Your favorite Jewish/Maori filmmaker/dreamboat is at it again. He has officially announced his next project, but, in traditional Waititi style, it’s not what you expect.

The film is called Jojo Rabbit, which sounds cute enough, and the premise also starts out sweet: It’s the story of a lonely little boy who creates an imaginary friend. That friend happens to be Adolf Hitler.

Waititi, in addition to helming the project, will play Hitler, which is the first hint that everything is going to be OK— a Jewish person of color doesn’t read as the literal Führer. Waititi has explained that this Hitler is “goofy” and “charming” (presumably to absurd, parodic degrees), an invented father figure for the protagonist.

Also starring in the film is Scarlett Johansson, so there’s another Jew in the mix. There have been differing synopses for Jojo Rabbit floating around since Waititi wrote the screenplay six years ago, but it seems that the plot includes the little boy discovering that his mother (Johansson) is hiding a Jewish teenager. In any case, the film definitely takes place in fascist Germany, so it’s going to be a rather dark comedy.

Waititi always has many irons in the fire, so we can also continue to anticipate his stop-motion Netflix movie about Bubbles the Chimp, and his sequel to mockumentary masterpiece What We Do in the Shadows entitled We’re Wolves.

Image via Flickr

The post Taika Waititi is Making a Hitler Comedy appeared first on Jewcy.

This is pretty ingenious: John Denno, a 16-year-old from Liverpool in England, has created a series of Lego dioramas about Nazi Germany and World War II for a school assignment. The project is sensitively executed and surprisingly moving, with models covering everything from Hitler’s rise to power, to Kristallnacht, to Auschwitz.

The project required a visual component, but Denno was concerned that his poor drawing skills would put him at a disadvantage, so he decided to build the sets with Lego, “because that is what I’m good at.” He told The Huffington Post, “I can’t draw for the life of me so I thought this would be an interesting way to present the project… I’ve been building, animating and photographing Lego since I was very young.”

The lego scenes have gone viral thanks to reddit and imgur, educating many more than just Denno about the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. (You can view the complete set here.) Lego FTW.

(Images: John Denno, imgur)

The post The High School Student Using Lego to Learn—And Teach—About Nazism appeared first on Jewcy.

New evidence suggests that Hitler’s wife Eva Braun was Jewish, or at least of Jewish descent.

The discovery was made by UK television show Dead Famous DNA (yes, really), which bought and tested hair samples acquired from a brush found in Braun’s apartment. According to The Mirror, “scientific analysis found a sequence in the DNA, passed down from mother to daughter, which is strongly associated with the Ashkenazi Jews ethnic division.”

Said host Marks Evans: “I never dreamt that I would find such a potentially extraordinary and profound result. Racism and fascism, ideas that one racial group is superior to another, made a mockery of by studying dead famous DNA.”

Hitler and Braun were married on April 29, 1945 at the Berghof, Hitler’s mountaintop residence, where Braun had spent the duration of the war, hidden away from public scrutiny. The day after their wedding, the couple committed suicide—Braun by biting into a cyanide pill; Hitler by shooting himself in the head. Paul Baer, a U.S. army captain stationed at the Berghof at the end of the war, took Braun’s hairbrush home as a “souvenir,” along with some other Nazi artifacts. The hair sample (which Baer’s son later sold to dealer John Reznikoff) and the hairbrush have apparently been “authenticated,” but Braun’s two surviving relatives refuse to undergo DNA testing, so it’s impossible to be certain that the hair was indeed hers.

Also worth noting is the sheer ridiculousness of the premise of the television show behind the discovery. Basically, Evans goes about acquiring dubious DNA samples—which have often deteriorated as a result of sunlight or exposure—from equally dubious sources, and sensationalizing the findings on TV. He paid the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving £3,000 (almost $5,000) for a lock of Hitler’s hair, which is so creepy and distasteful I don’t even know where to start. The Mirror also notes that “the lab frequently discovers [samples] don’t ­contain enough DNA for testing.”

All of this is to say: buyer (and viewer) beware! We’ll probably never know with any certainty if Hitler’s wife was of Jewish descent, but authenticity aside—this is reality TV, after all—the hypothesis makes for compelling viewing, and ratings for the April 9 episode will likely be off the charts. Who needs authentic DNA when you have an authentic marketing coup?

(Image: Eva Braun with Adolf Hitler at Berghof, 1942. Via Wikipedia commons.)

The post Was Hitler’s Wife Jewish? appeared first on Jewcy.

Picture a serene afternoon in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary. A Mercedes drives through the town as local children play. But, it isn’t long until the car, which “detects danger before it comes up,” strikes the town’s most notorious citizen, a young Adolf Hitler. That’s the scene in this commercial, created by a group of German film students.

There’s never been a better reason to buy a Mercedes-Benz.

(Photo by AngMoKio/Wikimedia)

The post The Car That Killed Hitler appeared first on Jewcy.

• The best part of Jewish Congressman Barney Frank’s weekend wedding to his partner Jim Ready? The couple vowed to love each other “on MSNBC or on Fox.”

• Yowza: meet the ‘Merica, an all-bacon burger.

• These days, Aaron Sorkin plays “Salieri to David Chase’s or Matthew Weiner’s Mozart.”

• How comedian Marc Maron turned spite into spotlight.

• Who says Bar Refaeli can’t swim with her glasses on, physics be damned?

The post Daily Jewce: Hitler’s Jewish Judge, Barney Frank Gets Hitched, and more appeared first on Jewcy.

• Real men use…Hitler-endorsed shampoo?

• Drake’s bar mitzvah, the music video.

• Happy first birthday, Skyler Morrison Berman—and congrats again on being the youngest Big Jewcy ever.

• RIP, Murray Lender, the man behind Lender’s Bagels.

The post Daily Jewce: Judy Blume’s New E-Books, Drake’s Bar Mitzvah, and more appeared first on Jewcy.

• At The Guardian: A series dubbed “After Tunisia” includes a few piece on Egypt, a couple on Lebanon, a bunch of Palestine, and nearly every country in the Middle East.

• At The Daily Beast: Egyptian police use water cannons on protesters; including Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei

• At The Chicago Tribune: Rahm keeps running.  @MayorEmanuel is thrilled.

• At Listverse: Ten famous people named Adolf that aren’t, ya know, Hitler.

The post Daily Jewce: Post-Tunisia (Sans Israel), Egypt Uses The Water Cannons, Rahm Keeps Running And More appeared first on Jewcy.