JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Tough Jews

By Uriel Heilman · October 23, 2008

Edward Zwick’s new feature film “Defiance,” which opens in the U.S. in September, is also a family film about the Bielski clan, writes Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker:

The film is still a family film, though, since it tells the largely unknown and entirely true story of the Bielski brothers’ brigade: of how Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski fled from Poland into the Belarusian forest in 1941—after the Einsatzgruppen had begun the mass slaughter of Jews that marked the first phase of the Holocaust—and managed not only to hold off the German Army, in grudging compact with Russian partisans, but to recruit Jewish civilians and keep them concealed for three years in the forest. By the end, almost twelve hundred Jews were living in the Belarusian woods, in a series of encampments that included libraries, nurseries, and clinics. The story, very well played by Daniel Craig (everyone’s favorite non-Jewish Jew), as Tuvia, and Liev Schreiber, as his angrier younger brother Zus, is stirring.

Here’s one story about the latter-day Zvi Bielski from his son Zus:

My dad came to visit me in Israel when I was in the Army. First he told me not to go—but when he came to visit he was so proud. He took the gun out of my hands, handled it like a pair of sneakers. ‘Never have your gun on safety,’ he told me. He was a great father, but he was hard to impress. I used to skydive, and once I had a videotape made—a cameraman jumped out with me. I couldn’t wait to get to Brooklyn to show it to Dad! So I showed him the tape. Nothing, no expression. So, finally, I say, ‘Pop, did you see that shit!’ He looked at me: ‘So? You had a parachute, didn’t you?’

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Hollywood, Heeb-style

By Ami Eden · May 12, 2008

Some highlights from Heeb’s Hollywood issue:

• Award-winning comedian Kristen Schaal wishes she were Jewish.
• Child actor-turned-Hollywood lawyer Jeff B. Cohen, known for his turn as Chunk in The Goonies, offers legal advice.
  
• Up close and personal with Jason Segel, the writer and star of the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
• Whatever happened to all of those Christian blockbuster that were suppose to come, following the success of The Passion of the Christ?


• Meet the two Jewish guys from New Jersey responsible for Harold & Kumar.
• A fashion shoot re-imagines three pioneering Jewish stars from the Silent and Golden eras: Fanny Brice, Molly Picon and Theda Bara.
  

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Strangers at Tribeca

By Mark Joffe · May 6, 2008

One of the most captivating New York premieres at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which ended yesterday, was Strangers, a powerful film about a chance romance between an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman who meet on a subway in Berlin. Their relationship is rocked not only by their jarring cultural differences, but by the disturbing events of the 2006 war in Lebanon, scenes of which are incorporated into the film.

Despite the fact that New York, like Los Angeles and Miami, has an entire festival devoted to films from Israel, Tribeca has been a major showcase for such Israeli films as The Bubble, Encounter Point, Yossi & Jagger and Ushpizin. Also screened at Tribeca this year was a short film called Roads, about the relationship between a traumatized Israeli ex-soldier and a 13-year-old Palestinian boy who works for a drug dealer.

After Sunday Levo spoke to the enthusiastic audience about how the film, which was nominated for best world drama at the Sundance Film Festival in January, came together and was put together. He said he was asked if he would be interested in the role just two weeks before filming began. Very few of the lines were scripted, and filming of scenes in the Berlin and Paris subways, and at the World Cup finals, was done surreptitiously, without going through official channels.

Levo said the movie, which was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival and arrives at theaters in Israel on May 29, will apparently be shown this summer at the Ramallah Film Festival, in the West Bank. It will be interesting to see if it is as popular there as it was here.

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ADL chimes in on Stein’s anti-evolution film

By Daniel Sieradski · April 29, 2008

Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman has spoken out against Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution film, Expelled.  In a press release issued just moments ago, Foxman writes:

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

While Foxman’s views may resonate with members of the scientific community who are outraged by Stein’s film, as an adamant defendant of church-state separation, Foxman has earned himself a reputation as a political foe of religious conservatives. Thus while his criticism may be apt, don’t expect him to be changing any minds in the anti-evolution community.

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Does The Fly do Passover?

By Ami Eden · April 8, 2008

An interview in The Independent with actor Jeff Goldblum takes a Jewish turn:

I nudge him on to the firmer ground of Adam Resurrected. “It was intense,” he says of his role as Adam Stein, a Jewish former circus performer forced by a concentration-camp guard to pretend to be a German shepherd dog. “Paul [Schrader, the director] likes to describe the film as a man who was once a dog who meets a dog who was once a boy. That’s a little cryptic though. I had a year to prepare for it, thank goodness, and I immersed myself in it, I did as much work as I could. I went to a concentration camp in Poland, the one that’s said to be the most intact – it was a very powerful experience. I went to Israel for the first time a couple of times and talked to some survivors in Los Angeles.”

This is the first time that Goldblum, who is Jewish, has done a part where his Jewishness is part of the character. Is that why he took the part? “Oh, it was a creative project. I’ve never done a movie about this subject, so there were Jewish things about it, you know. Yes. Mmmm.”

