This week was Shavuot, when the Jews received the Torah. But just as the good Lord giveth, so does he taketh away (is that in the Torah? Or is that a New Testament thing?). And this week was also one of loss so great, I fear I can hardly do justice to the resulting sense of emptiness in just once column, except to say it’s a comfort to know that on some level, humanity grieves together.

We’re all always sitting shiva for something or other—our youth, our illusions, the perfect sentence that flew out of our minds (never to return) when the person in front of us thrust his seat back, almost crushing our pelvis and breaking the screen on our laptop. (Yes, I’m on a plane right now, just like Thomas Friedman! If it crashes, this will be the last thing I ever write. Dynamism!)

Continue reading "Sitting Shiva for Smash—and, One Fears, a Generation’s Connection to Musical Theater" at...

Ladies and Gentlemen, the doctor is out.

Dr. Joyce Brothers, the legendary television psychologist and $64,000 question boxing maven (she later credited her expertise in this area to a producer suggestion, hours and hours of furious cramming, and a truly prodigious memory), has died of a respiratory ailment at age 85. Gentle, approachable and calmly articulate, Dr. Brothers was a ubiquitous but always charming media presence, from her television show to her columns to her multitude of cameo appearances, including The Simpsons, Hollywood Squares, Happy Days (in which she famously dissected the latent homosexual tendencies of the Cunningham’s dog—it’s on the blooper reel) and my personal favorite, her gracious turn on the country club catwalk during the Wilderness girl-themed, Robin Leach-hosted celebrity fashion show in my favorite movie of all time, Troop Beverly Hills (“clad in khaki for a luxury stroll or a walk in the woods.”)

Continue reading "The Doctor Is Out: Remembering Dr. Joyce Brothers" at...

Are you tired of hearing about The Great Gatsby yet? I kind of am! In its latest iteration, it’s a movie by a filmmaker I don’t like, based on a book that I have never—bear with me—been totally crazy about, set in a era that has always seemed, in the collective subconscious at least, more a flashy theme for a supermodel’s birthday party than one with any meaningful historical context or populated by living, breathing human beings.

And yet, I’m still going to see it, and not just because I recently realized that my deep emotional attachment to Leonardo DiCaprio remains the longest—if most one-sided—romantic relationship of my life. And I’m going to see it in 3-D. Not for the usual, joked-about reasons—Jay Gatsby flinging his many colored shirts right into the audience, the eerily protuberant eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg popping straight off the screen and directly into your soul—but because I can’t resist the most delicious irony this spring since the Met Ball went punk.

Continue reading "Baz Lurhmann's 'Gatsby' and the Figment of Meyer Wolfsheim" at...

The Queen is dead! Long live the King!

That is what they are decidedly not saying in the Netherlands right now, where the former Queen Beatrix, having in accordance with typically practical Dutch tradition abdicated after 33 years on the throne in favor of her oldest son, Willem-Alexander, is still very much alive.

Continue reading "The Netherlands' Beatrix Ushers in a New Era" at...

What I’m about to say my upset you. It may make you angry. It may even shock you.

We need to be nicer to Gwyneth Paltrow.

Continue reading "Why We Hate Gwyneth Paltrow Too Too Much" at...

O ye of little faith.

I told you.

Continue reading "The Suffering and Ascendance of Jews in AMC's 'Mad Men' Season 6" at...

Game of Thrones has made its triumphant return across the Narrow Sea and is back on Sunday nights on HBO for Season 3. For fans of dragons, medieval warfare, and hilariously gratuitous nudity, this is very good news indeed.

As much as I love the show—except for all the Beyond the Wall zombie stuff which is a) boring, b) cold, and c) confusing because it’s impossible to tell anyone apart—I can’t watch it without thinking of Michael Weingrad’s great essay a few years ago in the Jewish Review of Books about the relative dearth of Jewish fantasy writers, and the lack of classic fantasy (in the Dungeons & Dragons sense) in the Jewish imagination. It’s a fascinating piece that draws a number of probing, thoughtful, and critically sound conclusions. Feudal societies on which the fantasy genre is built traditionally had little use for Jews except to burn them alive, to borrow money from them (and then convict them of treason as a way of defaulting on debts, the punishment for which was burning alive), or when someone needed a doctor (after which the doctor, regardless of whether the patient lived or died, could be accused of witchcraft, and thus burned alive). There was a lack of a cultural memory of pagan influence in the Jewish collective imagination, and there was a pragmatic dismissiveness about literary duality—Christian literature looks into the underworld and sees a seething miasma that operates in mysterious parallel to the knowable, godly world, Jews peer into the depthless fathoms below and see a cheap source of belly lox.

Continue reading "HBO's 'Game of Thrones' Reimagined as the Seven Kingdoms of Jewish Westerows" at...

“Have you ever known someone who was disfigured?” Helen Mirren, as defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden, asks an anxious junior associate in Phil Spector, the new HBO film premiering Sunday about the murder trial and eventual conviction of the legendary music producer. “Like, really difficult to look at? You see them enough, eventually you grow used to it.”

It’s a notion that the film—written and directed by David Mamet in typical hard-nosed style—asserts over and over again. His face obscured behind dark glasses, his bald head clad in a variety of increasingly bizarre wigs, from a blond little Dutch Boy variant to a skunk-striped perm that would not look out of place on one of the more flamboyant members of your grandma’s B’nai Brith Sisterhood chapter, Phil Spector, as played by Al Pacino, appears to be every inch the “freak” his lawyers openly worry the jury will see him as: reclusive, deranged, and frightening, a proverbial Beast shut away from the world in his forbidding castle.

Continue reading "Al Pacino Plays a Shylockian Phil Spector in David Mamet's New HBO Film" at...

So, I was passing through the Los Angeles airport last week.

Don’t worry, this isn’t about to turn into a humble-bragging Thomas Friedman column where I somehow manage to work in a lot of details about my fabulous jet-setting lifestyle of discussing current events with world leaders and preternaturally wise cab drivers while bemoaning our comparatively faulty infrastructure and pleading with Mike Bloomberg to buy us out of this mess before every building, sidewalk, and taco stand in America crumbles to dust.

Continue reading "What the Jewishness of the New Oz Movie's Actors Says About Assimilation" at...

There’s been so much on the Twitterwebiverse this week, both real and manufactured—Seth MacFarlane’s boob jokes! the anti-Semitic Teddy bear! Anne Hathaway’s continued insistence that she has as much right to walk this Earth as any human being who is less talented and pretty!—that I almost can’t handle Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind’s ridiculous blackface Purim costume of no known living “basketball player” in no recognizable uniform.

