Last week Variety editor Malina Saval penned an important piece:  Too Jewish For Hollywood: As Antisemitism Soars, Hollywood Should Address Its Enduring Hypocrisy In Hyperbolic Caricatures of Jews. In it Saval discusses Hollywoood’s Jewish history and its troubling portrayal of Jews. While some will say, “Jews control Hollywood,” the truth is that Jews created Hollywood […]

I just realized that if you want to be a passable Jew, you better de-Jewify. If you want to be a Jew that is tolerated, you better not be too Jewish, for there is a harm in being too Jewish. I’ve known for quite some time that the media and much of the secular world […]

From Roman invaders And Hellenist Greeks From violent Crusaders Those days were so bleak From Inquisitors in Spain And Nazis of Reich three Cossacks in Russia And then the KGB   But not in New York, Toronto, or LA. Not in London, Lima, or Paris, we won’t hide today.   The world woke up to […]

For the first two seasons of Shtisel, I feared that featuring so many dysfunctional Haredi Jews who live such stringent and strict lives would be off-putting to Jews from less observant backgrounds. The lifestyles are unappealing in many ways, the stringencies not required by Jewish law. For anyone considering a life of more observance, the […]

As I noted in my first review of Season 3, Episode 1, what I love about this season of Shtisel is that we get to see examples of better practices in the Haredi world pushing back against worse practices as well as examples of healthier Haredi Jews than we’ve seen in other seasons. In this […]

Last week, I read about how US Gymnastics is getting a major overhaul in safety. Five years since it came out that pedophile Larry Nasser abused many of their star athletes for decades, the organization is under intense pressure to create a serious cultural shift and prove that it can build a safer environment for young […]