Share

Joshua Kushner, the prodigal son of the Kushner family (in the sense that ‘prodigal’ means loosely liberal) the founder of Oscar Health insurance, the man who some see as a modern-day-Moses figure, is currently cavorting around Israel (in the sense that ‘cavorting’ means ‘taking spectacular photos for Instagram’.)

A proposal seems imminent. A conversion of the non-Kosher Karlie — probable. And an ethical breakthrough by a man whose heart is being used as rope in a game of tug-of-war between family and patriotism…well, who knows. The holy land has helped people through other such breakthroughs before. Kushner and Kloss have been dating for five extremely photogenic years though Kloss, an enthusiastic feminist and avowed Clinton-supporter who recently, with Kushner, gave to gun violence prevention causes, seems less likely to tow the party line than her counterpart, Ivanka.

Let’s take a look at the posts Kushner, the 32 year-old businessman, and Kloss, the 25 year old model and social entrepreneur, have posted to social media about their trip through Israel.

On Friday, Kushner posted a photo of an alleyway in Jerusalem. It is a characteristic Kushner post that makes one wonder if Kushner is a sensitive thinker outside of his time or merely a humanoid robot who will be content to watch the world burn.

A post shared by Joshua Kushner (@joshuakushner) on Apr 20, 2018 at 4:34am PDT

He followed it two days later with another picture of a stranger that begs the question: Did Joshua Kushner ask that stranger’s permission to take her photograph and post it on a highly trafficked webpage? Is Joshua Kushner ever going to save the world, or is he just going to keep taking these pictures?

A post shared by Joshua Kushner (@joshuakushner) on Apr 22, 2018 at 1:13am PDT

That same day, Kloss uploaded a picture of herself floating in the Dead Sea, which she confusingly referred to as “the lowest place on dry land.”

Feeling especially connected to this big beautiful 🌍 on #EarthDay. Floating in the Dead Sea, the lowest point on dry land!

A post shared by Karlie Kloss (@karliekloss) on Apr 22, 2018 at 12:58pm PDT

She then posted a windswept selfie with the old city of Jerusalem as a backdrop, creating a lovely, eerie juxtaposition between her golden features and the comment-war about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict the picture provoked.

💙

A post shared by Karlie Kloss (@karliekloss) on Apr 22, 2018 at 7:49pm PDT

And the pièce de résistance — Kloss, in front of the colors of the Israeli flag, dressed to match, inside what just might be a very, very fancy mikveh.

sunday in 🇮🇱

A post shared by Joshua Kushner (@joshuakushner) on Apr 22, 2018 at 1:28pm PDT

Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at Singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Share

Ever wanted to call someone a “leftist s***head” right to their face?

Aviva Zimmerman has.

Well — her satirical alter-ego “Avi” of “Avi Does The Holy Land,” has. In brand new episodes the very funny, slightly raunchy web series, Zimmerman interrogates Israeli-American relations in brief aggressive interviews.

First up: “celebrated lefty sh*$-head authors” Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, the married couple who produced the anthology “Kingdom Of Olives And Ash,” criticizing the Israeli occupation. “Jewish people love reading your books. Why would you betray your fanbase?” she asks. Chabon and Waldman, who do in fact usually come off in interviews as insufferably choked by white-guilt, fare well under Zimmerman’s icy gaze.

In a second interview with “notorious bellyaching lefty s***head slash self-hating Jew” Simone Zimmerman, Avi vows “to find out how we can better isolate these haters from their communities and force them to change their minds,” an uncanny take-down of the way Simone Zimmerman really has been treated.

You can delight in more of “Canadian Jewess” Avi’s antics here or on her Facebook page.

Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at Singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Share

In ‘I Feel Pretty,’ Renee Bennett (Amy Schumer) hates herself. She hates her face and she hates her body. She hates her clothing and her job and her office. She hates her life. Then she hits her head and believes she has transformed into the form of a runway model, and every aspect of her life changes, making her happy. The changes in her life happen, of course, not because of her looks but because of her confidence. She learns this and tells others. The end.