Almost, but not quite. And I’ll tell you why: In a time when a huge swath of the population—myself included—spends enormous chunks of time parsing various acts of unwitting and unintentional racism, sexism, ageism, sizeism, and any other vague adjective you can attach an “ism” to and wag a finger at, it’s important to break through the wall of what Lindy West at Jezebel smartly terms “outrage fatigue” and point out when things are genuinely, inexcusably offensive. Hikind’s choice of costume was.

Continue reading "What Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind’s Purim Costume Does to Anti-Semitism" at...

The 85th Academy Awards are being hosted by Seth MacFarlane this year, leaving open the real possibility that they will not feature a parodic opening medley with all the names of the Best Picture nominees, and even if they do, it will be performed by Seth MacFarlane, which is a big problem. To my mind, this medley has to be performed, and it has to be performed by Billy Crystal, otherwise the whole thing is unofficial and nobody really won, like how if they don’t lift you up in chairs at your wedding, you’re not really married.

And yet! As Tablet Magazine is a place of wonder where dreams come true, I have somehow been allowed to write and perform my own Crystal-esque Oscar medley in the style of my idol Marc Shaiman, which I hope will mitigate some of this disappointment.

Continue reading "Forget Billy Crystal! Tablet's Rachel Shukert Sings Her Own Oscars Medley" at...

After more than a decade of rape jokes, dick jokes, and sly inversion of all forms of racism, we’re all pretty used to Sarah Silverman and her comedy, which in this era of Girls, “hipster racism,” and hundreds of YouTube videos of the aspiring stars of tomorrow strumming folksy songs about their various bodily functions can seem both oddly prescient and oddly quaint in its resolve to shock.

So, it’s only fitting that another Silverman has emerged on the scene, intent on breaking down a set of very different boundaries: Susan, the comedian’s rabbi sister, who along with her teenage daughter Hallel Abramowitz was among the latest group of women to be detained by Israeli authorities to appease the unbending ire of a bunch of absurdly powerful men dressed as John Galliano. Their transgressions, committed as part of the social action group Women of the Wall, seem to be the usual ones of wearing tallit, reading Torah, and other acts of “gender-bending” that the ultra-Orthodox seem to think will turn the entire Temple Mount into something resembling an extra-fierce episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race (we should be so lucky). The comedian herself was quick to Tweet her support: “So proud of my amazing sister @rabbisusan & niece @purplelettuce95 for their ballsout civil disobedience. Ur the tits! #womenofthewall.”

Continue reading "Sarah Silverman’s Sister’s Protest Against Gender Inequality Is the Best Thing the Silvermans Have Done" at...

If you’re not a Lubavitcher, it’s possible you might have heard of Oprah Winfrey, the Edward the Confessor of the modern age. One day, when the rising waters of New York Harbor finally swamp its barrier islands, I fully expect the rebuilt Lady Liberty gracing the desiccated shores of what once was Manhattan to be fashioned in her likeness, with the poem engraved on the pedestal on which her enormous Louboutin-shod feet rest exhorting the world to give her its housebound, its compulsive, its seekers of absolution, its celebrity hangers-on that have a book to push.

Cissy Houston—mother of the late, great Whitney—belongs to that final category, although you’d hardly know it from the hubbub over her recent sit-down with the Mother Superior herself on Oprah’s Next Chapter. Instead, most of the post-show buzz has concerned Houston mère’s candid, and seemingly unashamed, admission that, well, she’s not super comfortable with gayness.

Continue reading "Saving Some of My Love: Cissy Houston's Prejudice Against Gays, and Ours Against Intermarriage" at...

My dear congregation, you may notice I am sermonizing to you a little earlier than usual this week. This is because I want to talk to you about something that happened on Monday, before Suri Cruise gets a haircut or Kim Kardashian farts in public and we forget all about it. On Monday, on what seemed like an unnervingly warm day for the end of January, we celebrated the second inauguration of our president.

Michelle had flattering new bangs, Malia and Sasha were as usual adorable. Beyoncé wore a full length evening gown and a cool $1.8 million in matched emeralds to lip sync “The Star Spangled Banner,” while Kelly Clarkson, in a triumph of placement through what sounded like a possible cold, appeared to sing the hell out of some parody lyrics to the British national anthem. On a more serious and meaningful note, there was President Barack Hussein Obama delivering the kind of full-throated, unapologetic endorsement of liberal policies and ideals that if you are me, made you weep with joy, and if you are Sen. Mitch McConnell will send you scrambling to the hills of South Dakota or wherever—until you realize that nobody picks up the trash in a libertarian “community” and you come crawling back to the rest of us Marxists with mail delivery.

Continue reading "Here’s to Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Uncle Leo of American Democracy" at...

I hardly think I need to explain to anyone who has been to the movies in the past 30 years—or indeed, anyone reading this column—the masochistic, magnificent, cinematic pleasure of the Holocaust picture. It would take a more qualified psychologist than me (Ed. note: Rachel is not a psychologist at all) to tell you why spending a couple of tense hours watching meticulous recreations of genocidal atrocity feels so emotionally satisfying. Whether it’s an uplifting story of the bittersweet triumph of the human spirit against impossible odds, a cinema-verité trek into the heart of darkness (complete with realistic gas chambers and period teeth), or some colossally miscalculated piece of insta-kitsch involving European-style circus clowns, we watch, we cry, we feel strangely proud of ourselves for having the courage to stare unguardedly into the chasm of man’s infinite inhumanity to man, even if we did have a jumbo-size popcorn to help us get through it. And when these films invariably win, or are at least nominated for, the Best Picture Oscar that year, we nod approvingly, satisfied that the world has rightfully continued to acknowledge that people hate Jews and that in most cases this is a bad thing.

But not this year. Move over, Anne Frank. When it comes to portrayals of cataclysmically human events of nearly incomprehensible scale, there’s a new sheriff in town. It’s been a long, a long time coming, but a change is going to come.

Continue reading "Are Slavery Movies the New Holocaust Flicks?" at...

Happy New Year! Do you watch Downton Abbey? Of course you do; you’re an English-speaking human being with access to machinery. (Ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer, especially if you have to provide it yourself.)

