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 […]
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 – […]
In 2026, the Jewish Institute for Television & Cinema (JITC) will return to the Sundance Film Festival for the third time, once again serving as the only Jewish organization hosting an official panel on Jewish representation in film and television. JITC first brought this conversation to Sundance in 2023, where its inaugural panel drew a […]
