Steven Spielberg has said that he got into filmmaking mainly to defuse anti-semitism; to earn the respect and admiration that he couldn’t get as an isolated child. His quintessential success, “E.T.” (1982), is the story of his own childhood reconstructed, where the sensitive and cerebral daydreamer is vindicated by an otherworldly power. Anyone who says…
This week’s movie news is flush with some of our favorite movie Jews. From Shia LeBeouf — Steven Spielberg’s estranged muse — to Darren Aronofsky, whose film “Mother!” has been received with a smattering of boos, we’ve culled the best film stories from Culture and the Shmooze. Read on if you so choose! 1) Jewish…
Our society tends to focus so much on the downsides of being a child star (stunted adolescence, lack of an education, high rates of drug addiction and mental illness) that we forget about all the perks! Like, money, for example, or getting a college recommendation letter from the most famous director in the world. In…
(JTA) — Director Steven Spielberg and producer Jeffrey Katzenberg have pledged $500,000 each to the student-organized March For Our Lives to end gun violence. The nationwide protest scheduled for March 24 is the brainchild of the Never Again movement organized by the student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida,…
It seems like just yesterday Elizabeth Banks was accusing Steven Spielberg of never having directed a movie with a female lead. Of course, Banks was quickly put in her place and apologized after hordes of people reminded her that Spielberg was behind the film “The Color Purple”, which had a black female lead. But is…
Movie news is well and good, but seems to pale in the wake of the most fascinating developments from late last week: The Nutella riots in France. According to a January 26 report from the BBC, after Intermarché supermarkets across France began offering a substantial discount on the chocolate hazelnut spread, people began to battle…
Few American musicals have won more sustained audience devotion than “West Side Story,” the 1957 brainchild of an all-Jewish creative team. Playwright Arthur Laurents, choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, collaborated, despite sustained tensions, to produce a musical that has been staged around the world for six decades and inspired an…
This week brought the 2018 Oscar nominations, the single best outcome of which is that now everyone has good reason to use the brilliant photo, above, of nominee Agnes Varda eating an Oscar statuette. It’s applicable in every situation. Angry at the establishment? Consider munching on an Oscar. Trying to figure out who you want…
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