But you’re also—if our demographic research is anything like accurate—an English-speaking human being with more than a glancing familiarity with the laws of Moses and Israel, which means that when you first found out that the maiden name of Cora, the august and current Lady Grantham, was the very, shall we say, un-English Levinson, you may have done a little mental hora of joy. Of course, every Jewish-American woman is a princess, or so we’ve been told—but a countess? In the bizarre prism of the hereditary aristocracy, where the more minor the title the fancier it seems, that’s really quite something. We’ve arrived.

Continue reading "Why 'Downton Abbey' Elides Period-Specific British Anti-Semitism" at...

2012 is almost over. We’ve caught up on Homeland, there’s a royal heir on the way—speaking of which, please allow me to take this opportunity to apologize for any confusion my Tweets may have caused as to the doings of my own womb; the fact that you think that I might plausibly refer to myself as “Her Royal Highness” calls for some serious introspection, to say the least—and we’ve all seen Les Misérables and adjusted our feelings about Anne Hathaway accordingly.

But otherwise, things are feeling pretty much the same this year as they did last time. We have the same president (thank God); the world didn’t end; Republicans in Congress are attempting to hold the country and its economy hostage over some predictable and utterly manufactured mishegas. As for Israel, well, Iran, settlements, Hamas, no peace talks—you know that song like you know every word to I Dreamed a Dream. Basically, we’re all just running down the clock, hoping that any looming catastrophe will keep until we’re safely dead.

Continue reading "After a Rough 2012, a New Year's Resolution for 2013 from The Tattler" at...

It’s been such a horrible week, full of unbearably horrible questions. I’ve never been more grateful that I don’t have to think of answers to any of them. This column, from its inception, has been a strictly frivolous enterprise, with any profundity of insight it may generate being entirely accidental. I’m not saying this to be self-deprecating; if the events of the past several days have taught us anything, it’s that shallowness has its place—one can’t help in moments like these but think of that immortal post-Sept. 11 Onion headline: “A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.”

So, rather than spend the next 900 words or so wading into some unnavigable debate about gun control or mental illness or violent video games or some heartbreaking combination of the three, I will focus here, as is my wont, on the ridiculous, the glib, the hysterical, the inane. Sometimes you can’t listen to any more weeping parents, or you don’t feel like holding your kids tighter. Sometimes you just need to laugh at something random on the Internet.

Continue reading "10 Things Tattler Loved About 2012" at...

And Lo! So the Lord said, on these winter days most holy shall a child be born; unto the kingdom shall a child be given. And shall he build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land?

Beats the hell out of me. For you see, I speak not on this day of Its Highness, the Royal Fetus, currently slumbering in the churning miasma of the Duchess of Cambridge’s middle-class womb, but of another child, with a lineage no less rarefied than that of the infant who will eventually reign over him (or half of him, anyway): young Henry Weisz-Aronofsky. Last week, this perfectly innocuous photograph of him sent some of my male colleagues at Tablet HQ into a death spiral of self-doubt and erotic terror.

Continue reading "What Rachel Weisz’s Happy Life With Daniel Craig Means for Jewish Men" at...

They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat.

Passed down through generations of wisecracking uncles and joke-aggregation emails forwarded by that lady with the male-pattern baldness who plays tennis with your mom, it’s the standard template for nearly every Jewish holiday; an omnipresent reminder that, to paraphrase David Mamet, the world hates the Jews, the world has always done and will continue to do so, yet we will live to eat brisket another day.

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And so it happens: The citizens of a great and powerful nation come together peacefully, with clear eyes and full hearts, to choose who alone among them has the tenacity, the courage, and the wisdom to rise to power. The decision is long in the making, the victory hard-won, and when it’s all over, one can do nothing but hope they have chosen the right leader to guide them fearlessly into the future, while remaining true to the lessons of the past.

I am speaking, of course, of Jewish Mum of the Year, the reality competition series (in the English sense that a series can be, like, four episodes long) that just concluded on the U.K.’s Channel 4. Conceived in part by the editor of London’s The Jewish Week, the show pitted eight Jewish mothers, ranging from the be-turbaned ultra-Orthodox to the spray-tanned, navel-ringed secular, against each other, asking them to participate in Top Chef-like challenges like planning a bar mitzvah luncheon or finding an appropriate date for a single woman by reciting the questionnaire from a matchmaking site to a variety of oddly dressed men. Two “mums” face elimination each episode for sins as varied as choosing gazpacho for a synagogue luncheon (I was puzzled too—it’s tasty! it’s parve!—until I remember that the acidity is bad for anyone on Lipitor) to being generally too laid-back and well-adjusted, the ultimate reality sin. The eventual winner is to be rewarded by the newspaper with her own advice column, as well as the satisfaction of having been officially recognized as the most overbearing, meddlesome, and thoroughly unbearable person on Earth. Mazel tov.

Continue reading "The Reality of British Reality Show 'Jewish Mum of the Year' " at...

Yes, yes, I know. Boardwalk Empire is very important. First of all, it is very expensive. Second of all, it is on HBO. Third of all, being very important, very expensive, and very much on HBO, it always seems to be nominated for a boatload of Emmys, further adding to its aura of importance. It has fancy costumes and complex characters and an intricate, multilevel plot structure. It’s the kind of show that by any known algorithm I should absolutely love.

I don’t. I take full responsibility for this. I feel like it’s a failing on my part, an indication of something faulty in my personal wiring, like my total lack of interest in contemporary music, or my hatred for elaborately prepared tasting menus, or how somehow the thought of an impending climate-induced apocalypse never seems quite urgent enough to me to bother unplugging my computer when I’m not using it. So, every year, I try. I gear up for the new season with my hopes high and the kind of grit and determination I usually reserve for arguing with my insurance company over my dental benefits. (When it comes to teeth, I am tireless.) And every year, about this time, I hit a wall and can’t go on.

Continue reading "How Jewish Gangsters Could Save HBO's 'Boardwalk Empire'" at...

“I’ve got a name for this hairstyle,” says Rebel Wilson of her high, cheerleader-style ponytail in her scene-stealing role as the soi-disant “Fat Amy” in the new comedy Pitch Perfect. “I call it the Orthodox Jews. Because it’s quite reserved in front, but a party in the back.” If this sounds like a bit of a non-sequitur in a film that mainly concerns itself with giving Millennial audiences our most seminal look at a cappella singing since Rockapella exhorted us to get up off the couch and go and find Carmen Sandiego (where could she be?), that’s because it is. In context, it still comes out of nowhere. That’s what makes it funny.

