Critics have denounced Downton Abbey as gaudy, a-historical, and a bit too apologetic about the fusty elitism of Britain’s upper crust. But to fans of the period drama—and I count myself among them—Downton has been four solid years of soapy goodness, topped off with surprisingly incisive writing and some seriously fabulous hats. Those of us who have remained loyal to the Grantham clan are in for a special treat this season: the show’s first Jewish character is about to make an appearance at Downton’s stately halls.

This past Sunday night we were introduced to The Honourable Ephraim Atticus Aldridge (played by the very gentile and very hunky Matt Barber), who strikes up a romance with Lady Rose as she is fetching cake to serve to exiled Russian aristocrats. We learn that Aldridge’s great-grandparents settled in England after fleeing the Odessa pogrom of 1859, and went on to amass a considerable fortune in their new home. Upon learning the year of the Aldridge family’s arrival in England, one of the aristocrats is livid. “He’s not Russian!” he shouts, storming off down the dank church basement, presumably to dust off his copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Downton has skirted around the issue of anti-Semitism in previous seasons, but the prejudice comes out in full force once an overtly Jewish family starts showing up at the Granthams’ dinner parties. I don’t want to spoil any more details, so I’ll just say that plenty of stiff upper lips curl at the prospect of an inter-faith union between Atticus and Rose. And of course, in true Downton fashion, the couple’s love affair is rife with melodrama, gooey sentimentality, and epic one-liners courtesy of Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess.

(Image: Lady Rose MacClare meets Atticus Aldridge on Season 5, Episode 5 of ‘Downton Abbey.’ Courtesy of ITV.)

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Shelly Oria’s debut short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, is simultaneously delicate and shattering. The book derives its title from a story of the same name, in which an Israeli expat from in New York obsessively tallies the merits of the two cities that she has called home. “It’s an ongoing competition,” she says, “But I forget to keep track, so I have to keep counting all over again.”

Many stories in Oria’s collection are rooted in two cities on opposite sides of the globe, their central characters Israelis who have made their way to the United States. But New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 is more textured than a simple exploration of migration and cultural difference. Quietly and without ceremony, Oria’s narratives veer into worlds that are unidentifiable and bizarre. In ‘The Beginning of a Plan,’ a young woman flees Israel to America to escape criminal prosecution, and discovers that she can quite literally freeze time. In ‘Victor, Changed Man,’ a couple reunites and promptly separates against the backdrop of an anonymous city that has been overtaken by a dense, unyielding fog. Often, the book’s fantastical narratives border on the grotesque. Oria writes of a North American town that traffics in human organs and blood, of another dominated by a band of vengeful, violent women. “We hold our men by their balls,” the nameless protagonist says. “And we squeeze.”

Even in the stories situated in identifiable locations, there is something disarming about the characters, who speak and think in jarring declaratives. “I always look them in the eye throughout, so as not to miss my moment,” says the protagonist of ‘This Way I Don’t Have to Be,’ explaining her addiction to sleeping with married men. “In that moment, their lives turn to air.” But beneath the cryptic authority of statements like these lies confusion and chaos. The lives of Oria’s characters are steeped in loneliness, unrequited love, and confounding lust. They subsist in fluid, often queer, sexual relationships that prove agonizing. Booney, the central character of a story called ‘The Thing About Sophia,’ develops feelings for her female roommate, and is invited into her bed, but not into her heart. In the titular ‘New York 1, Tel Aviv 0,’ an Israeli immigrant moves in with a former IDF soldier and falls desperately for his girlfriend, a woman who cannot be tamed.

Oria author was born in Los Angeles, but raised in Israel, and she taught herself to write fiction in English when she was an adult. If she is at any disadvantage when it comes to proficiency in the language, it does not show. Her sentences are piercing, her tone cool and assured. She is admirably bold in her storytelling, weaving her short narratives with ribbons of the strange and the surreal.

Every now and then, however, Oria overreaches in her attempts at originality. ‘Fully Zipped,’ which chronicles a series of exchanges between a customer and a salesperson in the fitting room of a clothing store, relies more on concept than on characters, and fizzles away without leaving much of an impression. ‘Documentation’ explores the unravelling of a relationship through a catalogue of kisses—a narrative technique that feels gimmicky and stale.

