The holy rebbe is pissed. Last spring, trendy underwear maker American Apparel, known for its sexually charged advertising, put up a pair of billboard ads that were unusually tame. The billboards, in Los Angeles and New York, featured an image of Woody Allen dressed as a Hasidic Jew from his masterpiece Annie Hall, alongside Yiddish…
Oded Turgeman, director of the new short film “Song of David,” doesn’t do things the easy way. As a burgeoning film director, he applied to Jerusalem’s most prestigious film school, with a commander in a combat unit as his only prior life experience. Then he moved to America to attend the American Film Institute —the…
The New York Post’s Page Six features these two celebrity quotes today: “”YES, I have always loved a good blonde, and who wouldn’t?” — Mel Brooks “PART of the bar mitzvah is that you become a man supposedly at 13 years old. And as I was a man, I decided never to go to a…
Natalie Portman speaks at length with the Times of London about a variety of topics, including her dating patterns, why being an only child made her career possible and why Stephen Fry was her all-time favorite co-star. She also touched on her Jewish identity. Asked whether her ethnic background has been a stabilizing influence, she…
Entertainment Weekly reports: Larry David, the mind behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, is set to be the lead in Woody Allen’s next, as-yet-untitled feature, which is scheduled to shoot in New York City in the spring. Plot details are being kept under wraps, but David will act alongside Evan Rachel Wood. E.W. notes that…
The Academy Awards have been announced and two films with Jewish content received nods in the foreign-language category: “Beaufort” http://www.kino.com/beaufort/], a film about Israeli soldiers in Southern Lebanon by Israeli director Joseph Cedar, and the upcoming release “The Counterfeiters” based on the true story of Salomon Sorowitsch, known as “Hitler’s Jewish counterfeiter.” We previewed the…
Have a look here at the trailer for “Defiance,” Ed Zwick’s take on the story of the Bielski brothers, who organized what is widely considered to have been the largest group of Jewish partisans during World War II. The movie stars Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber, among others, and is set for release in late…
For the past half-decade, New York City has been consumed by a frenzy of greed. A whirlwind of out-of-context development, anarchic “architecture” and a virus-like proliferation of chain stores that has ravaged the cityscape. Property owners, not satisfied with rents and property values that have already soared into the stratosphere, instead are all too often…
So the Anti-Defamation League has finally weighed in on L’Affaire Will Smith, and, I have to say, its statement is a little disappointing. To recap: Will Smith, speaking off the cuff to a Scottish newspaper, suggested — quite reasonably — that Hitler was driven by a “twisted” notion of what he thought was “good.” The…
In October, it was Halle Berry. She found herself in the celebrity hot seat, apologizing profusely following an innocent, if clumsy, remark that only the most hysterical among us would view as evidence of antisemitism. This month, apparently, it’s Will Smith’s turn. In a rambling interview published in Scotland’s Daily Record, Smith was quoted as…
Will we be seeing much more of Borat, Sacha Caron Cohen’s uproariously un-P.C. Kazakh journalist character? It seems unlikely, judging from an interview that Baron Cohen gave to The Daily Telegraph. “When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so…
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