Is he observant about his religion? Does he celebrate Passover, for example? “Oooooh, you know,” he says, his giant hands wafting about in the air, eyes rolling in their sockets. “I celebrate it in my own way, nothing traditional or traditionally observant.” Does he believe in God? “Uhhm, not in the way I think people… ssss… uhh, do I believe in a figure outside myself, a being, who lives somewhere… where we can’t see them who, you know, umm, sends you to heaven or hell… I’m not sure I believe in that bit of it. I, I, I, err, ahh you know… I believe in stillness and spaciousness.”

It’s a mesmerising display of stammering and obfuscation. And all the while his head is rolling and his hands are drifting about and his rubbery face is performing acrobatics as he rolls his eyes back into his head, works his jaw and flutters his eyelashes. Then he jerks his chin up and his eyes twinkle. “Do you like Japanese food?”

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‘High School Musical’ coming to Israel

By Ami Eden · April 3, 2008

With shows like “In Treatment,” Israel is finally starting to carry its weight in the U.S.-Israel pop culture relationship. And how do we return the favor? Check out this piece of news from the Forward…

A consortium of Tel Aviv-based producers, talent agents and TV distribution specialists recently announced auditions for the first-ever Hebrew version of the play, which is based on the 2006 Disney Channel movie about teen love ignited during a session of karaoke. Despite its culturally specific setting — an American high school populated by such figures as a popular jock and a competitive drama club tyrant — “High School Musical” proved an international smash hit, viewed by young people in 100 countries and becoming one of the top-selling DVDs of all time. ...

The musical will be adapted, appropriately, by someone whose last name means “song” — Smadar Shir, a children’s book author and journalist also responsible for a number of youth-oriented plays. Shir, who is the writer of two weekly columns in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, has also translated into Hebrew versions of “Aladdin” and “The Little Mermaid,” and the stories of Mark Twain. She’ll have limited creative leeway in adapting her newest project, which, according to contractual agreements with Disney, must hew as closely as linguistically possible to the original.

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The News Shticker

By Ami Eden · March 21, 2008

Jewschool’s Ben Dreyfus posits that Haftarat Zachor + Megillat Esther = The Lord of the Rings (and wonders which is totally plagiarized).

What, if anything, does it mean that the comic book industry was so heavily populated by Jews (and, while the Forward is on the topic, Mister E lights the menorah).

With the NCAA tournament underway, ESPN takes a look at Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl. Jewish federation leaders know him as Mordechai Shmuel.

Help wanted: Cute kid to be Jewish secret agent and a Jewish family willing to swap its mother.

Natalie Portman loses her Hasidic co-star.

With help from JTA digital master Daniel Sieradski and a big hat tip to Daniel Treiman.

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The News Shticker: Jewno, Britney & Mel

By Ami Eden · March 18, 2008

If Juno were Jewno ...

(Jewschool has more on the story behind the video)

Britney removes her Kabbalah tattoo and ... does lunch with Mel Gibson. On Shabbos!!!

Before the deadly construction accident last weekend, a Jewish octogenarian and retired contractor tried to warn New York officials that a crane on E. 51 St. wasn’t properly braced.

(With help from JTA digital master Daniel Sieradski)

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An old newspaper and a new TV channel explore the Jewish-Rastafarian connection

By Ami Eden · March 14, 2008

The Forward has hooked up with The Jewish Channel to produce three shows: a round table featuring the paper’s staffers, an interview show with J.J. Goldberg and a movie-themed program with arts & culture editor Alana Newhouse.

In one recent segment on Newhouse’s show, she and the TJC crew looked at the Jewish-Rastafarian documentary Awake Zion.

http://tjctv.com/blogs/are-dreadlocks-the-new-peyos/

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Natalie Portman on pre-Nazi Germany, Judaism, being a hot knish and U.S.-Israel relations

By Ami Eden · March 5, 2008

Along with the release of ”The Other Boleyn Girl” has come several interviews with Natalie Portman.

She touched on a few topics of Jewish interest in her talk with Time magazine:

You take on a period piece in The Other Boleyn Girl. What is your favorite time in history? —Nikki Barrett, York, PA.
I’m really interested in 1920s Berlin. I read this great book by Amos Elon called The Pity of It All. It’s about Jewish life in Berlin right before the war. The whole environment of the salons and all this culture—there was a real openness and freedom. It’s scary to think the response to that was this incredible fascism....

As a native of Israel, what role do you think the U.S. government should play in its affairs? —Amy Lucio, Riverside, Calif.
I would love to see a government that made demands on Israel and the Palestinians to reach an agreement. Ultimately, it has to come from the people themselves, though. No one is going to like an externally imposed solution.

And then there was her interview with The Sunday Times of London:

I identify very strongly as Jewish, but I could be Indian, Puerto Rican . . . Anything that gives you a cultural identity makes you know who you are and grounds you, even as a young girl trying on identities.” She sighs. “Any time I see something about Britney, I close it. I can’t look at it. I’m usually interested in gossip, but this makes my stomach hurt.” ...

And, of course, while Portman is famously Jewish, Johansson is a lesser-known Jew (because of her Scandinavian father, she’s called “the kosher Danish"). When Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek made a movie together, all the headlines blared “the Hot Tamales”. What should the media label a film starring two Jewish girls? Portman doesn’t miss a beat.

“The Hot Knishes,” she says.

Hat tip: Bintel Blog.

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