Joe Biden Attends Shiva To Pay Tribute To Norman Lear
09.12.2023 - 22:25
/ deadline.com
President Joe Biden, on a West Coast fundraising swing, attended a shiva to mourn Norman Lear, who died this week at age 101.
Biden attended the shiva at the Lear residence, according to Reuters.
The president and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a longtime friend of Lear’s, also paid tribute to him at a Hollywood-centric fundraiser for the Biden-Harris reelection campaign.
The president paid tribute to Lear as a “transformational force in American culture,” and also noted his decades of political advocacy, saying that he “fought directly for free speech, a woman’s right to choose, the environment, voting rights, and more.”
Lear’s political impact went well beyond the influence of his shows. In the early 1980s, he founded People for the American Way, an advocacy group that countered the emerging power of the religious rights. The organization has been part of some major political battles, including the opposition to the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.
Biden was attending private fundraising gatherings with high dollar donors through the day on Saturday and is scheduled to headline an event with First Lady Jill Biden on Saturday evening.
On Saturday afternoon, the first lady attended a fundraiser at NeueHouse Hollywood hosted by Matthew Crowley and Martha Leon De La Barra. Actress Connie Britton introduced her, per a pool report, and she also did a Q&A with actress Elizabeth Banks.
The first lady said, per the pool report, “I wish that this election were about simple policy differences. I wish it were about differences of character or merit. But fundamentally, what this election is about is democracy.”
“We are the party defending it, not the one tearing it at its seams….We are the party