As it turns out, though, this is not the only time a joke of this nature pops up unexpectedly in a movie that is utterly—even refreshingly—free of Jewish content, explicit or implicit (yeah, there’s a nerdy kid whose last name is Applebaum, but I’ll let that go for now). Most of them seem to revolve around Wilson for no deeper reason than that she is the designated funny one and therefore given all the funniest lines. But the fact that these jokes are considered the funniest tells us a great deal about the place of the Jewish joke—or rather, the joke about Jews—in American comedy today.

Continue reading "Why the Jewish Joke Is Low Risk, High Reward" at...

Mazel tov, Anne Hathaway!

For those of you who don’t read the tabloids or fit into the narrow Venn diagram sliver of people equally obsessed with Les Misérables and The Dark Knight Rises (even I fit into only one of those circles; I’ll let you guess which), allow me to inform  you: The Devil Wears Prada star and patron saint of drama nerds married her fiancé Adam Shulman last weekend. The groom wore a suit; the bride, a custom-made Valentino confection with a headpiece that made her look like the world’s most ethereal lobotomy patient. They did it in Big Sur. And, as every tabloid has made clear, it was a “traditional Jewish ceremony.”

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Baruch dayan ha’emet. Blessed is God, the true judge. This is the prayer we say upon learning of the recently dead, and something we remind ourselves on Yom Kippur, when we pray fervently not to be among them.

But the phrase takes on a new meaning when you consider the fact that we may be living in one of the most harshly judgmental environments of the modern era, or at least, you know, since you moved out of your parents’ house. Vast hordes of anonymous and seemingly tireless Internet commenters take to the boards to vehemently defame anyone with whom they might have the slightest disagreement—as a monster, a Nazi, a whore, or worse. Televised panels of professional yentas, as purposeful and solemn as any beit din, gather to hand down judgments on everything from what clothes people wear to their aptitude as parents (and look, I’m not saying Dina Lohan is going to win any Mother of the Year awards, but it’s pretty rich coming from Sharon Osborne). For every article defending the Duchess of Cambridge through her recent photo scandal, there seem to be a slew of others condemning her for having the temerity to have breasts in the first place. (As per a clever Gawker commenter: “Don’t want to get raped? Don’t wear your vagina.”) And last, but certainly not least, a major party’s nominee for president dismisses nearly half the population of the country he hopes to lead as shiftless freeloaders leading a life of luxury as government dependents—so much so, in this vision, that L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon must soon be accepting food stamps along with American Express.

Continue reading "Yom Kippur Lessons From a Random Internet Transvestite" at...

Wa wa WEE wa. Sure, as an expression, it’s a little 2006. But every so often a situation comes along that is so exceptional, so shocking, so deliciously titillating that the nonsense string of syllables made famous as the mating call of Borat Sagdiyev—not to mention Israeli comedian Dov Glickman before him—is the only possible response.

In case you don’t follow me on Twitter, I am speaking of course of the recent photographs leaked of His Royal Highness Prince Harry, epically wasted and splendiferously nude on his post-Olympic Hangover-style romp in Las Vegas. I’m sure you’ve seen them by now, so I’ll refrain from describing them here out of deference to the Palace and in particular, Prince Philip, whose bladder probably can’t stand any more excitement this year, except to say that out of the current crop of “glamorous young royals,” Harry, as far as I’m concerned, is the only one giving anyone their money’s worth. (If I was a British taxpayer, I’d insist on seeing naked pictures of all of them, a la those strange “anatomical” photos the admissions board used to take of incoming freshmen at Ivy League universities. Brutal and archaic, yes, but so is the hereditary principle.)

Continue reading "Prince Harry, Touchstone of Europe's Circumcision War?" at...

You know how it is.

You’re standing in the hallway outside the bathroom watching your husband shave, your always-simmering wrath toward the state of American politics in general and the Republican Party in particular brought to a rolling boil by several cups of coffee drunk at injudicious speed, and you’re both inveighing against certain distant-ish relatives whose ideological leanings are a constant source of ire, wondering aloud what terrible misfortune might need to befall them to bring them around, or at least lay their hypocrisy bare. That they should suffer a catastrophic illness that their insurance refuses to cover, leaving them nothing to be so bent out of shape about re: the estate tax? That they should be so hot for Israel to bomb Iran that their son drops out of medical school to join the IDF? That their son should be elected president and they should have no idea what the hell they did with his birth certificate? And then a light bulb goes on.

Continue reading "My Husband and I Made ‘Yiddish Curses for Republican Jews.’ You’re Welcome." at...

When I was growing up, my grandmother kept a photograph of her forebears, my great-great (I may be missing a great) grandparents, in her dining room, where it hung over the rolling bar cart, an implement that for complicated reasons cultural and generational never held anything more intoxicating than an economy-sized vat of Gummi Bears and another one of rapidly decaying Chex Mix. Anyway, I hope it’s not speaking ill of the dead to say the image was not a flattering one. To be more precise, it scared the shit out of me. It was made in Europe sometime in the 1890s, using the same technology as those Victorian mourning portraits of dead bodies. The woman glared fiercely into the camera with strange pale eyes that pointed in two different directions, like the witch in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Her stiff horsehair wig, styled in a tight samurai-style topknot, did little to soften the frankly Habsburgian-underbite that made her lower canine teeth protrude over her lower lip. As for him, his face was almost entirely obscured by a scraggly length of matted beard, like if you put a pair of glasses and an enormous yarmulke on Cousin Itt.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure they were both lovely people, but life in a turn-of-the-century, pre-orthodontia Poland was clearly hard on the looks, and I used to stare at the picture—this “heirloom,” as my grandmother liked to call it—with horrified fascination, pondering what vast existential schism of time and bizarre confluence of genes could possibly connect these people to me. Not that I thought I was any great beauty, but there’s a difference between the odd bout of chin acne and having teeth that touch your nose.

Continue reading ""Honey Boo Boo," Reality TV's Convincing Take on Immigrant Aspirations" at...

