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 […]
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 […]
Mireille Silcoff, an author and cultural critic who lives in Montreal recently penned a poignant piece for the New York Times Magazine: There’s Something Missing in Films About Jewish Cultural Figures. In it, she describes how Jewish identity is missing from all the major Jewish biopics of late, be it Oppenheimer, about Robert J. Oppenheimer – […]
I was an Orthodox Jewish kid growing up in a small, out-of-town Jewish community when a commercial on the Disney Channel for a new movie stopped me cold. At first, it looked like every other made-for-TV sports story: a struggling basketball team, an unlikely coach, a familiar underdog arc. And then something caught my eye. […]
Over the past 14 years working as an occupational therapist in the NYC Department of Education, I’ve cherished teaching children how to hold a pencil, tie shoelaces, and navigate school challenges. But the most impactful experience continues to be a deeply personal one: Seeing the value society gives to the populations portrayed in their educational […]
