Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 151 - 173 of 173
(JTA) - Steven Spielberg's remake of "West Side Story" drew seven Oscar nominations Tuesday, including best picture and best director. Spielberg's best-director nomination makes the Jewish Hollywood legend one of only four filmmakers in history to ever be nominated at least eight times for best director. (Two of the others are also Jewish; the third is Martin Scorsese.) He has won the award twice before, for "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan." With this nomination, Spielberg also...
(JTA) — A Jewish woman in Chattanooga, Tennessee, says her child was taught “how to torture a Jew” in a public school Bible class. The woman, Juniper Russo, wrote about the incident in a Facebook post that is no longer public. In it, she alleged that the teacher engaged in “blatant Christian proselytizing” in a Bible history class that was meant to be “non-sectarian.” Hamilton County Schools, the Chattanooga public school district, is investigating the incident. Michael Dzik, president of the Jewish Federation of Chattanooga, told the Jewi...
(JTA) — Hummus is the glue that holds society together in “Breaking Bread,” a new documentary about Israeli and Arab chefs that strives to be as delicious as its dishes. Unfortunately, the film is missing a few key ingredients. The film’s main protagonist is Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, a microbiologist-turned-chef who organizes a food festival in Haifa, which she sees as a poignant symbol of Arab-Jewish coexistence. There is a special section of both the film and festival devoted to “The Hummus Project,” in which different chefs make different v...
(JTA) — A rural Tennessee school board’s decision earlier this month to remove “Maus,” the celebrated graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its curriculum has attracted fierce backlash from other pockets of the state and beyond. A nearby comic-book store is pledging to give away the book for free to every student in the county, an area church plans to hold a discussion on its themes and a college professor intends to offer free classes on the book to students in the county. Nirvana Comics, a comic-book store in Knoxville, announced Thursda...
(JTA) — Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, the man at the center of the Colleyville, Texas, synagogue hostage crisis last weekend, says that he is looking for another job, but wants the world’s focus to remain on his congregation’s trauma and healing process rather than his career. “My congregation, Congregation Beth Israel, and Colleyville have just undergone a traumatic experience. I’ve just undergone a traumatic experience,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And that’s where the focus needs to be.” Cytron-Walker was responding to an...
(JTA) - "P.O. Box 1142" was the only name the Jewish GIs were given as to their destination. The American World War II soldiers, many of them refugees from Europe, assumed they would be flying overseas to fight Nazis. Instead, they were taken to an off-the-grid compound in rural Virginia - to look after Nazis. "Camp Confidential: America's Secret Nazis," an animated documentary from Israeli directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, tells the story of a group of Jewish American veterans whose sole...
(JTA) - Peter Bogdanovich, the Oscar-nominated movie director and actor whose films, ego and off-camera exploits encapsulated the personality-driven excesses of 1970s Hollywood filmmaking, has died at 82. His death was announced Jan. 6 and first reported by Variety. Bogdanovich's mother, Herma Bogdanovich, was an Austrian Jew. His father, Borislav Bogdanovich, was an Orthodox Christian painter from the former Yugoslavia who, according to the family lore, gave up his art career in order to secure...
(JTA) — At a time when many local Jewish news outlets are scaling back or shuttering operations altogether, the Cleveland Jewish News is expanding its footprint for the second time in three years. CJN’s publisher, the Cleveland Jewish Publication Company, announced Dec. 21 its plans to begin serving the Jewish population of Akron, Ohio, after reaching an agreement with the Jewish Community Board of Akron to revamp the current Akron Jewish News as a monthly print newspaper and standalone website, beginning in February 2022. The current Dec...
(JTA) - Bob Einstein, the cult-favorite Jewish comedian best known for playing Marty Funkhouser on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and the popular "Super Dave Osborne" character on various TV variety shows, is given the biography treatment in a new HBO documentary airing Dec. 28. "The Super Bob Einstein Movie," directed by Danny Gold and provided to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an advanced screener, is a sentimental journey through the life and career of Einstein, who died in 2019 shortly after...
(JTA) - One of television's most notorious cartoon antisemites is now an Orthodox rabbi. Eric Cartman, the egomaniacal, hate speech-spouting grade schooler on Comedy Central's long-running adult animated series "South Park," has had a change of heart in a new hour-long special of the show, which is set 40 years in the future. In "South Park: Post COVID," which debuted on Thanksgiving on the Paramount Plus streaming service, Cartman has converted to Judaism, leads a congregation in Colorado Sprin...
(JTA) - "Nazisploitation," a pop-culture subgenre that draws on imagery and stories from the Holocaust for winkingly perverse entertainment, is built around the idea that there are bad-taste ways to interpret an incomparable tragedy that can nevertheless prove enlightening. The form reached its apex - or, depending on your vantage, its nadir - with films about forbidden love affairs between Nazis and Jews, or Nazis and other survivors of their brutality. In one notable, and polarizing example,...