Carrie Bradshaw and friends once asserted, just before dissolving into communal martini-induced weeping, that there are two kinds of women in this world: “simple” girls, and “Katie” girls. The “simple” girls, as personified in the episode by Mr. Big’s new fiancée (Bridget Moynihan, before she was jilted IRL by Tom Brady) are adoring, self-abnegating types who instinctively know how to position throw pillows and don’t ask too many questions and never forget to buy Windex. The “Katie” girls—so-called after the main character in The Way We Were, as played by Barbra Streisand in her most glorious stage as supreme deity to, in the words of Fran Drescher, all “Jewish girls in search of a leader”—are unruly, uncompromising, challenging, fearless; the kind of women who don’t let their partners easily win arguments or dictate their ambitions, who want to be the main characters in their own stories. If men—who conceivably range from shaygetz gods like Robert Redford with rumpled golden locks suitable for tender/inflamed mussing to the nebbishy bald guy your mother made you go out with over Thanksgiving—ultimately reject you, it’s not because of anything you’ve done wrong, but because the schmucks are simply scared of your Katie-girl wonderfulness. The lesson is clear: Different is nice, but it sure isn’t pretty/ Pretty is what it’s about.

And it all happened because Marvin Hamlisch wrote that song.

Continue reading "Hamlisch’s Genius: ‘The Way We Were’ as Ultimate Survivor’s Song" at...

Tragedy has again unexpectedly struck the post-war generation of urbane Jewish tastemakers and those who love them. Legendary composer of “A Chorus Line” and genuine EGOT Marvin Hamlisch has died, at the alarmingly young(ish) age of 68, after what his family has termed a “brief illness.” The kick line in Heaven will be especially precise tonight.

I’ll have lots more on Hamlisch and his unique genius in my Tattler column this Friday. For now, console yourselves with this account from our friend Michael Schulman at the New Yorker—someone who never knew Marvin but desperately wanted to–and the terrific clip below of Hamlisch playing a medley of his songs.

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Most 86-year-old women, whatever their ethnic persuasion, do not arrive at important events via helicopter parachute, escorted by a hot piece like Daniel Craig; many of them can’t even stand up in the shower anymore. But everything else, from the ongepotchket peach lace dress to the passive-aggressive “oy, mein back” shuffle to the seats to that face, seemingly caught constantly in mid-kvetch, saying “For this you made me come out in the middle of the night, sitting outside in the rain like a dog?” Not a trace of her former impersonal friendliness, of smiling Gentile stoicism, remained. At the Olympic opening ceremony, somewhere in between the coal miners performing a Dickensian rendition of the “Stool Boom” number from Waiting for Guffman and the interpretive dance salute to the National Health Service, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, became the whole world’s bitchy Jewish bubbe. I half expected her to take an ancient sucking candy from that famous purse of hers and unwrap it loudly during the moment of silence “for everyone” that the IOC creepily rammed into the ceremony at the last minute.

Was she like this all along? The question of any stray Jewish heritage within the British Royal Family has been explored mainly by the British Israelite movement—for the most part a cheerful and benign group of loonies who since the time of Queen Victoria have held that the Ten Lost Tribes somehow found their way to the sceptered isles, where they became the progenitors of the British people, making the Windsors direct-line descendants of King David—and the usual bunch of anti-Semitic Internet crazies who believe that everyone in a position of power today is somehow a secret Rothschild taking part in a crypto-Zionist Judeo-Bolshevist conspiracy to control the world.

Continue reading "When Did the Queen of England, Star of the Olympic Opening Ceremony, Become a Jewish Grandmother?" at...

If the old Jewish left is dying, as many elegiac trend pieces and hopeful Republican pollsters would have us believe, it has, over the past few years, come roaring back to life on New York stages. In 2009, Tony Kushner, always a trendsetter and never a stranger to exploration of various utopianisms, brought us The Intelligent Homosexual’s  Guide to Capitalism & Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures. Obie-winning playwright Amy Herzog is practically a one-woman trend piece with her recent excavations of her own familly’s radical past in After the Revolution and 4000 Miles. And now, currently playing in the HOT! Festival at downtown performance laboratory Dixon Place, comes The Material World, a new musical by multi-disciplinarian artist Dan Fishback, which concerns a family of Russian-Jewish Communists in 1920s New York who grapple with Chekhovian concerns such as sisterly rivalry, political stasis, and the ever-present question of when (and if) they will return to a newly revolutionized Moscow.

Fishback is a close friend, and his director, Stephen Brackett, was actually an honor attendant at my wedding, so this isn’t a review. But even a more impartial viewer than I can see that the play raises a host of fascinating issues—chief among them, alluded to in its title, the conflict between idealism and materialism, which Fishback cleverly personifies, respectively, in his protagonist Gittel Fenster, a pre-pubescent revolutionary who scrawls Leninist creeds in her diary with all the fervor of a besotted adolescent, and her beautiful older sister Mitzi, who returns from a sleepover at the unseen proto-JAP Ruthie Feigenboim’s house with fantastical tales of flounced pink bedspreads and gorgeous dresses so numerous “she don’t even know how many she has.”

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Well, it happened. The mortgage bubble burst, and the stock market crashed. The war in Afghanistan continues to rage (or at least sputter), Iran looks every day dismally closer to having the capability to wipe its entire region off the map in a bout of dictatorial PMS. And finally, the last mess created during the Bush Administration is ready for President Obama to clean up, as if he didn’t have enough to deal with this summer: Katie Holmes has filed for divorce from Tom Cruise.

My bubbe always told me there was nothing less attractive than feigned shock (although she didn’t quite put it that way, and it was mostly in regard to grave misfortune, like your house being burned down by Germans or Poles or Cossacks), so I won’t pretend to be surprised now. We’ve had enough years of paparazzi photographs of a wan, gray-faced Katie listlessly wandering the streets of New York with seemingly no purpose other than to dispense to young Mistress Suri cupcakes, ice creams, and—in the creepy parlance of the Daily Mail—“cuddly toys” to know that life in Cruiseland isn’t exactly Risky Business, or even that scene in Rain Man where he teaches Dustin Hoffman to dance.

Continue reading "What Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' Prenup Shares With a Ketubah" at...

It’s one of the professional hazards of writing for a Jewish magazine that you begin to reflexively excavate Jewish subtext in popular culture where probably (and preferably) none was intended. In this realm of thought, Downton Abbey becomes a toff re-imagining of Fiddler on the Roof, True Blood a cautionary tale on the trials of assimilation (or anti-Semitic blood libel, take your pick), and the Harry Potter saga an elaborate magical allegory for the Holocaust (although did she really have to make the inhuman goblins hook-nosed and bankers?). So many Jews, lurking around every corner, casting their shadow over every aspect of society and culture, no matter how unrelated! One almost starts to understand how the anti-Semites feel. Mel Gibson, c’est moi.

