Get ready for Aly Raisman as you’ve never seen her before.
As Us Weekly likes to tell us, “they’re just like us!” Celebrities apparently do things that regular folks do, like go to the grocery store, make a coffee run, drive a car or change a diaper.
Jews aren’t exactly famous for their athletic prowess — the punch line of many a joke, including this classic from “Airplane!”
Talk about a strange analogy.
From the celebrated to the marginalized, from the heat of a summer antiwar protest to the searing cold of a Windy City winter, Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has been capturing unique, often strikingly ironic images for more than six decades. Thirty two of them, including pictures of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin and Marlon Brando, are currently in display in an exhibit titled “That Was Then” at Chicago’s Thomas Masters Gallery through December 23.
Hope swelled for a quick moment after the NFL’s Oakland Raiders named Bruce Gradkowski their starting quarterback earlier this week, just days after he led his team to a 16-14 comeback victory over the Arizona Cardinals.
If you thought Israeli supermodel Bar Rafaeli’s appearance on the cover of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in 2007 stirred things up, wait until you see this: The Huffington Post just released photos of Refaeli’s cover for next month’s Esquire — and this time there’s not even a bikini. Completely nude and covered in what seems to be the beginning of a Stephen King story, the cover takes objectification to a new level. Refaeli’s (bizarrely orange) body is reduced to scrap paper. Words are scrawled on her in messy handwriting, and one word has even been scratched out and rewritten. But, as they say, sex sells, and if this serves to increase the world’s awareness of Israeli hotties, so be it.
Back as a bored Hebrew school kid in suburban Chicago, I passed the time by staring at the map of Israel that hung on every classroom wall in my synagogue. Although I’d never traveled there, I knew the shape and topography of the country remarkably well — the ironically shrimp-shaped swath of brown, ringed by three pools of blue: the Mediterranean Sea to the West, the Red Sea to the South and the Dead Sea to the East.