A marquee advertising Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” recently declared: “Before there were the Jews, there was… The Odyssey.” The slogan has sparked backlash, and for good reason. It isn’t historically accurate. While “The Odyssey” was composed centuries later, its story is traditionally set around 1200 BCE, in the aftermath of the Trojan War. By that […]
Twenty-two years ago director Gidi Dar did something groundbreaking. He was part of a team that brought Ushpizin, a positive, nuanced, authentic depiction of Hasidic Jews to Tribeca. Ushpizin gave way to films like Rama Burshtein’s Fill The Void, shows like Shtisel and somewhat mainstreamed the idea that Hasidic and Haredi Jews are human, worthy […]
The Jewish internet has been abuzz about “Bread of Affliction,” the recent episode of Apple’s Your Friends and Neighbors, which aired closer to Lag B’Omer than Passover, but who’s counting? Actually, lots of people! (Google “sefiras haomer” if you didn’t get that!) What I saw repeated over and over again was how authentic and detailed […]
Growing up in secular America, it was always a major event when they would broadcast The Ten Commandments on one of the major, primetime networks. Although I watched it on a television screen decades after it “played on the big screen, it still took my breath away – even as a child of the eighties, […]
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 […]
Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared a surprising statistic: people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs the company tens of millions of dollars a year in computing power. Every extra word requires additional processing, and when you multiply that across hundreds of millions of users, basic politeness suddenly becomes expensive. And yet people […]
