May 07, 2021
By GABE FRIEDMAN
(JTA) — Oscar-nominated actor Lakeith Stanfield co-moderated a room on the audio app Clubhouse in which participants made a slew of anti-Semitic remarks, The Daily Beast reported Friday.
The room in question had split off from another one on that was shut down on Wednesday night titled “Did Min. Farrakhan Tarnish His Legacy By Being Anti-Semitic?” The subsequent one was titled “Someone Ended The Room About Farrakhan.”
...
April 29, 2021
By SHIRA HANAU
(JTA) — An Oscar-winning documentary about the experience of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust that was produced by Steven Spielberg will be made available for streaming on Netflix.
“The Last Days” will be remastered from the original 35- millimeter film before its streaming release on May 19.
The documentary, which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1998, tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews...
April 26, 2021
By GABE FRIEDMAN
(JTA) — Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin never thought he had family members who died in the Holocaust. The team behind “Finding Your Roots,” the long-running PBS celebrity genealogy show, proved he was mistaken.
In his episode airing Tuesday night, Patinkin learns that he has family who were rounded up in Bransk, a town in northeastern Poland, and sent to the Treblinka concentration camp.
As he reads out...
April 26, 2021
By GABE FRIEDMAN
(JTA) — It was an unusual Academy Awards in several ways.
Forced to adapt to social distancing protocols, the ceremony was split into different venues but mostly took place in Los Angeles’ Union Station. For only the second time in history, a woman won best director — and the first woman of color at that, as the award went to Chloe Zhao for “Nomadland,” which also won...
April 25, 2021
By PHILISSA CRAMER
(JTA) — Comedian Billy Crystal and actress Tiffany Haddish are so close that Crystal read a Torah portion at Haddish’s 2019 bat mitzvah ceremony in Los Angeles.
Now the two Jewish celebrities are taking their friendship to the big screen in a buddy comedy called “Here Today.” The first trailer for the movie, out May 7, was released Thursday, and it includes a shot of Crystal and...
April 24, 2021
By STEVEN SILVER
(JTA) — “Miss,” a short film that debuted on Vimeo on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, at first seems like a British version of Lena Dunham’s “Girls”: Two young female roommates, Nina and Olive, share a London flat and appear to have something of an uneasy relationship.
Nina tells Olive that she wants to compete in an online beauty pageant and would like her photographer roommate to...
April 13, 2021
By DAVID SCHECHTER
ATLANTA (JTA) — To the end of his life, the civil rights hero and later congressman John Lewis remembered the half-mile walk from his family’s farm in rural Pike County, Alabama, to the Dunn’s Chapel School.
There was no school bus for Black children; Lewis’ hike was short compared with the miles walked by many of his classmates. They were being educated in surroundings separate from whites,...
April 09, 2021
By BEN SALES
(JTA) — Tucker Carlson, a popular Fox News host, defended a white supremacist conspiracy theory on the cable network, spurring the head of the Anti-Defamation League to tweet “Tucker Must Go” and send a letter to Fox News saying he should be fired.
Appearing Thursday on “Fox News Primetime,” Carlson said Democrats are coordinating a “replacement” of current U.S. voters with immigrants from the “Third World.”
“I...
April 06, 2021
By GABE FRIEDMAN
(JTA) — It’s a Meir moment.
Academy Award winner Helen Mirren will portray Golda Meir, Israel’s only female prime minister, in an upcoming biopic set during the Yom Kippur War.
Production on “Golda” will begin later this year, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The news follows the announcement last month of another star-powered production on Meir, a series titled “Lioness” led by Israeli actress Shira Haas of “Unorthodox”...
March 30, 2021
By STEPHEN SILVER
(JTA) — PBS has decided to postpone airing the documentary “Til Kingdom Come,” which examines the close relationship between American evangelicals and Israel, in the light of accusations that the film misleadingly spliced together two separate parts of a speech by former President Donald Trump.
The film, which was directed by the Russian-Israeli documentary filmmaker Maya Zinshtein, was released as a rental for in-home viewing in late...