It’s a relief, then, to come across something like Francesca Segal’s skillfully rendered and delightful debut novel, The Innocents, which subverts the paradigm by putting the inferable Yiddishkeit of an iconic work front and center. In her Hebraized—and cleverly literal—retelling of The Age of Innocence, Segal substitutes Edith Wharton’s Gilded-Age Manhattan upper crust for the tightly knit Jewish community of north London suburb Temple Fortune (disclosure: My husband was born, if not raised, in precisely such environs). The primly vacillating Newland Archer is converted into Adam Newman, a thirty-ish lawyer and professional Nice Jewish Boy beginning to feel hemmed in by all the Shabbat dinners and mandatory chauffeuring of old ladies and unimaginative sexual positions and wondering if there might be some sort of wonderful wonders awaiting him in the glamorous world of gentiles. Newland’s intended, the innocent May Welland, becomes Rachel Gilbert, Adam’s recent fiancée and girlfriend since high school (they met on a teen tour of Israel and were instantly smitten; readers—not to mention Rachel’s parents—may be forgiven for asking what took them so long); Ellen Olenska, the wounded temptress who entices Newland to stray from the well-traveled path of propriety, finds her counterpart in Rachel’s cousin Ellie Schneider, a 6-foot-tall, 22-year-old blonde Jewish supermodel. If that last one strikes you as a little, shall we say, unlikely, then congratulations! You’re as self-hating as I am.

Continue reading "The Cage of Innocence: In Francesca Segal’s 'The Innocents,' Shades of Edith Wharton in Jewish North London" at...

I confess I’m at a loss here. Usually, when a writer has a block, it’s because she’s genuinely baffled; because she’s subconsciously holding herself back until she knows what to say. The bizarre holding pen of expression in which I find myself now is the opposite: I have too much to say about Nora Ephron, too much sorrow to express; too much confusion about what has happened, and when, and why; too much shock at the end of a life that even at 71 seems to have been cut tragically short.

More than anything, I want to get right to the point, because I have a feeling she would have wanted it that way.

Continue reading "How Nora Ephron Created an Entirely New Type of Woman: Sharp, Romantic, and Empowered" at...

It’s official! Memorial Day is but a distant memory—pardon the pun—and Summer 2012 is finally upon us. If you’re anything like me, for the next three months you’ll be spending a lot of time worrying about how fat your armpits look in a tank top and trying to be a politely unobtrusive guest at other people’s vacation homes.

I can’t offer you any help with the armpit problem without invoking cries of “Healer! Heal thyself!” but there’s no better way to keep out of a testy host’s hair than to lose yourself in a good, “trashy” (which is a word that literary people like myself like to use to mean “genuinely absorbing”) novel. A whole slew of summer reading round-up lists, the seasonal equivalent of those service-y holiday fancy-people features about what to give the doorman for Christmas so he doesn’t let his college-aged niece squat in your apartment while you’re in St. Bart’s, are currently circulating in every major magazine and newspaper right now, giving you the lowdown on all the books the struggling publishing industry is sincerely hoping you buy at full price this June.

Continue reading "Need a Beach Read? Rona Jaffe’s Complicated, Poignant, Frank Novels Are the First (and Still Best) Chick Lit" at...

As a movie, it has everything. It’s the story of a troubled man struggling to transcend his dark past with an act of faith, a Manichean battle between the forces of darkness and light inside each one of us, a cautionary tale of power gone mad and talent corrupted by hate. It’s got religion, violence, revenge, betrayal, fanaticism, addiction, really creepy sex, and an enormous stuffed owl. Added up, it’s a scenario so compelling you might be forgiven for feeling a little disappointed that it’s Joe Eszterhas who’s writing it.

But Heaven and Mel, Ezsterhas’ juicy new Kindle Single detailing how the Basic Instinct writer bravely discovered that the permanently embattled What Women Want star is in fact a genuine, virulent anti-Semite (as opposed to a circumstantial, alcohol-influenced fashion designer type) and a paranoid, possibly dangerous maniac while collaborating (as many, including me, have noted) on M.C.K.B.I., a biopic about Judah Maccabee—which the Chicken Run star planned to produce and direct (if you’re wondering if I plan to continue referring to Gibson as the star of various mostly forgotten films from the mid-to-late 1990s, the answer is yes; the Internet isn’t going away, and we might as well make good use of it) is his story, and tell it he does, with the bravado and lack of moral ambiguity of the experienced Hollywood hack. As one of those one-word titles starring Liam Neeson my husband watches on pay-per-view, it’s a work of art. As a piece of genuine insight, it leaves something to be desired.

Continue reading "In ‘Heaven and Mel,’ Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas Again Recounts His Belated Discovery of Mel Gibson’s Anti-Semitism" at...

It’s 2012, nearly seven decades after the fall of the Reich that was meant to last a millennium (and only fell short by 992 years), yet the hottest meme on the Internet today is still the big man himself: Adolf Hitler. We’ve had cats who look like Hitler, goldfish who look like Hitler, countless YouTube parodies of the bunker scene in Downfall, with strategic subtitles making Bruno Ganz as Hitler rant about everything from the subprime mortgage crisis to the egregious lack of a built-in camera in the new iPod Touch to the humiliating existence of the parodies themselves. The news, a couple of years ago, that a scrupulous bakery employee had refused to furnish a birthday cake reading “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler” to a white supremacist couple who had ordered it for their small son, went viral, and of course, let’s not forget Godwin’s Law—perhaps the oldest and most immutable principle of the Internet—which states that the probability of a Hitler or Nazi mention grows exponentially with the length of the online discussion.

Just a few days ago, my ever-helpful husband forwarded me a link of the latest Nazi-themed sensation sweeping the screens of a nation. It’s a Tumblr titled “Ignore Hitler,” which features colorful mouse-made cartoon images of the Fuhrer in a variety of humorously compromising situations: wrapped like a present; struggling with a sandwich, as a hairy-legged, bow-wielding cupid with a swastika-shaped birthmark visible on his nude behind, and more.

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Well, folks, it’s been a big week in gay news. On the good side, President Barack Obama came out in support of same-sex marriage and Anjelica Huston sang on Smash. On the other, the press has been all abuzz over the lawsuit recently slapped on John Travolta by a masseur claiming the star attempted to coerce him into unwanted sexual acts during a session at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Two steps forward, one step back. That’s progress, I guess.

