Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — When Mel Brooks was filming “The Producers,” he recalled an executive approaching him and saying, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” Brooks said he would fire the actor, but never intended to actually do it. And when “The Producers” came out, it became a classic in no small part because of that “curly-haired guy” — otherwise known as Gene Wilder. That story is one of many retold about the actor in “Remembering Gene Wilder,” a new documentary about Wilder that, following a run last year on the Jewish film festival ci...
(JTA) — Rob Reiner, best known for his acting role in the 1970s sitcom “All in the Family” and for directing a series of beloved comedies — including “This is Spinal Tap,” “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally” — is getting serious in his latest project. “God and Country,” which hits theaters this week, examines what Reiner sees as the troubling rise of Christian nationalism. The Jewish filmmaker produced the documentary, along with his wife Michele and his friend Steve Okin, with Dan Partland as director. The film follows the hist...
(JTA) — A 3-0 score is extremely rare in the NFL. But when the Minnesota Vikings beat the Las Vegas Raiders Sunday night in the league’s lowest-scoring game since 2007, the moment held extra significance for the player who scored those three points. Vikings kicker Greg Joseph, one of only a handful of Jewish players in the NFL, had worn cleats before the game that showed support for Israel as part of the league’s “My Cause, My Cleats” program. His shoes displayed Stars of David and the phrases “I Stand with Israel” and “Am Yisrael Chai,...
(JTA) - Throughout Hollywood history, many stars of Jewish ancestry have soft-pedaled their heritage, changing their names or speaking rarely, if at all, about their Jewishness. No one can accuse Barbra Streisand of either. The singer and actress of the stage and screen - one of the most beloved Jewish American icons of the past half-century - published her long-awaited memoir, "My Name is Barbra," earlier this month. Throughout, Streisand references her Jewish background constantly, often...
(JTA) - Those who are Jewish or Phish fans - or both - have likely noticed at one point: Jews really seem to love Phish. There are many possible reasons for this, starting with the fact that the genre-bending jam band has many ardent fans of all stripes, having sold millions of albums and played to enormous festival crowds for decades. Two of the band members - bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman - are also Jewish, and the group has been known to play Jewish songs such as "Yerushalayim S...
(JTA) - According to the Jewish Virtual Library, 550,000 Jews served in the United States armed forces during World War II. There were 38,338 Jewish casualties, while 26,000 Jewish soldiers "received citations for valor and merit." But in high-profile TV and film, identifiably Jewish soldiers have been a rare sight. One exception came 25 years ago this week, when Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" hit theaters. The movie is perhaps best known for its opening sequence, for which Spielberg...
There are some light spoilers for “The Bear” in this article. (JTA) — “The Bear,” FX and Hulu’s drama series about the behind-the-scenes workings of a Chicago restaurant, has been one of TV’s most acclaimed series since debuting last year. The first episode of its second season, which debuted June 22, brought up a controversial term that caught the attention of critics: “Jewish lightning.” Most found the reference funny but didn’t want to touch it. A Vulture critic wrote,” I’m not even going to...
(JTA) - In the hit show "The Sopranos," veteran actor Jerry Adler plays mob-adjacent Jewish businessman Hesh Rabkin, who made a fortune in the music business decades earlier. In a first season episode, Hesh is confronted by a rapper seeking "reparations" for a late Black musician who he says Rabkin didn't pay fairly for a hit record. When Hesh responds by bragging that he wrote the hit songs he worked on back in the day, Tony Soprano corrects him: "A couple of Black kids wrote that record, you...
(JTA) — On a couple of occasions in Julian Schlossberg’s early life, he found himself in parts of the United States where some people he talked to had never met a Jewish person. The first was a stint in the Army, the second was while selling movies to rural television stations. But over the next six decades — once Schlossberg embarked on a long and successful career that included stops as a Hollywood studio executive with Paramount Pictures and later as a prolific distributor of movies and p...
(JTA) - After a long career pause brought on by an assault-induced depression and injuries, actor Brendan Fraser is back in headlines, earning early Oscar buzz for his performance in the upcoming movie "The Whale." What some of even his most ardent fans might not realize is that one of Fraser's earliest roles - alongside Matt Damon in what was his first major onscreen role - came in one the few mainstream Hollywood films to focus on antisemitism at non-Jewish schools. In "School Ties," which...
(JTA) - How the subject of his new documentary, "Syndrome K," has largely escaped public attention is a mystery to filmmaker Stephen Edwards. "It's the greatest elevator pitch in Hollywood," he said. "The story of three doctors, one of them Jewish, practicing with a fake identity, that fool the SS with a fake disease that saved Jews from certain deportation." "Syndrome K," which hits digital and video on demand platforms on Tuesday after some Jewish film festival showings, tells that...
(JTA) - Most film debuts don't include licking a taser while dressed as a mime, or having a scorpion crawl on one's face. But when it comes to the "Jackass" TV and movie franchise, that's par for the course. That doesn't mean Rachel Wolfson's Jewish parents weren't a little worried about her joining the stunt comedy group for its latest movie, "Jackass: Forever." "When I first told them, they were like, have you told your therapist?" Wolfson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Through three seas...
(JTA) - This year, everyone seemed to have an opinion about how the entertainment industry views Jewish women. The comedian Sarah Silverman and others openly inveighed against what she deemed "Jewface," or the trend of casting non-Jewish actresses as (Ashkenazi) Jewish women; a plotline on this year's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" season mocked a similar idea by having Larry David cast a Latina actress as a Jewish character on a show about his childhood. Whether you agree with Silverman or not, it's...