Some of the most striking stories in New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 are, in fact, the ones rendered in simple linear narratives. ‘The Disneyland of Albany,’ the strongest story in the collection and the most overtly political, follows an Israeli artist named Avner, who leaves his young daughter Maya in Tel Aviv when he moves to New York to further his art career. During one of Maya’s visits to the States, Avner travels to Albany to meet a wealthy Jewish patron, who subtly attempts to bully Avner into infusing his work with Zionist symbolism. At one point, Maya becomes agitated when she learns that a community was displaced so Nelson Rockefeller could build Albany’s Empire State Plaza. “Did they use tanks?” she asks, a reference to the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes.

If the circumstances of Oria’s more ethereal narratives are unnerving and strange, so is this story of a little girl who carries the trauma of her country’s wars. In New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, devastating realities collide with haunting landscapes of the surreal, until it cannot be said where one ends and the other begins.

Related: New Short Story Collection Explores Tel Aviv’s Dark Side

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At the beginning of Exodus: Gods and Kings, Ramses II—heir to the Egyptian throne—and his adopted brother Moses prepare for battle against a Hittite army. Before riding off into the fray, they exchange swords as a symbol of their fraternal bond and intertwined destinies. It’s a compelling scene, and I had high hopes that Exodus would prove to be an evocative retelling of what is perhaps the most intriguingly human strand of the biblical narrative: two men, who are raised as brothers, become bitter adversaries in an epic clash of powers. As it turns out, while there are plenty of adjectives that can be used to describe Ridley Scott’s latest film, “evocative” is not one of them.

As far as cinematic interpretations of the Passover story go, Exodus is the most uninspired, laugh-out-loud-ridiculous of them all. Seriously, this movie makes A Rugrats Passover look like Citizen Kane. Exodus is plagued (see what I did there?) by turgid dialogue, campy costumes, and an abundance of logical inconsistencies. As Moses, Christian Bale does what he can with the script, but it’s hard to accept his gravitas while he’s covered in spray tan and spouting off cornball lines like, “You can learn a lot about somebody by looking him in the eye.”

For the most part, Exodus sticks to the key points of the biblical narrative: an Egyptian prince discovers that he hails from a family of Hebrew slaves, goes into exile, has a pow-wow with God, returns to Egypt to liberate the Israelites, and much divine smiting ensues. The film’s interpretations of the scriptural story are more often than not contradictory and absurd. Early on in Exodus, two Egyptian officers mistakenly refer to Moses as a slave, and he kills them because… well, it’s not entirely clear why. When Moses is told by one of the Hebrews that he was born to a Jewish mother, he responds in disbelief: “That’s not even a good story. I thought you people were supposed to be good at telling stories.” And yet Moses seems to have known for some time that a palace servant is actually his Israelite sister. How he comes to this realization is never made clear; maybe the filmmakers figured we would forget about the discrepancy if they threw enough CGI locusts our way.

The most laughable of all the film’s ludicrous moments is the appearance of God, who manifests to Moses as a little boy with a British accent and a shoddy haircut. I’m not sure what to make of the religious implications of this casting choice, but it is disastrous on a narrative level. Whenever the Almighty brims with rage, it’s impossible to refrain from thinking that he needs to be sent to his room and have his Xbox privileges taken away.

The truly unfortunate thing about Exodus is that the film bungles some perfectly fertile source material. There is much to explore in the story of an Egyptian prince whose world is upended when he discovers that he belongs to a nation of slaves, and who is forced to wreak havoc upon the very people who saved his life when his own mother was forced to abandon him. But in Exodus, Moses and pretty much every supporting character are frustratingly half-baked. The first meeting between Moses and his biological brother Aaron packs about as much emotional heft as a cardboard sandwich. As Moses’ wife Tzipporah, Spanish actress Maria Valverde is reduced to shooting lusty glances in Moses’ direction and uttering the least exciting dirty talk imaginable (“Proceed”). Aaron Paul makes an appearance as Joshua, Moses’ eventual successor, but he isn’t given much to do except shout “Moshe!” at crucial moments in the narrative.

Only in Ramses II, played with spirit and copious amounts of eyeliner by Joel Edgerton, do we get some semblance of a multi-dimensional character. Ramses is pained by the suffering of his family and his people, but he cannot bring himself to concede to the one thing that would rid Egypt of the plagues. He rages over the insubordination of the man whom he once thought of as a brother. He seems bewildered by Moses’ allegiance to a God that wipes out a nation of firstborns. But as soon as God begins the wreak havoc in Egypt, the interactions between Moses and Ramses become too clipped to feel substantial. At one point, rather than show up to the great palace in person, Moses sends Ramses a white horse with a warning written on its side. I think this is supposed to be menacing in a Godfather-y sort of way, but it really isn’t.

