Four years ago, Jew in the City stood outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza with a simple message: Orthodox Jews deserve fair representation. At the time, NBC’s Nurses had aired an episode that grotesquely and inaccurately depicted Hasidic Jews. The portrayal sparked outrage across the Jewish community. But instead of simply protesting, we chose to do something […]
Several weeks ago JITC (Jewish Institute for Television & Cinema) Hollywood Bureau hosted an official panel at Sundance Film Festival on Jewish representation in media. We presented the findings from our groundbreaking study conducted with the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. The research examines how general Jewish characters—and also […]
For years, the Jewish Institute for Television & Cinema has observed the same patterns in Hollywood: Jewish characters reduced to familiar tropes, Jewish identity flattened into caricature, and Jewish stories told through a narrow lens that rarely reflects the depth or dignity of real Jewish life. Those observations were recently confirmed by data. JITC’s Jews […]
UPDATE 1/21/26: Since this article was first published, Elie Kligman has made history. This spring, the University of Michigan Baseball program welcomed Kligman as the first Orthodox Jew to play Division I baseball, where he joined the team as a catcher. Now 22, Kligman is a graduate student at the university and continues to balance […]
At JITC’s 2nd Jewish Media Awards, we were proud to honor Hasidic Jew Professor Aaron D. Twerski with a Jewish Media All-Star Award. A leading legal scholar and educator, Professor Aaron Twerski is the Irwin and Jill Cohen Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, a former dean at Hofstra University School of Law, and […]
In 2026, the Jewish Institute for Television & Cinema (JITC) will return to the Sundance Film Festival for the third time, once again serving as the only Jewish organization hosting an official panel on Jewish representation in film and television. JITC first brought this conversation to Sundance in 2023, where its inaugural panel drew a […]
