Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand By William J. Mann Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 567 pages, $30 It was hardly an accident that 22-year-old Barbra Streisand seemed to embody the comedian Fanny Brice so perfectly in the 1964 Broadway musical “Funny Girl.” According to celebrity biographer William J. Mann, the role was deliberately tailored to fit her…
May your son the doctor introduce you to his fiancée, Bristol Palin. May your child give his bar mitzvah speech on the genius of Ayn Rand. May your insurance company decide constipation is a pre-existing condition. It’s not clear who’s behind these Yiddish Curses for Republican Jews. But in just three days, the online phenomenon…
As much as Jews love their holiday feasting, big family meals can also bring up some anxiety. Maybe you keep more kosher than your parents. Maybe less. Maybe you used to be a vegetarian, but now you eat meat, but only if it’s sustainably raised. Navigating special food needs with loved ones is fraught because…
Barbra Streisand may have been slightly disappointed with Jennifer Aniston’s smooth-nosed “Funny Girl” homage, but at least she can take personal credit for Lea Michele’s distinctive schnoz. “My mother would say to me, ‘Barbra Streisand never got a nose job. You’re not getting a nose job,’ ” the “Glee” star says in the latest issue…
In his black T-shirt and first-day-of-basic-training haircut, with weathered skin that betrays his Iranian roots, Idan Mor looks like a typical post-army Israeli. The soft-spoken Mor, however, is anything but. The 32-year-old former paratrooper and Haifa native is making a name for himself as one of the smartest and most original comics on Israel’s alternative…
Journalist Calvin Trillin is a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker who has written over two dozen books. But he is perhaps best known as a humorist, a career that began in 1978 when then-editor of The Nation, “the parsimonious Victor Navasky,” took him to lunch. As Trillin recalls, Navasky wanted to “discuss his…
The role that launched Barbra Streisand has been recast — and it didn’t go to the Jewish heir apparent. The next Broadway production of “Funny Girl” will star Lauren Ambrose as Fanny Brice, the real-life Jewish comedian whom Streisand played during the show’s original 1964 Broadway run. The role, which earned Streisand a Tony nomination…
Funny or Die “Yeah, uh huh, you know what it is. My nose and ass — they’re both big” is the catchy refrain to this outrageous yet endearing Funny or Die parody, celebrating the idiosyncratic joys of being both black and Jewish. It’s hard to be put off by the video’s many offensive Jewish and…
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