I will say that unlike some other biblical epics (ahem, Noah), Exodus looks great. The film is shot against a vast expanse of creamy sands and looming mountains. There are mudslides, and hailstorms, and some pretty epic croc attacks that usher in the first plague by tainting the Nile with human blood. The parting of the Red Sea—essentially the climax of the whole story—is pretty underwhelming though. For some reason, in a movie about a man who talks to God and ushers in a sequence of divinely-ordained plagues, the filmmakers decided that this would be a good time to affect some realism. As the Israelites prepare for their crossing, the Red Sea simply froths and dries up without much ceremony—not unlike the trajectory of this film.

(Image: 20th Century Fox)

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You might have heard of the Sonderkommando Revolt that took place in Auschwitz on October 7, 1944. You might know that on this day, a group of Sonderkommando—Jewish prisoners who were forced to haul bodies out of gas chambers and dispose of them in crematoriums—blew up Crematorium IV and cut through the barbed wire fence surrounding the camp, allowing two hundred prisoners to escape, albeit only temporarily. But you are probably not familiar with the four women who made the revolt possible by smuggling gunpowder from an Auschwitz munitions factory, where they worked as slave laborers.

“October 7, 1944,” a small exhibit at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, pays tribute to Roza Robota, Estera Wajcblum, Regina Szafirsztajn, and Ala Gertner—the female leaders of the Auschwitz resistance, who were ultimately tortured and hanged for their participation in the revolt. Their names, faded from the annals of history, are painted in stark white against one of the gallery’s dark walls. The centerpiece of the exhibit is “Four Women,” a film of interpretive dance by the celebrated choreographer Jonah Bokaer.

Bokaer shot the film in a sparse, grey warehouse, where four dancers took on the personas of Robota, Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner. Because the women were forced into manual labor, and because they hid illicit gunpowder under their nails, much of the performance is preoccupied with the dancers’ hands. They scrape at the ground, paw frantically at their fingertips, and grasp at each other in a desperate, sometimes violent way that evokes the terrifying circumstances of their relationship. For most of the performance, the dancers’ features are obscured by their long hair, until, in a jarring shift of focus, the film cuts between lingering close-ups of their faces. It is a powerful moment of revelation in a performance that strives to shine the spotlight on four courageous women whose stories are often excluded from histories of the Holocaust.

Another reel is projected on the opposite wall, a steady shot of the ruins of Crematorium IV, which Bokaer filmed during a five-day period of immersion at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gallery also displays a series of documents that relate to the revolt with varying degrees of directness; among them are an Auschwitz logbook that contains the name of a man who is believed to be Szafirsztajn’s father, an eyewitness account of the work of the Sonderkommando, and another eyewitness account that describes dead bodies being carried out of a crematorium as a band of prisoner-musicians played in the background.

Though the four women at the center of the exhibit were not part of Auschwitz’s prisoner band, music is central to the installation. Bach’s Violin Partita in D Minor, which Auschwitz’s band was regularly forced to perform, plays in an incessant loop. Behind each glass case containing primary source documents hangs an illuminated sheet of paper, onto which Bokaer painted segments of the Partita’s score.

I know the significance of many of these details because I was given a tour of the exhibit by the museum’s director. But for those who peruse “October 7, 1944” unattended, the gallery offers little curatorial direction. There is no text explaining that the plinths in front of each primary source document are bricks from the ruins of Crematorium IV; no indication that the muddy ruins depicted in the exhibit’s second film are the exploded remnants of that very same crematorium; no hint that Bokaer chose Bach’s Partita as a soundtrack for his installation because it was one of the few melancholy scores to be played in Auschwitz (the others were jaunty polkas, meant to lull Jewish prisoners into a false sense of calm before they were gassed to death).

The decision to keep the exhibit free of textual explanations was deliberate, and there is certainly something to be said for unburdening art installations of belabored discussions about meaning and intention. But the relevance of so many poignant, thoughtful touches is lost as a result of the exhibit’s minimalism. Significantly, I left the gallery knowing very little about Robota, Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner, aside from their names. Though the brochure for “October 7, 1944” claims that the installation strives to “[give] four heroines their place in Holocaust history,” the gallery offers no biographical information about the women who sacrificed themselves for the sake of the resistance. They remain colorless figures, shrouded in the mystery of their hidden pasts.

