Clint Eastwood Shoots ‘Sully’ on Upper West Side, Asks Jews to Move Cars on Sukkot

Image by Getty Images
If you’re a car-owning Jew on the Upper West Side, beware!
Rosh Hashanah brought a shakeup over filming of the new “Ghostbusters” movie, which came to the neighborhood over the holiday. Residents on the closed-off streets were asked to move their cars during the holiday, when anyone observing it would be unable to drive. A quiet uproar followed.
Now, adding insult to injury, over the first days of Sukkot, Clint Eastwood’s “Sully” began filming, with , in the same famously Jewish area. And while Ghostbusters is about some goons who manage to destroy much of the Upper West Side — or at least cover it in marshmallow fluff — Sully is about Chelsey Sullenberger, the hero pilot who landed a damaged plane in the Hudson in 2009, capably avoiding all kinds of opportunities for destruction. You would think a film crew telling a story about a do-gooder would be interested in do-gooding itself, but perhaps not.
As a Jew hailing from Denver and St. Louis, where everyone covertly ignores the dictum of thou-shalt-not-drive—after all, getting to synagogue from most places in either city without a car takes the same amount of time as an entire Torah service—this is a foreign problem to me. None the less, what gives, New York?
It’s too easy to use Clint Eastwood quotes against him in this situation, so I’ll just say: we’ve tried being reasonable and we don’t like it. Now get out of here before we have a heart attack.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
