What does a movie about sex-crazed, abusive nuns featuring a slew of big-name celebrities have to do with Judaism? Not much on the surface, but it should come as no surprise that proper Hollywood Catholic sex comedy wouldn’t be complete without its share of Jews.

…

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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The trailer is out for GLOW, an upcoming Netflix series starring your girlfriend and mine, Alison Brie (sorry, Dave Franco). And boy, does it look good.

“GLOW” is an acronym— and Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling is a real entertainment circuit that had its heyday in the 1980s, when this series takes place. Brie’s character, Ruth Wilder (please be Jewish, please be Jewish) is a struggling actor who winds up in the pro-wrestling business, where she finds an unlikely sisterhood, and empowerment and success in a way she never expected. Marc Maron also stars as Sam Sylvia, the somewhat skeezy director of the operation.

Historically, there weren’t that many Jews involved with GLOW, but two prominent performers, Chainsaw and Spike, aka the Heavy Metal Sisters (born Sharon and Donna Willinsky, respectively), were. But the new TV show is fictionalized, so here’s hoping. Regardless, the series features a diverse cast, and Brie is perfect and amazing, so we’re off to a great start.

Plus, Jenji Kohan is attached as one of the executive producers, so you really can’t go wrong. (Plus, former Jewcy and current Tablet writer Rachel Shukert is part of the production team.)

GLOW hits Netflix on June 23rd. In the meantime, check out the amazing, funny, touching trailer below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZqDO6cTYVY

Image via YouTube.

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Finally, Dave Franco and Alison Brie have tied the knot!

The (Jewish, funny, unfairly attractive) couple has been dating since 2012 and engaged since 2015. In that time, Franco has been in like a dozen movies, and Brie has wrapped up both Community and Mad Men (oh don’t worry; she still has more than enough on her plate).

There’s no word on if the ceremony was Jewish at all; after all, both Franco, 31, and Brie, 34, (both from interfaith families) were raised culturally Jewish, rather than religiously. Besides, they’re being private about the details of the event (the odds are good that at least James Franco was there, though, since Dave is his brother).

A la Chelsea Peretti (Jewish) and Jordan Peele (not Jewish but great), when the Dabrie (Franison? DaFrAB?) were engaged, they made a TV commercial together… for a mobile game, as you do.

But the most important question remaining: Are Franco and Brie going to appear on Jewcy‘s March Madness Jewish Celebrity bracket? We’ll tell you now— yes. But will they at some point be up against one another?

Wait and see.

In the meantime, mazel tov to Dave and Alison, and here’s a weird (slightly NSFW) comedy video they made together back in 2013:

Image via YouTube

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So, we decided to fix that. Here are other fascinating Jewish women ripe for depiction on screen, and ideas for Jewish actors that could easily star in these projects:

1. Clara Lemlich— Ever heard of the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909? It was Lemlich who brought the bubbling conflict to a boil, in an extremely climactic (dare we say cinematic?) speech (in Yiddish!) at a labor meeting that convinced the crowd to strike— a high point in her long career advocating for workers’ rights.

Who should play her: Clara actually has a pretty close resemblance to Hailee Steinfeld, and the Oscar-nominated Actor showed in True Grit that she can play a young person who has been made mature beyond her years from hardship.

Heck, Steinfeld could also play Rose Schneiderman, who coined the phrase “bread and roses,” and was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum (she had a female partner for much of her life). Gertrude Stein was not the only queer Jewish woman, people!

2. Shulamith Firestone— Firestone’s story has all the makings of a great film, from her transformation from Yeshiva girl to secular artist, to her powerful, sometimes controversial work in the feminist movement, to her struggles with mental illness.

Who should play her: Lola Kirke. Kirke is perhaps less well-known than her sister Jemima (a star of Girls), but she’s had some pretty hefty roles already, including in Gone Girl. Put her in a pair of round glasses and watch her go.

3. Rosalind Franklin— Franklin‘s scientific career was in some ways tragic, partially due to her tragic death at age 37 of cancer, and partially because of her relegation to obscurity despite the hugely important work she did in exploring the molecular structure of DNA (these days, there is even some controversy on whether or not Watson and Crick appropriated her work).

Who should play her: Mara Wilson. You may be going, “Wait, Matilda?” But Wilson has a vibrant (if intentionally indie) career today, as a writer, comedian, and, yes, actor. She’s still got it, and with a convincing British accent, this would be a chance to shine. (Also, she has an amazing Twitter).

4. Doña Gracia Nasi— Remember when the child of Inquisition survivors rose up to become one of the most successful merchants in Renaissance Europe? Remember when she used her fortune to rescue Jews from Portugal, build Jewish communities, and support Jewish scholarship? No? Well, then the time for a biopic is ripe. (She actually appears as a character on a Turkish TV show, but that’s not nearly enough.)