And so I thought I would divert the course of this review to put forth what little information is known about these four brave women, who were hanged in the last public execution to take place at Auschwitz before the camp was liberated.

Estera Wajcblum was born in Warsaw in 1924. Both of her parents were deaf-mutes, and they were murdered immediately upon the family’s arrival at Auschwitz. After the revolt failed and Wajcblum was contained in a prison block, she smuggled a note to her little sister, who was also a prisoner in the camp. The note read: “Not for me the glad tidings of forthcoming salvation; everything is lost and so I want to live.”

Regina Szafirsztajn was born in Bedzin, Poland. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1943.

Ala Gertner, also from Bedzin, belonged to a wealthy family. She was well-educated, and fluent in German. In late 1940, Gertner was ordered to work at the office of a labor camp in Sosnowiec, Poland. There, she met a man named Bernhard Holtz, and the two were married in the Sosnowiec Ghetto in 1941. The couple was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Twenty-eight letters that Gertner wrote to her friend Sala Kirschner are on display in a permanent collection at the New York Public Library.

Roza Robota was a member of the Hashomer Hatzair socialist movement as a young woman living in Ciechanów, Poland. She liked to be called by her Hebrew name, Shoshanna. After being deported to Auschwitz in 1942, Robota worked in a clothing depot next to Crematorium III. She had connections to the underground resistance, and convinced Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner to join the movement and capitalize on their access to the camp’s munitions factory. Before the noose was tightened around her neck on the day of her execution, Robota called out to the prisoners assembled before the gallows: “Sisters, revenge!”

Four Women (Excerpt), 2014 from Jonah Bokaer on Vimeo.

“October 7, 1944” runs through December 30 at Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

(Image credit: Janek Skarzynski/Getty Images)

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YidLife Crisis is a new web series that grapples with some of the great quandaries of contemporary Jewish life: Should Jews continue to practice archaic traditions? How do we define Jewish culture, which bears the influence of nationalities from around the globe? Also, how much badonkadonk is too much badonkadonk?

The series consists of four raucous, five-minute episodes written and performed by Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, two Montreal-born actors who play Chaimie and Laizer, respectively. Each episode follows the two thirty-somethings as they grapple with their secular Jewish identity, revel in iconic Montreal restaurants, and extol the virtues of schmaltz (an absolute must, when it comes to smoked meat). This would be sufficiently wonderful on its own, but Batalion and Elman deliver something even better: the series is performed almost entirely in Yiddish.

Batalion and Elman studied Yiddish at Bialik High School in Montreal. Years after graduating, they connected in Los Angeles and began brainstorming ideas for a project that they could work on together. They knew they wanted to create a Yiddish web series, but not because they had lofty goals of preserving a “dying language.” As comic actors, Batalion and Elman were drawn to the vitality and rhythm of Yiddish, which has played an integral role in shaping humor and comedy in North America.

“I think a large part of what we’re doing here is a form of preservation of culture, but it’s not based on some sort of pure altruism,” Batalion explains. “It’s based on the fact that we just thought Yiddish was funny. Jamie and I are big fans of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and that kind of comedy is built on a Yiddish style that’s coming out in English, but it really owes royalties to the Yiddish language.”

Initially, they planned to recreate classic Seinfeld sketches in Yiddish, as a homage to the language that lends its flavor to their favorite sitcom. But they soon realized that they could do more than borrow material from an existing show. Batalion and Elman applied for and received a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation, an organization that promotes Jewish culture in Montreal. Then, with some translation help from Batalion’s father, the duo started to write their own Yiddish scripts, which explored their concerns as young, secular Jews.

“The grant led us to realizations that we had about how the show could be deeper than just redoing Seinfeld sketches, “Elman says. “We could actually use the content of what we’re going to talk about in the show as a way of reaching out to other communities, and as a way of explaining our narishkeit, our Jewish neuroses, to the non-Jewish world.”

And what is it, exactly, that occupies the minds of the YidLife guys? Food, for one thing. (“It’s a Jewish show,” Elman says. “What else are we going to be doing?”) Each episode is set in a beloved Montreal eatery, as Chaimie and Laizer chow down on their favorite dishes and engage in Talmudic debates on matters of great Jewish import, like the optimal method for making bagels. They chat about beautiful women, naked selfies, and the merits of a big, um, posterior (the series is rated “Chai plus,” thanks to its racier content). It’s amusing to watch the guys work words like “badonkadonk” into Yiddish dialogue, but their lighthearted banter belies an earnest contemplation of modern Jewish life, with all its inconsistencies and hypocrisies.

