On September 11, 2001, Harold Ramis was in a car making its way through the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn — the heart of the Satmar Hasidic community — watching as people covered in ash from the just-fallen Twin Towers came streaming over the bridges from Lower Manhattan. “We got to Williamsburg, and the Hasidim were…
This blog breaks two golden rules of mine: first not promoting adverts and second not enjoying anything Jewish that includes the line “Oy Vey!” But, I’ll go with the minhag of my friend’s dad for whom all women are Jewish beyond a certain level of beauty. In this case, all videos are kosher beyond a…
A mark of the strangeness of the film “In a Dream” is that the dramatic revelation of Isaiah Zagar’s sexual abuse as a child is almost immediately forgotten in our journey through the roiling psychic storm that is his mind. For make no mistake, although this follows a family (filmed from the inside by his…
Filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky’s “Oy Vey, My Son Is Gay,” slated to be released this fall, offers the exact story line that the title suggests: overbearing Jewish mother from Long Island (Lainie Kazan) hurls eligible Jewish bachelorettes at her nice, but (no-so-secretly) gay son, Nelson (John Lloyd Young). But Nelson is already in a relationship — with…
Not to be too self-referential (as if there’s any such thing), but I’d just like to point out that in my recent paean to Adam Sandler’s (goyish) wit and (Jewish) wisdom, I rendered the following verdict: “‘You Don’t Mess With the Zohan’ is a stupid movie; I couldn’t stop laughing.” Now, I’m happy to report,…
Minneapolis’s Star-Tribune reports that native sons made good (filmmakers), the Coen brothers, are holding a casting call at the JCC in their hometown of St. Louis Park: Their new film “A Serious Man,” about a Midwestern Jewish family in the late 1960s, will hold an open casting call to fill those roles with performers from…
Israeli news site Y-Net reports that Woody Allen is expected to go to to the Israeli Red Sea resort town of Eilat for its film festival. The thought of the consummate New York nebbish in Eilat brings to mind that scene in “”Annie Hall” of a very uncomfortable Woody Allen in sunny Southern California. I…
American Apparel is apologizing to Woody Allen after he filed a $10 million lawsuit against the trendy T-shirt monger for its unauthorized use of an image of him dressed in Hasidic garb on a pair of billboards. “We deeply admire Woody Allen as a filmmaker and an inspiring social and political satirist,” the company said…
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…
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