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 […]
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 – […]
