More in ‘Coen brothers’

The Oscars air Sunday evening on ABC, hosted by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Below: the five most Jewish movies in contention (in increasing order of Jewy-ness!), and which categories they’re nominated in. Because how else are you going to know when to cheer, and when to Tweet your grievances?
UPDATE: This list should have included ...

As Oscar week continues, let’s take a look at maybe the most profoundly Jewish mainstream American movie in quite some time: the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. It tells the story of Larry Gopnik, a middle-aged Jewish physics professor in late-1960s Minnesota who watches, powerless and blameless, as just about everything that could go wrong ...

And the Oscar nominations go to … two very prominently Jewish-themed films, among others. Both Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (about Nazi-killing Jews) and the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (which is almost exclusively about Jews, and which is, for my money, the most profoundly Jewish American movie in years) are up for the big award: ...

• For a strange and degrading appearance on Lopez Tonight, Larry David took a DNA test and host George Lopez revealed that the comedian “really is a bad Jew,” as he is, supposedly, 37 percent Native American. [Monsters and Critics]
• The overzealous printing of Torah-study pamphlets by Israeli synagogues has led to a garbage crisis, ...

• Italy has a new publication, Pagine Ebraiche (Jewish Pages), that aims “to speak to the external world, not the internal Jewish world.” In other words, it’s a Jewish paper for non-Jewish Italians—who, apparently, care! [JTA]
• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who kowtowed to pressure from the United States and Israel to postpone an investigation into ...

As the Coen brothers chose to open their monumental new film, A Serious Man, with a lengthy fable, I’ll begin this review with a fable of my own.
There once was a Jew who felt his life was spiraling out of control. He had done some things he was certain were sinful, and found it increasingly ...

Conjecture about Jewishness in the cinematic oeuvre of Ethan and Joel Coen has chased them for nearly 20 years, since the 1990 release of Miller’s Crossing, reaching a memorable plateau in 1998’s The Big Lebowski, which featured John Goodman as a Vietnam vet and convert who refuses to drive on Shabbat. Religious buzz is growing ...

• A New Jersey couple gives new meaning to the term “mitzvah mobile,” parking an RV outside a local hospital as a place for Jewish families with sick children to celebrate the Sabbath. [Jewish Star]
• Dov Yermiya, a 95-year-old Israeli pioneer and activist, has formally renounced Zionism in the face of what he sees as ...

• Israel published a 160-page report justifying last January’s three-week military incursion into Gaza and reporting the results of several related investigations. The report comes in advance of two United Nations papers on the action that are expected not to be so kind. [JTA]
• Madonna, pop mega-star and Hollywood-style Kabbalist, will publish the first installment ...

Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen in Knocked Up
A friend called one evening while we were both watching Knocked Up on HBO. It was during the scene in which Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) and Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) are on their way to a doctor’s appointment, talking about the relationship between Alison’s sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) ...