This simple premise has elicited rage and hurt from many people, especially women.

When female fury happens en masse, we would be stupid to ignore it, discount it, or condescend to it. And complaints against the movie are legitimate — Schumer is another white woman headlining an almost entirely white movie. The movie, like most mainstream movies, has various items and ideas to sell its viewers. And it’s just not that well-written.

But there is a boiling fury, one that has shown up in reviews like in the New York Times, and Entertainment Weekly, and all across Twitter since its trailer’s release months ago. It’s something like this:

Amy Schumer, who is approximately average-sized, white, blonde, and conventionally pretty, should not see herself as ugly enough to make a movie about feeling ugly.

Essentially, Amy Schumer acting as a stand-in for ugliness and fatness elicits rage.

I had such high hopes but once again it’s the same narrative of a “bigger” girl being ugly. Implying that the only way we could be happy with ourselves is after a head injury that makes us “feel pretty” is just bullshit. 💁🏼‍♀️🙄 https://t.co/ARSXuRblpL— Destiny 🌑💫 (@fablesandfae) February 9, 2018

But in “I Feel Pretty”, Amy Schumer makes no attempt to represent beauty or ugliness, fatness or thinness. She represents women who hate themselves and their bodies.

The ugly truth is that women like Schumer, women like Schumer’s preternaturally thin co-star Emily Ratajkowski, and women like the array of millions who saw “I Feel Pretty” this weekend feel ugly all the time. And it’s not that fun to watch a movie about that.

The question critics should be asking isn’t about the legitimacy of Schumer’s claim to ugliness, it’s about Schumer’s claim to her feelings of ugliness. Sofie Hagen, a comedian whose tweets criticizing “I Feel Pretty” went viral, wrote of “I Feel Pretty,” “Who is this meant to resonate with? Before we can enjoy the premise, surely we have to buy into the fact that she is not pretty. How many of us are bigger than her? Are we supposed to accept that THIS is ugly when it’s all we’ve been taught that we should aim for?”

Hagen’s response is so raw and recognizable and painful. In fact, it issues from the same place as Schumer’s character’s pain — the pain of knowing your merit is judged every single day by your appearance, and that as much as you try not to care, those judgments have the power to affect your happiness. Renee (Schumer) and Hagen, who says she is “bigger” than Schumer, both feel ugly. Hagen feels that Schumer, whose performance as Renee feels stunningly personal, shouldn’t be publicizing the fact that she feels ugly. But the point of “I Feel Pretty” is that the enemy is not hyper-thin women or average-sized women or any woman or man at all. The enemy of women is intense beauty standards. The enemy of women is the patriarchy. It gets in the way of women’s careers, friendships, sex lives, and happiness. That is the touching, clumsily delivered, not very funny message of “I Feel Pretty.”

Once Renee (Schumer) stops worrying about her looks (albeit because she believes they’re perfect), she uses the skills she already has to finagle her dream job, a boyfriend whom she loves, and happiness. She also becomes vain, but she readjusts when she realizes that her looks haven’t changed — she achieved her goals by being herself. “I Feel Pretty” claims that if women did not feel constantly judged by their appearances they would have more time and space to feel happy and be more successful. To make that claim, the movie uses an army of skeletal models and a lot of branding for “Soul Cycle,” which is distracting. But the point, a point Amy Schumer has made in every step of her comedy career, is that all women are deeply and negatively affected by obscure beauty rules set by men. That’s worthwhile.

Fighting with each other about who gets to feel most injured by the patriarchy only delays its destruction. All anger and pain about body image and the violent consequences of beauty standards are legitimate, and the sooner we realize that self-hate is equal opportunity, the sooner we create a solution that is beautiful.

Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at Singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Share

Promise you’ll never go away again, Bette!

The 2017 Tony Award winner for the titular role in “Hello, Dolly” will return to the Broadway stage for the final weeks of the production she made a smash hit. Bette Midler, who received rave reviews last year for her portrayal of Dolly Levi opposite David Hyde Pierce, will resume her role for the final six weeks of the revival’s Broadway run. Hyde Pierce will also resume his role, replacing Victor Garber. Midler will retake the reigns from Bernadette Peters, who took over the role from Midler in April.