In the first episode, Laizer is gorging on poutine—a very treyf Canadian specialty made with fries, cheese curds, and gravy—as Kol Nidre soars in the background. In another episode, Chaimie takes Laizer to task for eating at a Greek restaurant. “After what they did?” he cries. “200 BC? Forced conversion, temple desecration? I can’t eat this crap.” He does, in the end, after Laizer reminds him that most of his favorite “Jewish” foods—latkes, bagels, challah, Danish—were borrowed from other nationalities who, to put it lightly, had fraught relationships with the Jews. In the same episode, Laizer questions the value of continuing to practice ancient Jewish rites, like circumcision. “Is your mother Jewish?” he asks Chaimie. “Then by Jewish law, so are you. So why the schmekle chop?!”

“We’re dealing with everything with humor,” Batalion says of YidLife. “But some of the topics that are broached are fairly serious. I mean, atonement, circumcision are pretty serious acts. It’s not just that the act is serious, but the implications and the discussion about identity is a pretty serious discussion. In some way, Jamie and I grapple with it every single day.”

“I want to clarify,” Elman cuts in. “I don’t grapple with Eli’s circumcision in any way, shape, or form.”

Yiddish might seem like an anachronistic choice of language for a series rooted in a very twenty-first century medium, but it works. During the filming of YidLife’s first episode, Batalion and Elman performed their dialogue twice: once in English and once in Yiddish. The French-Canadian staff of the restaurant where they were shooting watched the English take with little reaction. But they started cracking up when Batalion and Elman performed the sketch in Yiddish.

“They were laughing the whole time we were doing the Yiddish, even though they couldn’t understand a word of it,” Elman says. “And in fact one of our camera guys—he’s a French-Canadian guy—was laughing during the take. I said, ‘Why is this so funny to you?’ He said, ‘Oh, it just sounds funny. It sounds like Seinfeld.’ And we knew right away that we were doing it right.”

Related: New Web Series Celebrates Poutine, Lactaid, and Jewish Angst—in Yiddish
Jews, Proselytizing, and Comedy Collide in ‘Jewvangelist’

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What’s an apikores to do on Yom Kippur? If you were an anarchist in London, New York, or Warsaw in the early 20th century, there’s a good chance you would have attended a Yom Kippur ball for the express purpose of eating, drinking, and thumbing your nose at tradition and the religious establishment.

The creators of the new comedy series YidLife Crisis have captured that heretical spirit, added a dash of irony and Yiddish profanity, and served it up for free online—with a side of poutine.

YidLife is the brainchild of Canadian comics Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, who play Leizer and Chaimie, respectively. The web series follows the two thirty-somethings as they contemplate the modern Jewish condition against the backdrop of Montreal’s iconic restaurants. The best part? YidLife’s dialogue is spoken almost entirely in Yiddish.

In “Breaking the Fast,” the first episode of the series, Chaimie tries to persuade Leizer to ditch the whole Yom Kippur thing and indulge in some poutine, which, for the uninitiated, consists of French fries slathered in cheese curds and meat-based gravy—essentially a very delicious, very treyf heart attack in a bowl. Leizer doesn’t need much in the way of convincing, though he makes sure to keep his cheese curds and gravy separate. As Leizer himself puts it (in Yiddish), “If I have to break the fast, fine, but I will not mix milk and meat!”

Watch  “Breaking the Fast” below, and stay tuned for an interview with Batalion and Elman!

Related: Jews, Proselytizing, and Comedy Collide in ‘Jewvangelist’

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This Is Where I Leave You, the latest offering from director Shawn Levy, is based on Jonathan Tropper’s novel of the same name. But the film never bothers to explain the significance of its title and probably would have benefited from something a little more descriptive, like This Is Where Fine Actors Waste Their Talents, This Is Where We Make Incessant Jokes About Fake Boobs, or This Is Where A Dad Dies and Nobody Really Cares.

