July 29, 2020
(JTA) — Marc Maron warned listeners at the beginning of the latest episode of his “WTF” podcast on Monday: “If you don’t like Jews, you’re gonna get triggered.”
It was a fair disclaimer, given that his hour-long conversation with Seth Rogen touched on just about every general aspect of modern Jewish identity, from Jewish summer camp to cultural Jewishness to sitting shiva.
But a second warning came part of the...
July 25, 2020
(JTA) — The influential British rapper Wiley posted a series of anti-Semitic messages on Twitter on Friday, spurring a wave of outrage and prompting his Jewish manager to cease representing him.
Among his comments were “I don’t care about Hitler, I care about black people” and “There are 2 sets of people who nobody has really wanted to challenge #Jewish & #KKK but being in business for 20 years you...
July 18, 2020
(JTA) — Actor and television host Nick Cannon offered his “most deepest and sincere apologies” to the Jewish community for the “hurtful and divisive words” he used in an episode of his podcast.
“They reinforced the worst stereotypes of a proud and magnificent people and I feel ashamed of the uninformed and naïve place that these words came from,” he said in a tweet on Wednesday night.
First...
July 17, 2020
(JTA) — Jennifer Grey, the Jewish actress who starred in the original “Dirty Dancing” film, is collaborating with Lionsgate on an untitled dance movie in which she will star and executive produce, Deadline first reported Tuesday.
Lionsgate holds distribution rights to the original “Dirty Dancing” films, which include the 2004 prequel “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.” The company has not commented on the project.
Grey, the daughter of actor Joel Grey, has...
July 16, 2020
By ARIELLE KAPLAN
Printed in black and white and bigotry all over, Nazi official Hans Severus Ziegler’s brochure for his public exhibit in Dusseldorf featured an African American jazz musician with a Star of David on his lapel. Designed to ridicule and belittle Jewish musicians for performing “Negro music” as another tactic to contaminate German culture, “Entartete Musik” (“Degenerate Music”) opened in May, 1938 — just four months before Kristallnacht.
...
July 12, 2020
The latest film from a production company behind a string of low-budget horror hits centers on a terrifying night spent carrying out an important Jewish burial ritual.
“The Vigil,” out in the United States in August, is about a formerly observant Jew who is recruited to stand guard over the body of a Holocaust survivor who dies in Brooklyn’s Hasidic Borough Park neighborhood. (Jewish law requires bodies to be accompanied...
July 09, 2020
By CURT SCHLEIER
(JTA) — In a recently released Netflix film, Broadway star Ben Platt shared his coming out story — and it involves a trip to Israel.
He shared the vignette from “Ben Platt: Live from Radio City Music Hall,” which debuted in May, in a clip on his Twitter account on Monday.
loved sharing my queer story in my concert on @netflix (you might even call...
July 03, 2020
By MARC BRODSKY
(JTA) — With the passing this week of Carl Reiner, we lost one of the comedy greats, Jewish or otherwise. His obituary recalled a show business career that dated to the infancy of television in the 1950s.
Reiner gained success starting in his late 20s as a writer and performer on “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour,” sketch comedies that one might broadly consider precursors to...
June 30, 2020
(JTA) – Until the last day of his life, Carl Reiner was tweeting about some of his favorite topics: politics, comedy and the twists and turns he experienced over decades as one of the world’s greatest living funnymen.
Reiner died Monday at 98, hours after reiterating his dismay that Donald Trump had become president, days after posing with his daughter Annie and longtime friend Mel Brooks in Black Lives Matter shirts and 70...
June 26, 2020
(JTA) — The Jewish Haim sisters are back with a third album of pop rock, titled “Women in Music Pt. III,” and the reviews are glowing.
The Wall Street Journal called the production “brilliant.” The Independent said it was “fearless and effervescent.” And Pitchfork described it as “Intimate, multidimensional, and wide-ranging,” and “far and away their best work.”
To celebrate the release, the trio is streaming a live concert at...