(JTA) - At 95, Mel Brooks is finally ready to speak his truth: A deli without Cel-Ray is no deli at all. The comedy icon and EGOT winner whose movies, musicals and stage acts defined the last century of American Jewish humor is celebrating the release of his new memoir, "All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business," and his upcoming Hulu production of "History of the World: Part II." In an interview with The New Yorker, Brooks also revealed his favorite deli sandwich ("a white-meat turkey...
(JTA) — Some of Netflix’s biggest international hits of the last few years — from “Fauda” to “Shtisel” — have been Israeli imports. Now, the streaming giant is spotlighting Palestinian entertainment, as well. Last week, Netflix released a “Palestinian Stories” collection consisting of what it said was 32 films, although only 27 films were listed under the category in the U.S. as of Monday. Of the available selections, which span the last couple of decades, 12 of them are short films. A mix...
(JTA) — The familiar Jewish narrative of outsiders struggling to assimilate to their new homeland gets turned on its head in the charming Israeli comedy “Golden Voices.” Here, the strange, unwelcoming new land the Jews face is Israel itself. The year is 1990, and married middle-aged couple Raya and Victor are new immigrants from the Soviet Union, which has just collapsed. With Israel suddenly playing host to an influx of new Russian-speaking migrants, Raya and Victor are our eyes and ears to this culture clash — and in a literal sense, our voi...
(JTA) - Were it not for Rudolph Vrba and Alfréd Wexler, would the world today know the true extent of the mass murder the Nazis inflicted during the Holocaust? The two men, both Slovak Jews who escaped from Auschwitz, secretly recorded fastidious notes about details of the death camp unknown to the outside world. These included schematics of the gas chambers, the Nazis' use of the deadly chemical Zyklon-B, the number of prisoners being brought in to their deaths every day and the planned...
(JTA) - At a key moment in the new Netflix film "Worth," Kenneth Feinberg, the real-life architect of the compensation fund for 9/11 victims, is shown overwhelmed by the monumental emotional toil of the job. At a town hall meeting for victims' families Feinberg - whom Michael Keaton until this point has portrayed as an ultracompetent professional arbiter - is assailed by critics of the fund who see its calculations as too impersonal, its salve on their grief too pitiful. One stands up and...
(JTA) - Reports of the demise of the Canadian Jewish News have been, not for the first time, greatly exaggerated. On Sept. 1, the publication - the largest Jewish news organization in Canada - will rebrand as a digital-first enterprise after abruptly shutting down operations in April 2020 and then resuming a trickle of content over the last year. It is the second relaunch for the 61-year-old nonprofit, which previously shut its doors in 2013 before garnering enough community support to restart...
(JTA) - Public school unions in the U.S. are increasingly becoming a hotbed of Israel discourse, with the largest teachers' union becoming the latest organized body to deliberate measures that censure Israel and support the Palestinian cause. Members of the National Education Association at the group's annual meeting held over the weekend (with President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden, a longtime educator, in attendance) planned to debate two items on Israel and the Palestinians among the...
(JTA) - A team of journalists once employed by the flagship Jewish newspaper in Los Angeles is trying to create an alternative news source for America's second-largest Jewish community. SoCal Jewish News announced itself last month with a GoFundMe campaign and a July 19 target launch date. Without mentioning the 35-year-old Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, the new website emphasizes that it will be different from the Jewish news currently on offer in the city. SoCal Jewish News is...
(JTA) — Bestselling authors Elin Hilderbrand and Casey McQuiston removed references to Anne Frank and Israel from their novels this week following an outcry on social media from small subsets of readers. The moves have ignited a storm of controversy in the literary world. The campaigns against the books have been successful despite appearing to be relatively small in size, and originate from wildly different perspectives on Jews and Israel. One takes the authors to task for a joke perceived as antisemitic, while the other objects to the mere m...
(JTA) - There is a remarkable scene toward the end of the new documentary "Final Account," a collection of eyewitness testimonies of the Nazi regime from elderly Germans and Austrians who remember it (and, to various degrees, were part of it). In the sequence, a former Waffen-SS officer sits down with a group of students in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee - the site of the infamous Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials met in 1942 to map out the parameters of the Final Solution. The officer, Han...
(JTA) — Jewish groups are criticizing NBC for airing an offensive portrayal of an Orthodox Jew on one of its medical dramas. The objectionable storyline occurred on an episode of “Nurses,” a Canadian hour-long drama following a group of nurses in a Toronto hospital. In the episode, a young Hasidic patient is told he will need a bone graft to heal his broken leg, leading his devout father to recoil at the possibility of a “dead goyim leg from anyone. An Arab, a woman.” The incident occurs in the series’ eighth episode, “Achilles Heel,” which...
(JTA) - The Arizona Jewish Post, a 75-year-old community publication covering the Jewish population of Tucson and southern Arizona, announced it would cease operations effective March 1. The Jewish Community Federation of Southern Arizona, which owns and operates the Post, announced the closure in an email to subscribers this week. The letter cited declines in ad revenue and readership, loss of philanthropic support and the COVID-19 pandemic as factors that contributed to the Post's...