The protagonist of this frenetic mess is Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), whose life is already in shambles when he learns that his father has succumbed to an unspecified, but evidently severe illness. Judd seems to find the death of his father mildly heartbreaking and terribly annoying; the funeral forces him to head to the ‘burbs and reunite with his abrasive family members, who don’t know that Judd is on the verge of a messy divorce. The Altman siblings soon learn that their father’s dying wish was for his children to sit shiva in his honor, which they are upset about because a) it means they will have to spend seven whole days together, and b) they will have to sit on low chairs.

As the Altmans interact in close quarters, we discover that Judd’s three siblings are also leading tattered lives. There is Wendy (Tina Fey), a snipey mom of two who spends much of the film lusting after an old flame (apparently this is OK, because Wendy’s husband is a conveniently obnoxious businessman). Paul (Corey Stall) and his wife are on a desperate, passionless mission to conceive a child, funerals be damned. And Phillip (Adam Driver) is an inept man-child, who decides to announce mid-shiva that he is engaged to his (much older) shrink.

The matriarch of the family is Hillary (Jane Fonda), a surgically-enhanced therapist who has managed to scrounge up some fame thanks to her best-selling parenting book. Hillary’s celebrity seems a bit undeserved, though, considering that her own progeny have about as much impulse control as a bunch of unruly baboons. The Altmans scream at each other, scream at other people, punch each other, and punch other people. They have multiple affairs between them, and Judd comes mighty close to committing adultery with an extended family member. Also, an Altman toddler throws poop. I won’t spoil all the details, but let’s just say that by the end of the film, things have basically devolved into a Jerry Springer sideshow.

In an essay on mic.com, Noah Gittel points out that while promotional materials for This Is Where I Leave You completely erase any reference to the characters’ Judaism, the film is one of few mainstream movies to depict an element of Jewish religious practice. We can be thankful for that, I suppose. But for the most part, This Is Where I Leave You treats religion as an inconvenience or a joke. The Altman siblings are just a little too quick to ask if they can sit shiva for three days instead of seven. In a mindlessly funny scene, Judd and his brothers get baked at synagogue during morning services, much to the dismay of the local rabbi. Rabbi Grodner himself (played, a little gratingly, by Ben Schwartz) is a running punch line; he delivers his sermons as though he’s a DJ (“Can I get a Shabbat Shalom?!”) and gets mad when the Altman brothers, for reasons that remain unclear, call him “Boner.”

All of this buffoonery would be fine if This Is Where A Leave You didn’t try to be anything more than what it is: another derivative comedy about yet another dysfunctional family. But the film insists on saddling its dumb humor with watery attempts at sincerity. By the end of the movie, we’re supposed to understand that the function of the shiva narrative is to thrust Altmans together, to force them to overcome their petty grievances and begin to understand one another. But when every genuine moment in the movie is punctured by a joke about Hillary’s mountainous implants, it’s hard to care about what happens to this band of adult-babies. If This is Where I Leave You doesn’t take its characters seriously, why should we?

(Image: Warner Bros.)

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One Direction star and perennial heartbreaker Harry Styles has been ranked 73rd in The Jewish Chronicle’s list of the 100 most influential figures shaping Jewish life in the U.K., ahead of 27 fully-fledged MOTs—including rabbis, philanthropists, and community leaders. Before you work yourself into a frenzy worthy of this hysterical mob, let’s make one thing clear: Styles isn’t Jewish. The Chronicle is aware of this, but decided to honor the singer anyway. “The One Direction star may not be Jewish,” they explain, “but he seems very much at ease with a Jewish lifestyle.”

Styles does appear to be pretty keen on the Jews, an affinity that many have attributed to the pop star’s friendship with Ben Winston, a Jewish music video director. Styles fasted on Yom Kippur, wore a Star of David necklace to last year’s Teen Choice Awards, and had his sister’s name tattooed on his arm in Hebrew lettering. As it turns out, Styles also looks pretty good in a kippah. According to the Chronicle, “millions of British teens have become familiar with Purim, Pesach, and schepping nachas,” thanks to Styles’ enthusiastic tweets about all things Jewish.

While tattoos, necklaces, and kippahs do not a Jew make, I for one am happy to see honorary tribal membership bestowed on anyone who publicly proclaims their love for “shmorreh matzah.” And now that Styles has been welcomed into the Jewish fold, Rolling Stone reports that the pop star has buried the hatchet with ex Taylor Swift. All is right in the world.

Brigit Katz is a graduate student at NYU’s Journalism Institute, and an intern at Tablet Magazine. You can find her on Twitter at @brigitkatz. 

Related: One Direction’s Harry Styles Isn’t Jewish

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