Of all the tabloid press coverage on Massage-gate, there are two details that, er, popped up at me. One is the employment of positively J.K. Rowling-esque adjectives regarding the area in question: “solid eight inches … springy” making it sound like Hollywood’s second-most famous Scientologist purchased his, ahem, wand straight from Mr. Ollivander’s. (It chooses the wizard, you know.) The second is the still-unnamed masseur’s assertion of how Travolta explained how he learned to Stop Worrying and Love Transactional Same-Sex Liaisons: By accepting that Hollywood is controlled by “homosexual Jewish men” who expect sexual favors in return for career-related ones.

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If the media near-blackout and blank stares I receive during my frequent evangelizing on its behalf are any indication, I am the only person in America who is watching GCB, ABC’s hourlong comedy soap about piously venal Dallas socialites and the menfolk they slyly claim to be their “lords and masters.” Beyond making it unlikely that the show will be renewed for a second season, the loneliness of my position doesn’t particularly trouble me. My therapist always says it isn’t the aberrant behavior itself that forms the barrier to mental health; it’s the lack of understanding as to why others find it strange.

So, in the name of sanity, why aren’t people watching GCB?

Continue reading "In Praise of ABC’s ‘GCB,’ a TV Series Without Any Need for Talmudic Analysis" at...

In case you haven’t been paying attention—or, like me, have been in a state of deep geriatric denial—you might be interested to know that ’90s nostalgia is in full swing: The Mommy Wars are back, I heard a couple of teenage girls browsing the sale racks at Anthropologie engaged in earnest discussion about where they could buy the most authentic “’90s dresses,” and Newt Gingrich has been running around loose, hairdo unchanged, being gross. But the best evidence that the decade of rollerblades, raves, and Yanni Live at the Acropolis is back may be the resurfacing of Joe Eszterhas, the luxuriously maned shlockmeister whose steamy Clinton-era extravaganzas of greed, lies, and improbable lesbianism once made him the highest-paid (and most notorious) screenwriter in Hollywood. Last week, Eszterhas returned to drop a new bomb on the American public: Mel Gibson is a raving anti-Semite.

This discovery, trumpeted in an open letter by the screenwriter to Malibu’s favorite Sedevacantist, was made during the collaboration on the screenplay for M.C.K.B.I., Gibson’s long-anticipated Maccabee biopic, during which Gibson repeatedly referred to Jews as “Hebes” [sic] and “oven-dodgers” and claimed the Holocaust was “mostly a lot of crap.” (A perplexing assertion, that: How can we be “oven-dodgers” if there were no ovens?)

Continue reading "Mel Gibson's Failed Plan for the World's First Pro-Jewish Anti-Semitic Propaganda Film" at...

“The WASP Woody Allen.” It’s a descriptor that has been attached so persistently to Whit Stillman—the filmmaker and unapologetic chronicler of the discreet charms of what his unforgettable 1990 debut Metropolitan termed the “Upper-Haute Bourgeoisie, or UHBs”—that it has practically become a cliché, trotted out with the release of each of his highly anticipated films.

His latest offering (and his first since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco) is Damsels in Distress, about a group of four prim young ladies seeking to “improve” the lives of the dullards and depressives who are their classmates at their sun-dappled Northeastern liberal arts college. The film offers no exception to the Allen comparison, but it does reassert a question: Does this comparison even make any sense, outside of a Hollywood pitch meeting? Do the famously rumpled upstate WASP and the famously rumpled Brooklyn Jew really have anything in common apart from a penchant for wordy dialogue and tweed jackets that appear never to have suffered the civilizing touch of an iron? Is a WASP Woody even possible?

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You can’t say we weren’t warned. No less an authority than Neil Patrick Harris told us in his hilarious opening number at last year’s Tony Awards: Broadway is “not just for gays anymore” (or the gays and the Jews, or cousins in from out-of-town you have to amuse …). Instead, it is now for those of us theater lovers who naively assumed the election of President Barack Obama had forever stanched the toxic religiosity that washed over us during the George W. Bush Administration like the flood waters of Lake Pontchartrain. A recent Tweet from New York Times theater editor Scott Heller points out that when Bigger Than Jesus, self-described “progressive Christian” Rich Miller’s one-man exploration of the life of Christ, opens at NYU’s Skirball Center this weekend, there will be four, count ’em, four separate depictions of Sons of God spreading the Good News to an audience who normally hears the word “Messiah” and thinks “Sondheim.” A single Jewish boy hasn’t dominated the New York stage like this since Neil Simon in 1966.

With so many Christ-figures running around Manhattan, where can your average Jew get maximum discomfort with the infectious suggestibility of Christianity and a vague sense of complicity in the horrific death of its prophet for her theater-going dollar? Simply put, if you’re going to see only one Jesus this Passover season, which one should it be?

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By the time Mad Men, Matthew Weiner’s seminal dissertation on the quiet desperation of the 1960s-era White American Male, has its Season Five premiere on Sunday night, Don Draper and his discontents will have been absent from our screens so long—not to mention those tense few weeks last year when it seemed like they might not return at all, giving those of us born after 1962 a taste of what the Cuban Missile Crisis must have felt like—that their impending return has a hint of the anti-climax about it; like when you finally open up the box with your wedding gown in it and think: “Oh, there’s that dress I ordered 11 months ago. I don’t remember the skirt being quite that poufy.”

Perhaps in an effort to convert any lingering wait-induced apathy into breathless anticipation, AMC has placed the strictest of embargoes on the advance screeners usually distributed to critics, journalists, and other interested parties, with the end result being that nobody in the Mad Men punditocracy—a group whose intellectual rigor and meticulous attention to detail the political commentariat would do well to emulate—has the slightest clue about what is going to happen this season, or even what year of the 20th century’s eventful seventh decade it will take place in, leaving us no choice but to dedicate our inaugural pieces (oh yes, there will be several) to more existential questions about the show’s appeal as a whole.

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Who is the Persian Mafia? According to the renowned 20th-century social scientist Cher Horowitz, who noted as she breezed past a claque of swarthy, cell-phone-wielding beauties encased in the finest gold chains and stretch leather money can buy, in the opening montage of Clueless: “You can’t hang with them unless you have a BMW and a Mercedes.”

