Claude Lanzmann, the French Jewish journalist, author, and filmmaker who died on July 5 at age 92, was not a believer in the proverb “live and let live.” As he explained in his memoir “The Patagonian Hare,” his celebrated film “Shoah” (1985) required aggressively pursuing Nazi murderers to demand explanations of their crimes. Fortunately, Lanzmann…
I am a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, where I am currently working on a monograph about the very first Jewish female comedian, Jean Carroll — which is an academic way of saying that I am very, very invested in the actual Jewish, female pioneer of stand-up. I wasn’t sure that “Mrs. Maisel” would do…
(JTA) — Actress Roseanne Barr became emotional and expressed regret for her tweet against a former Obama administration official during a podcast interview with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. The interview took place two days after ABC canceled her popular show, a reboot of her late 1980s sitcom, over the tweet mocking Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser…
A confession: I, due to an unexplained resistance to seeing the “Jurassic Park” movies, was until this year unaware of the existence of Jeff Goldblum. This was a mistake. Jeff Goldblum, I have learned, is the closest thing Hollywood has to a human sunbeam — see “Thor: Ragnarok,” in which he plays a dictator with…
Richard Adams never intended his 1972 novel, “Watership Down,” to be an allegory. And a book about a group of rabbits certainly doesn’t have a Jewish ring to it. Chocolate versions of them are eaten to celebrate Easter. They aren’t even kosher animals — despite the fact that they chew the cud, they don’t have…
Oprah gave a pitch-perfect commencement speech at my school’s graduation, a mix of motivation (“Be the truth. Be. The. Truth.”) and motivation shtick (“Invest in a quality mattress. And don’t cheap out on your shoes.”). The exhortation that won the biggest rise from the thousand USC Annenberg students: “Vote. Vote. Vote.” Their cheers almost made…
Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood By J. E. Smyth Oxford University Press, 328 pages, $29.95 Just the Funny Parts: … And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking Into the Hollywood Boys’ Club By Nell Scovell Dey Street Books, 336 pages, $27.99 It’s even worse than you suspected. But it was once better…
One of the most iconic moments from Leon Vitali’s career in movies – which began in acting and evolved to encompass an expansive range of activities working as what might with a good degree of understatement be described as an “assistant” for legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick — came as he was masked and anonymous. During…
The year of Leonard Bernstein’s centenary, already widely celebrated, just got even better: Jake Gyllenhaal, your Serious Jewish Actor crush, is going to play Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic. As Deadline reports, Gyllenhaal will produce and star in “The American,” which will begin filming this coming fall from a screenplay by Michael Mitnick, adapted from…
Olivier Assayas’s 1994 film “Cold Water” was a coming of age film in more ways than one. A teen romance set in the heady aftermath of Paris’s May ’68 uprising, the film showcases adolescent angst, romance, and the friction that accompanies the first encounters with something larger than oneself. For Assayas, it also represents, “The…
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — 1993 was a dramatic year in the memorialization of the Holocaust. In April, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors; 45 million visitors later it is a fixture adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., not only telling the story of the Holocaust but demonstrating the ongoing significance of…
