We are painfully aware that news media and social media have exploded with horrific blood libels and lies since October 7, but Jewish depictions in Hollywood were quite problematic long before that. In the last few years, Jews were represented as moneyed and scheming (“Cobra Kai”), benefiting from the slave trade (“You People”) and committing […]
Millions of Bravo viewers first met Barbie Pascual on Below Deck, where she made an unexpected confession: “I know my soul is Jewish.” At the time, she hadn’t yet formally begun converting to Orthodox Judaism. By the time Pascual returned to the franchise most recently on Below Deck Down Under, that journey had become a […]
What does it mean to “act like a Jew”? For decades, television and film have often answered that question through tired stereotypes: neurotic, greedy, awkward, entitled, loud. But Jew in the City’s Jewish Institute for Television & Cinema’s award-winning video Like a Jew set out to offer a very different answer — one grounded in […]
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 […]
When we returned to Sundance this week for the third time, I felt like a pro. I knew how to navigate Main Street and where to stay to be close to the local kosher restaurant. Once again, we came back to a packed room for our panel, but this time we had hard data to […]
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 […]