“Hello, Dolly!” producer Scott Rudin announced that the show will close on August 25, after playing for 17 months. The production, which also won the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival, will go on to tour the country beginning in October, with “Cats” legend Betty Buckley in the title role.

For this, the fourth Broadway revival of the 1964 production, Midler was heralded as one of the great Dolly Gallagher Levis of all time.

It will be so nice to have her back where she belongs.

via GIPHY

Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at Singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Share

It was late April 2018, and the soul of the people of Israel was stretched to the breaking point. Actress Natalie Portman, long thought of by Jews as God’s emissary here on earth, was taking a vague and confusing stance on Israel that was probably well intended but felt like the snuffing out of 1,000 neir tamids. Across the world, a man who was such a shanda for the goyim that he made Madoff look like a Hadassah vounteer, dominated headlines.

And then, as Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would probably say if he had been following the Jewish narrative, “Across my foundering deck shone A beacon / an eternal beam.”

The beacon is the news that film star Brad Pitt is dating an Israeli academic and designer named Neri Oxman.

via GIPHY

Real footage of Brad Pitt dancing with joy for the Jewish people

As it has been said since time immemorial, one who has loved Angelina Jolie simply can never love again unless one is able to access an Israeli MIT professor and renowned genius with works in the MOMA and the looks of a model.

Wow, Brad Pitt is really into Neri Oxman! https://t.co/wv5KWRi1iV— HollywoodLife (@HollywoodLife) April 20, 2018

Here’s the situation:

Brad Pitt is a true A-list star and has been the gold standard in Hollywood elite for years. He is a great actor and has been considered at times one of the most handsome men in the world. “List of awards and nominations received by Brad Pitt” is its own Wikipedia page, and Pitt has been married to Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie, and engaged to Gwyneth Paltrow.

So the only question is — can Pitt even hold a candle to Neri Oxman?

Pitt was first linked to Oxman in early April, when the two “collaborate[d] on an architectural project he was working on,” according to Page Six.

via GIPHY

I don’t know why Brad Pitt was working on an architectural project at MIT and it just doesn’t seem like the point of this story

Oxman is a 42 year-old Haifa native who studied at Israel’s Technion and completed her Phd in architecture at MIT. According to her bio, she “coined the term, and pioneered the field of, Material Ecology, which considers computation, fabrication, and the material itself as inseparable dimensions of design. In this approach, products and buildings are biologically informed and digitally engineered by, with and for, nature.”

Frankly, I am fully literate in English and I did not understand one word of what Neri Oxman has accomplished. What you need to know is that she is the professor of everything, her work is on permanent display in the MOMA, and she looks like Audrey Hepburn if Audrey Hepburn had grown up in Israel.

via GIPHY

Neri Oxman/Audrey Hepburn sweeping Brad Pitt off his feet.

Page Six originally reported that Oxman and Pitt were just “friends,” but other publications have gone on to report that the two are happily dating. “They continue to talk on the phone several times a day and are very infatuated with each other,” an anonymous source told US Weekly. People Magazine went so far as to say that Oxman could be “his Amal Clooney,” an extremely rude but nevertheless complimentary remark that suggests that Pitt and Oxman’s relationship mirrors film star George Clooney’s relationship with the immensely successful barrister Amal Clooney, who, like Oxman, hails from the Middle East.

via GIPHY

Let Amal Clooney and Neri Oxman be their own separate fabulous entities!

What to make of this “trend” (two examples) of A-list male actors dating young film stars and models before settling down with wildly accomplished women who look like models but are instead vaguely age-appropriate professionals at the top of their fields? Like most things men do, it seems, at best, like a sideways-step for women in the ‘ole gender equality debate. But for the Jewish people, it is nothing short of thrilling.

Neri Oxman, we are in your debt for the one and only piece of great news this week. How can we thank you?

Perhaps a Genesis Prize?

via GIPHY

Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at Singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny