Gruber and arranged to film a roundtable with the group of long-time supporters that Mr. Gruber calls the Connecticut Cronies.
The interviews took place in the summer of 2023. Mr. Gruber presented a nearly completed version of the film to Mr. Lieberman in March 2024. “He looked at it and said, ‘I like it. It’s a great legacy for my public service.’ He died six days later.”
Like his subject, Mr. Gruber is a man of faith — traditional is how he puts it. He grew up on the Lower East Side and lived briefly in West Orange, where he was a bar mitzvah at Ahawas Achim B’nai Jacob and David.
His original goal was to be a TV journalist, so he majored in broadcast journalism at Syracuse University. “But my first project after graduation was about my grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor, and her first trip back to Poland after World War II. She led 200 students on an offshoot of March of the Living. That (“Pola’s March”) was my first film, 30 years ago. Joe Lieberman was my eighth film. So thank God, I’ve had a career doing this sort of thing.
“I tried to get a TV news reporter’s job, but I’m grateful I did not because being on camera and telling stories in two minutes is not what I really wanted. What I wanted was to tell longer-form stories and not be on camera, and that was all triggered by that first story about my grandmother.”
The film will be shown the afternoon and evening of March 18 and 19 at Regal Cinemas in Nanuet, Secaucus, and New Brunswick, followed by a week-long release in theaters around the country.
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