Six Degrees of Kevin’s Bacon: Who’s Jewish in Hollywood?

From JewishBookCouncil.org

Earlier this week, Emily Stone wrote about Jews and sports (have you taken her quiz "Athlete or Mathlete?"). Her book, Did Jew Know: A Handy Primer on the Customs, Culture, and Practice of the Chosen People (Chronicle Books), is now available. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

While some stars look Jewish or publicly identify as Jewish, supporting Israel—you go, Scar Jo!— or record Chanukah songs that even gentiles love to love, others mask their heritage like a traveling salesman with a toupee; only, no matter how many times you comb it over, transplant it or blow it out, everyone knows it’s a rug, especially in high-def. Meantime, some stars kinda look ethnic (read Jewish) but aren’t. It’s a conundrum.

In my house growing up, a stronghold of secular but devoted cultural Judaism, as soon as anyone’s name was introduced, famous or otherwise, my mother would immediately and inevitably punctuate the mention with the modifier “JEWISH!” or “NOT JEWISH!” While this particular brand of Yiddishkeit echolalia may not have been unique to our household alone, it is unique to the Jews to think about who is and isn’t Jewish, more than, say, the goyim. Walker Laird Gaffney and Turfer Throop probably do not yell out the word "JEWISH!" mere seconds after you tell them you just had lunch with Manny Howard or Jessi Burger. Nor do they gleefully tell you that Kate Hudson is, in fact, a member of the Tribe and exactly how and why (maternal grandmother).

What’s interesting here, or perhaps troubling—more than the commonplace self-identification practices of the Tribe via name recognition—is who among those in Hollywood chooses to maintain a public Jewish identity and who decides to go lo pro, even though, let’s face it, we all know what’s up. And I’m not talking about who’s a Zionist—that’s a whole other blog—or about depictions of Jewish characters in movies or in TV—don’t get me started—but who is a big ol’ ethnic Jewy the Jew all the livelong day in looks and name and life besides Madonna and Britney Spears! O Red String and Yehuda Berg (JEWISH!), thank you for all you have done. Hot gentiles dressed like bunnies at Purim parties? It’s a world gone mad.

While there’s a certain pride in Jewish identity in the world of letters, Hollywood generally shies away from wholly embracing Jewish identity, with the exception of the yearly smattering of Holocaust films or the Goldbergs and Krusty the Clown. This is remarkable especially when you think about the fact that Tinsel Town continues to be presided over by its forefathers, almost all of whom still seem to prefer an anemic version of what I like to call “blow-out Judaism,” where everyone either looks like Courtney Cox at a slut cotillion or is a fax of a fax of a fax of pre-bad-for-the-Jews Woody Allen.

In other words, whether or not you believe in your heart of hearts that America is a Christian Nation, its goysiche look is defined and imposed by a bunch of schleppy desert nomads whose last names end in –stein, –berg, –sky and –witz. And these now wildly successful American nomads, no matter how Jewish they themselves may look, do not, I repeat do NOT want to look at frizzy hair, nor back TV series about life in Borough Park. It’s everything a Jewish boy from Brooklyn or the Bronx would live to avoid. Still and all, my mother and I are not fooled! And when big, dark curly hair comes back with a vengeance, which it will, believe Jew me, we are ready and have been since the 1980s. Come back to the Dry Bar, Harvey Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein.

So the next time you’re settling in for your next Netflix marathon, and the credits are rolling, or Kevin Bacon (NOT JEWISH!) enters the frame, play a rousing round or six of Jewish/Not Jewish and let your neighbors keep score. It’s not just a game; it’s a matter of national nachas.

It’s True-ish, They’re Jewish! A True/False Quiz

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Jewish Culture Was Not Always a Response to Non-Jewish Culture

Why read the Talmud as a secular Jew? In part, for its expression of an independent Jewish creativity and spirituality.