More than 15 years have passed since Prof. Horowitz’s seminal observation—I know, we are so, so old—and the Ryan Seacrest-produced Shahs of Sunset, Bravo’s latest televised Hobbesian experiment chronicling the unexamined lives of the nouveau riche and those who long desperately to join their poolside-idling, bronze-limbed, Restylane-basted ranks, seems to indicate that the War on Terror, the Great Recession, and the increasing drumbeat of phantom missiles on Natanz have done little to change the Westwood-ensconced Tehrangeleno community. For its members, money talks and materialism rules. A major fight of the first episode revolves around one of the women (Asa, the arty one, who dresses like something out of a Delcroix painting set at Burning Man, refers to herself as a “Modern Persian gypsy bohemian,” and, as such, typically considers herself above such frivolity) snidely accusing another (G.G., the princess-y one, who boasts that she has somehow made it to the ripe old age of 30 with “my only paycheck coming from Daddy,” an arrangement that is surely less creepy than she makes it sound) of actually wearing H&M.

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There’s something undeniably—for lack of a better word—tickling about seeing the new Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. After all, her signature oeuvre of witty, often subversive conceptual self-portraits, in which she effortlessly slips into a wide variety of compositional guises—movie starlets, historical paintings, depressed society women, manic circus clowns—are the antithesis of the macho, humorless Abstract Expressionists MoMA usually pulls out the top-floor big guns for (not to mention the big-name Impressionists/Fauvists/Cubists designed to pack in the crowds that feel most comfortable viewing art they have previously seen reproduced in miniature on their nighttime mug of chamomile). Looking at Cindy Sherman’s work, I’ve always had the same thought, “Oh, she’s one of us.”

But it wasn’t until I was face-to-face with the enormous wall mural that opens the exhibition, featuring digitally manipulated, 7-foot images of the artist in a faintly Fractured Fairy Tale setting—in my favorite, she brandishes a huge toy sword while wearing an ill-fitting felt nude suit and wedge haircut: Dorothy Hamill meets Joan of Arc—that I finally stopped to ask myself exactly among which “us” I was categorizing her. Women? Artists? Funny people? Sherman’s work is most often discussed in feminist terms, and despite my hatred of the ghettoization this implies—as though the work of women can be understood only in terms of the female experience, while a man saying the same things gets to be seen as universal—this was the analysis I accepted on some subconscious level; it’s pretty hard, as a woman, not to look at her breakthrough 1977-80 series Untitled Film Stills and be hit palpably in the heart with the sense of yearning, of possibility, the joy and the tyranny of being a woman; of being at once the observer and the observed, of the exhilaration of crossing a city street sure that you look exactly like Audrey Hepburn and the crushing sense of failure when you pass your reflection in a shop window to see that this is emphatically not the case.

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There’s a famous scene early in Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett O’Hara, fresh from the disappointingly mundane death of her first husband, the dopey and unlamented Charles Hamilton, accepts Captain Rhett Butler’s offer to dance at a charity bazaar. Respectable Atlanta society—which recognized the sale and ownership of other human beings, but not the right of a grown woman to leave the house without a chaperone—is scandalized by the prospect of a merry widow in their midst, until Scarlett’s sister-in-law, the saintly Melanie Wilkes, comes to her defense, insisting Scarlett is merely “sacrificing” for the “Glorious Cause,” and the old guard is appeased. Dolly Meriwether, the most fearsomely judgmental matron in Atlanta, sums it up succinctly: “If Melanie Wilkes says it’s all right, it is all right.”

This was precisely the line that popped into my head when Natalie Portman appeared on the Oscar red carpet Sunday night.

Continue reading "Natalie Portman, in Vintage for the Oscars, Gives Dior a Kosher Stamp" at...

Just in case you’re lying dead in a ditch somewhere—or more alarmingly, don’t have a television—I’m taking it upon myself to remind you that the 84th Academy Awards are Sunday night. Self-congratulatory tears will be shed, God will be thanked, sincere and entertaining people like animators and short-subject documentarians will be played off the stage mercilessly. If the stars align, we may be treated to one of Meryl Streep’s typical acceptance speeches of scatterbrained grandeur as the camera cruelly lingers on Glenn Close’s haunted Halloween mask of a smile.

But what we may not see is Sacha Baron Cohen. The most mischievously shape-shifting Jewish comedian/folk hero since Herschel of Ostropol has been warned by the Academy in no uncertain terms not to turn up dressed as Admiral General Alladeen, his lavishly bearded Qaddafi-esque alter ego from his upcoming movie, The Dictator. After pre-emptively banning (or so it was rumored) Baron Cohen from the pre-show swanning in the absence of assurances he would do so as “himself” (a concept surely as amorphous for the chameleon-like star as it was for the similarly slippery Peter Sellers), they are now reduced to stern proclamations warning of their extreme displeasure should their warnings be defied. “The red carpet,” sniffed one official Academy spokesperson, “is not about stunting.”

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About 20 minutes after Whitney Houston’s death was confirmed by all mainstream media outlets, I saw a Tweet from my good friend and colleague, Jewcy’s Jason Diamond: “The countdown to somebody writing about Whitney Houston’s Jewish connection begins now …”

Well, Jason, I guess it might as well be me. Her funeral will be held Saturday, Feb. 18—exactly a week to the day that the Queen of Pop was found unresponsive in her bathtub at the Beverly Hills Hilton—at the Newark church where she first showed the public the power of those unforgettable pipes. Doubtless there will be a Jew or two in the invite-only audience: Clive Davis, of course, the “Jewish uncle,” mentor, and lifelong protector, enabler, and friend, who discovered her as a teenager and managed to turn her into the first black female artist that White America felt comfortable truly embracing; perhaps Billy Joel, who likes to tell the story about how he reluctantly indulged a very young model who asked if she could sing along when he was fooling around on the piano in a hotel lounge once, only to be blown away by the voice that was soon to be among the most recognizable in the world. Maybe even a Black Hebrew or two, come from the village of Dimona in southern Israel to mourn their most famous honorary citizen—a laurel conferred during Houston’s 2003 visit to Israel, when she declared the country “home” before a benignly puzzled Ariel Sharon, whose hand she then weirdly refused to shake.

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After more than 30 years in broadcasting, most of which she has spent as arguably the single most recognized woman in America, if not the world, Oprah Winfrey has finally managed the impossible: She is interviewing a family that has no idea who the hell she is. And she didn’t have to track them through the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea, or pilot an OWN-branded luxury catamaran through pirate-infested waters.

No, all Oprah had to do was take a chauffeured SUV over the Brooklyn Bridge to Crown Heights, a place “that is like another place, maybe a little townlet in Europe,” in the words of Aaron Ginsburg, who with his wife Shterna and their nine lovely children is one of the main subjects of “Oprah’s Next Chapter: Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn” a two-part special that will begin airing Sunday night on OWN.

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