(JTA) - After a hiatus of more than six years that followed his departure from "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart returned to regular series TV on Thursday night with "The Problem with Jon Stewart." Debuting on Apple TV+, it's a new talk show that will feature in-depth discussion of different political issues, with new episodes debuting every two weeks. The 58-year-old Stewart, of course, is Jewish, and has frequently referenced Judaism throughout his comedy career, including before, during and after...
(JTA) - This Friday, following a pandemic delay, Apple TV+ will debut "Foundation," the first-ever screen adaptation of Isaac Asimov's bestselling, award-winning science-fiction book series. First announced in 2018 and produced in association with Skydance Television, the TV show is one of the Apple streaming service's most expensive and ambitious productions to date. The series, which follows a mathematician struggling to convince a galactic federation that their society is on the brink of coll...
(JTA) - Perhaps no American Jewish actor has been so closely associated with crime films as Harvey Keitel. During a career now in its sixth decade, the 82-year-old Keitel has appeared in "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Wise Guys," "Bugsy," "The Two Jakes," "Reservoir Dogs" and "The Irishman," among numerous other films. Now he's adding to the list with "Lansky," portraying perhaps the most famous Jewish gangster of all time, Meyer Lansky. Lansky, born in Russia in 1902, arrived in New York in...
(JTA) — PBS has decided to postpone airing the documentary “Til Kingdom Come,” which examines the close relationship between American evangelicals and Israel, in the light of accusations that the film misleadingly spliced together two separate parts of a speech by former President Donald Trump. The film, which was directed by the Russian-Israeli documentary filmmaker Maya Zinshtein, was released as a rental for in-home viewing in late February ahead of a planned broadcast premiere on March 29 as part of the “Independent Lens” series on PBS. I...
(JTA) - There's never been a great, definitive American movie about a bar mitzvah. And after "Donny's Bar Mitzvah," a new movie that arrived this week on Amazon Prime and iTunes, there still hasn't been. The film, directed by Jonathan Kaufman (referred to in the media notes as "Jonny Comebacks"), is an indie comedy set entirely during the bar mitzvah party of Donny Drucker (played by Steele Stebbins), a boy from a highly dysfunctional family, in 1998 Michigan. It's something of a festival of...
(JTA) - In the late 1960s, when Neal Karlen was not even 10 years old, he would spend time at the home of his grandparents, one of the few Jewish families that remained on the north side of Minneapolis. Karlen would play basketball and ride bikes with a group of African-American kids who lived in the neighborhood. One of them, he later realized, was a young Prince Rogers Nelson. The two men would reconnect in the early 1980s, when Karlen was a magazine journalist and Prince one of the world's...
(JTA) - From Hank Greenberg to Sandy Koufax to Alex Bregman, Jews and baseball go way back, to the 19th century. It's not just players and fans - the participation even extends to the role of official baseball historian of Major League Baseball. The first man to hold the title, the legendary Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, was Jewish, and an inductee to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Holtzman died in 2008, and in early 2011, the official baseball historian role went to John...
(JTA) - It was only a matter of time: A Jewish Netflix has arrived. That moniker is probably the best description of ChaiFlicks, a film and TV streaming platform focused on Jewish-themed movies that launched Wednesday, Aug. 12. It helps that its creators were once in business with the real Netflix. Neil Friedman, founder of the Jewish-focused distribution company Menemsha Films, said he sold two films to Netflix: the 2015 bakery-set drama "Dough" and the 2016 Israeli film "The Women's Balcony."...
By Stephen Silver (JTA) — The mid-to-late aughts saw a run of films that featured Jewish characters, for lack of a better description, kicking ass. In 2005, there was Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” about the Israeli government’s plot to get vengeance for the 1972 Olympics terrorist killings. It was famously the subject of a monologue by Seth Rogen in “Knocked Up,” about how “every movie with Jews, we’re the ones getting killed — Munich flips it on its ear.” There was also “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” in 2008, Adam Sandler’s cheeky Mossad age...
HAVANA (JTA) - The remaining Jewish community in Cuba has much to contend with - a lack of resources and rabbis, a population that's both aging and dwindling, and ongoing uncertainty about how much aid and assistance they can expect from their co-religionists in the United States. Adding to that long list: It's not easy to find traditional Jewish foods. There are a variety of reasons why, especially for observant Jews who keep kosher. One of the biggest staples in the Cuban diet is pork - a cate...
(JTA)-Jewish summer camp is such a crucial part of the American Jewish experience that many Jewish adults, even in their older age, likely remember the names of many of the kids in their cabins from when they were 11 years old. One of those cabins more than 60 years ago contained a couple of interesting young Jewish boys. Louie Kemp would go on to head his family's seafood company and played a key role in introducing imitation king crab to the United States. Robert "Bobby" Zimmerman, went on to...
(JTA)-"Raising pigs in Israel? Couldn't you play golf like everyone else?" That's a quote that doubles well as the concept behind the movie "Holy Lands," which stars Hollywood veteran James Caan as a relatively secular American Jew turned Israeli pig farmer. The film, directed by the French filmmaker Amanda Sthers and adapted from her own novel, stars the now 79-year-old Jewish actor as Harry Rosenmerck, a retired cardiologist who chooses the unlikely late-in-life path of raising pigs in...