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

More than once, in the course of reading Daf Yomi and writing about the experience, I have been asked why I would spend so much time immersing myself in the Talmud. Sometimes the question is asked in a curious spirit, other times impatiently. After all, I am not an Orthodox Jew, and I don’t live my life as if the laws of the rabbis were binding on me. Absent that kind of commitment, why should anyone engage with the difficulties and minutiae of the Talmud? What kind of nourishment does this challenging text offer to a secular Jewish reader?

I’ve thought a lot about this question, and there are several answers I could give. Reading the Talmud is a unique intellectual challenge: It requires escaping one’s usual ways of thinking and adopting the very different worldview and logical procedures of the rabbis. Spiritually, too, the Talmud offers a surprising way of thinking about God and what intimacy with God might mean, one that is very different from the standard Protestant model that informs mainstream American religion, including Jewish religion. And historically, reading the Talmud offers some insight into the lives of our ancestors, for whom it was the centerpiece of religious and intellectual life.

But perhaps the most important thing I am getting out of reading the Talmud is the experience of a time when Jewish culture was not primarily a response to non-Jewish culture. Modern Jewish life, which started with the emancipation of Western European Jews around the time of the French Revolution, is a complicated negotiation between Jewishness and the wider gentile world. How do Jews fit into societies and cultures whose history and assumptions are not Jewish, and sometimes even anti-Jewish? Modern Jewish culture and politics, with all their complicated glories, are all deeply involved with this problem; and while it is much less urgent for American Jews today than it was for our ancestors in Europe, it remains hard to escape.

The Talmud, on the other hand, is not reactive, not a negotiation. It is an expression of an independent Jewish creativity and spirituality—informed by surrounding cultures, as everything human must be (just look at all the loanwords from Persian and Greek), but not primarily addressed to those neighbors. It is remarkable, for instance, how little the Talmud has to say about Christianity, which was starting to dominate the world of the rabbis just at the time the text was being compiled. Reading the Talmud is a reminder that Judaism is not historically a mere guest or victim of other religions, the way we tend to learn about it in school and in history books, but an autonomous tradition, with its own values and achievements. You don’t have to “believe” in the Talmud, in a religious sense, to draw strength from the sense that Judaism rests on its solid foundation.

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The Yiddish Speakers Who Stayed Behind

by Jenny Levison for Jewniverse

We generally think of Yiddish as the pre-Holocaust shtetl language, and of its surviving speakers as having long-ago resettled across various continents. We don't tend to think about the shtetls – and the native Yiddish speakers – survivors left behind. Luckily, some researchers at the University of Indiana, Bloomington have.

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Everything He Wanted To Know About Sex Among the Orthodox

Interview With Haredi Politician Gets a Bit Awkward

By Tuvia Tenenbom for The Jewish Daily Forward
Racheli Ibenboim is a Haredi lady of the Gur dynasty, one of the most fundamentalist branches in the hasidic world. The Gur people, for one reason or another, are ever busy with ever more rules forbidding more and more “sexual temptations” of whatever kind. For example, not long ago a new prohibition was announced: A father shall not dance with his little kids at public events. Kids, apparently, have been declared to be sexual temptations. In the old days, only women were the “temptation” of the Gur hasids.

A few months ago, Ibenboim was the Jewish Home party candidate in Jerusalem’s municipal elections, but she was reportedly pressured to withdraw. Luckily, no rabbi knows that I’m in town and no rabbi has forbidden Racheli from meeting me — a man.

A man, God has said long ago — in case you didn’t know — shall never talk with a woman who is not his wife or mother. In addition: A woman, as every child of God knows, never shakes hands with men, unless he is her husband and she is not on her period.

Yet, when we meet and I offer Ibenboim my hand, she takes it.

Did she lose her marbles? Did she fail to notice that I am a man? I have no idea, and I’m very intrigued. And so, I ask her.

“Tell me, Racheli: How come a Gur woman offers her hand to a man?”

