September 23, 2020
(JTA) — Actress, director and Academy Award winner Natalie Portman can add another title to her resume: children’s book author.
The Israeli-American movie star rewrote three classic children’s stories — “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Three Little Pigs” and “Country Mouse and City Mouse” — to be more “gender-safe,” in her words, with fewer male pronouns and more gender diversity.
She wrote about the thinking behind the project in...
September 21, 2020
By EMILY BURACK
(JTA) — “Schitt’s Creek,” the show co-created by the father-and-son duo Eugene and Dan Levy, swept the Emmy Awards on Sunday night.
The beloved series won every comedy category for its sixth and final season, and the younger Levy alone won four awards.
This year’s Emmys ceremony was broadcast live, but from nearly 100 streams in different locations across the country. Yet in the first hour of the...
September 15, 2020
(JTA) — Actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen said he will not post to his Instagram account on Wednesday in protest of parent company Facebook’s failure to fight hate.
Cohen made the announcement in support of the Week of Action organized by the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, which was spearheaded over the summer by the Anti-Defamation League, NAACP and several other civil rights groups. The groups are protesting Facebook’s unwillingness...
August 31, 2020
By ALAN SMASON
A theatre reviewer in a pandemic? Sounds crazy, no? But here in New Orleans with no shows to see, I’ve become more than that. I’ve assumed new roles as a director, a stage manager and in the grand tradition of Bialystock and Bloom, a producer.
How all of this intersected with the story of two long-dead, reclusive New Orleans Jewish sisters is an even more incredible tale....
August 28, 2020
“Harbor from the Holocaust” shares the story of 20,000 Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II to the city of Shanghai.
A production of WQED, the one-hour film explores the extraordinary relationship the refugees, known as “Shanghailanders,” had with their adopted city through the bitter years of the Japanese occupation from 1937 to 1945 and the bitter Chinese civil war that followed....
August 07, 2020
By LIOR ZALTZMAN
(JTA) — Seth Rogen’s “An American Pickle” is one of the most Jewish Hollywood films ever.
In it, Rogen plays two Jewish family members separated by a century: Ben Greenbaum, a young app developer who lives in Brooklyn, and Herschel Greenbaum, his great-grandfather from the old country who falls into a vat of pickles and stays perfectly preserved in brine for 100 years. Call it a pickle...
August 07, 2020
(JTA) — It’s official: A “Dirty Dancing” sequel is coming, and it’s starring Jewish actress Jennifer Grey, who played Frances “Baby” Houseman in the 1987 original.
Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer confirmed the news to Deadline on Thursday, while keeping the plot secret.
“It will be exactly the kind of romantic, nostalgic movie that the franchise’s fans have been waiting for and that have made it the biggest-selling library title in...
August 06, 2020
(JTA) — YouTube is the latest media platform to remove Wiley over what it termed the British rapper’s “repeated violations.”
The decision to remove his channel comes after pressure by groups in the United Kingdom, including the Campaign Against Antisemitism.
Wiley was removed late last month from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram following a series of tweets widely regarded as anti-Semitic and other social media posts.
Last week YouTube, which is...
August 05, 2020
(JTA) — British Jewish actor Jason Isaacs opened up about his longtime struggle with drug addiction to the British magazine The Big Issue on Monday, saying he first got drunk at age 12 and “by the age of 16 I’d already passed through drink and was getting started on a decades long love affair with drugs.”
“Every action was filtered through a burning need I had for being as far from a...
July 31, 2020
By PENINA BEEDE
(JTA) — The afterlife is not a major point of discussion in Jewish thought. Religious Jewish texts focus on the life one leads in this world — not the next one.
As Rabbi Hertzel Fishman, for example, has observed: “Mitzvot [commandments] are not magic, they do not help God nor do they earn us rewards, but they are valuable for the way in which they improve our...