“I am a member of the President Peres Youth Forum, a place where there are many events attended by many people: Goyim from all over the world, people of all colors and shapes, and I had a big conflict because on such occasions people shake hands all the time. I was thinking about it and I made a rule for myself: I will shake hands with men I meet in official affairs, provided I don’t know them personally.”

The rationale, she explains, is grounded in the ultra-Orthodox tradition, not something she has made up. She gives me an example: “Haredi women, when they board a bus, pay the fare by giving money to the driver, into his hands.”

Wow! Drivers are men and I should be treated like a driver. Or a goy. I love it!

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The Philistines in Jordan

Noah Wiener for Bible History Daily

When we think of the Philistines, we think of the traditional foes of the Israelites. Philistine archaeology has revealed a bit more of the picture. Tell-es Safi (Biblical Gath, a major Philistine city and the hometown of Goliath) excavators Aren M. Maeir and Carl S. Ehrlich outlined Philistine history in BAR in 2001:

The Philistines were one of the Sea Peoples (as we know from an Egyptian inscription), a group of seafaring tribes that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean world at the end of the Bronze Age (1200 B.C.E.). After engaging in a number of battles with Egypt, the Philistines settled in Canaan, possibly as Egyptian mercenaries. After attempting to extend their influence farther into inland Canaan, an attempt reflected in the accounts of various battles recorded in the books of Judges and 1 Samuel, the Philistines were wedged into the southwestern coastal strip of Canaan, presumably by King David, in the early tenth century B.C.E.

Archaeology often paints a distinctively Mediterranean picture of the Philistines: three of the five cities of the Philistine “pentapolis” were located on the coast; Philistine religion shows distinct Aegean characteristics; and the Philistine marketplace at Ashkelon was situated directly on the sea, suggesting a western focus for Philistine trade.

Other than Israel, no country has as many Biblical sites and associations as Jordan: Mount Nebo, from where Moses gazed at the Promised Land; Bethany beyond the Jordan, where John baptized Jesus; Lot’s Cave, where Lot and his daughters sought refuge after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; and many more. 

Recent excavations at Tell Abu al-Kharaz in Jordan, a site associated with the Biblical city Jabesh Gilead where Saul and David fought the Philistines and Ammonites, have pulled focus on the Philistines back away from the seashore. Swedish University of Gothenburg archaeologists excavated a 200-foot-long structure dating to around 1100 B.C.E., shortly after the Bronze Age collapse—an event often associated with the emigration of the Philistines to the Levant.

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'Sturgeon Queens' To Screen On PBS And In Festivals

New documentary details life of appetizing store Russ & Daughters.

Lauren Rothman, Special To The Jewish Week

“Sturgeon Queens,” a new documentary set to screen at festivals and to air on PBS stations in the New York area, traces the vibrant life of Russ & Daughters, the iconic cured-fish palace that opened on New York’s Lower East Side in 1914. This year, the still-thriving store celebrates its 100th anniversary, and its owners, fourth-generation Russes, plan to open a 65-seat café nearby. It’s a big year for a celebrated Jewish business that has weathered many changes in the neighborhood’s cultural landscape.

Seasoned filmmaker Julie Cohen had been planning a full-length feature on the store for years. She knew that if she wanted to make it happen, 2014 would be the time.

“It really had to be this year,” she said.

Cohen, who runs the documentary production company Better Than Fiction, came across the idea for a Russ & Daughters movie back in 2008, when PBS commissioned her to produce “The Jews of New York,” an hour-long program that wove together six stories of Jewish life in the city. The tale of the appetizing store was just one of those stories, but it really resonated with Cohen, who, like many secular Jews, said that her strongest connection to her heritage is through its foods.

“Like every good Jewish girl, I love lox and pickled herring,” she said.

Continue reading here and watch the trailer below.

A Life in Pictures : Bob Mankoff

The Dotted Path to Cartoon Heaven

From Moment Magazine