Who should play her: Neve Campbell is of Sephardic heritage, a good age to play Nasi, and has the acting chops. If Campbell can handle the Underwoods on House of Cards, she can handle the Inquisition. Campbell is actually a practicing Catholic, but she identifies ethnically as Jewish, and this would be an interesting twist in playing a woman whose family had once faked a Catholic conversion to survive.

5. Me and all my friends— This is just an excuse to cast Jenny Slate as anyone I know, and maybe anyone you know. I don’t know who’s going to end up famous enough for a filmed account of their life, but Slate is brazenly Jewish enough, funny, has a sensitive side (Obvious Child is amazing) and really feels like a peer. Slate for life.

We conclude with a special shout-out to commenter Greg M., for suggesting:

Like the meet cute Rom Com “Hannah + Martin, The Hannah Arendt Story” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Martin Heidegger, a right-leaning morally ambiguous philosopher and Alison Brie as Hannah Arendt, a foxy student of moral issues. They Kant help themselves from falling in love!

Sign us up.

Images from Wikipedia

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With Valentines Day right around the corner, Jimmy Kimmel thought he’d give a “boost” to Craigslist Missed Connections.  In her most sultry voice, actress Alison Brie assists Kimmel in reading a list of missed connections to the tune of chic hotel elevator music.

Walmart paint lady, Subway sandwich man, and UPS guy all get a shout out. To all you love birds and single-mingles, Happy Friday.

(Photo by Getty)

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Fans of Community rejoiced last night as the fifth season premiered on NBC. After a rocky fourth season, the show is back, and the cast is ready to reclaim Greendale Community College. 31-year-old Alison Brie, who stars in the show as perfectionist and former Adderall addict, Annie Edison, recently spoke with The Daily Beast about the return of Dan Harmon, her time formerly employed as a clown, and pre-gaming with her costars.

Some teasers from the interview:

So, Community is back. I saw the first few episodes, and it seems like the show has its mojo back. What was the first day of filming with Dan like? Was there a team-bonding night?

We like to pre-game, so the cast had gotten together with Dan and Chris McKenna, our other new-old showrunner, beforehand to—not hash everything out—but have a fun night where we addressed everything that needed to be addressed, and to more get ourselves pumped up for work. So by the time we started filming, it felt like the same-old. The energy all-round on set was better, and real positive.

Back to the pre-game party. What are we talking about here? Flip cup? Karaoke? How does the Community cast get down?

What was the worst experience you had as a clown? Any Damien-like kids?

The kids were not so bad! Honestly, the worst part—and again, it goes back to the Power Puff Girls—was being ogled by strange dads. That was weird. It’s like, “I have a huge head on! You don’t even know what I look like, so stop looking up my skirt!”

As far as Dan’s exit goes, and his dicey relationship with Chevy Chase, did you ever witness any of that hostility between them on set? And was it the sense of the entire cast that it was getting to be too much, and a change needed to be made?

Honestly, I don’t really have much of a take on it. I think it gets really blown out of proportion in the media. I don’t think Dan leaving was definitively something that had to do with Chevy, nor does Chevy leaving definitively have to do with Dan coming back. These were network-level decisions that were in a totally different realm outside of my working knowledge, but in the media, everyone wants to play it up like it’s this rivalry. And I wasn’t at the wrap party that year when some of that infamous stuff went down.

(Photo by Getty)

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Jewcy patron saint Alison Brie (née Schermerhorn) and her band Alison Brie and the Girls are back, performing a soulful, slowed-down cover of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend”—and it’s pretty great.

Brie, who plays the comically oversexualized Annie Edison on NBC’s tragically overlooked Community as well as Trudy Campbell on Mad Men, is almost unfairly talented, doing that whole actress-with-an-all-girls-cover-band-on-the-side thing and totally pulling it off:

Previously on Jewcy: Alison Brie, Jewish Actress from Community and Mad Men, Totally Rocks
Watch Alison Brie Dance the Charleston During a Photo Shoot
Network Jews: Annie Edison from NBC’s Community

(Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Irina Shabayeva)

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• Gay parents on Israeli TV shows: so hot right now. [NYT]

• An Italian artist’s statue of Hitler praying, currently on display in the Warsaw Ghetto, has offended a whole bunch of people. [NY Daily News]

• Ariel Kaminer’s moving tribute to the late David Rakoff. [NYT]

• Alison Brie is Captain America. [BuzzFeed]

• Tel Aviv is going Wi-Fi, people [JTA]

• Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow were roommates:

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Rachel Berry moved to New York and we stopped watching, Annie Edison and the rest of Community was pushed to 2013 (though that didn’t stop us from getting our Alison Brie fill in other ways, and we’re still confused about how we feel about Shosh (but not Zosia, never Zosia) making 2012 very much the year of men for our Network Jews series (with sincere apologies to Hanna Rosin).

While there were many worthy candidates, here are the Top 5:

1. Schmidt:

Our first Network Jew is also our favorite. While we remain mixed about the merits of New Girl (even if it did lead to this) we can always rely on the real star of the show: Schmidt. He may have started out as a douchebag, but somewhere along the line he’s become, as Willa Paskin dubbed him, an “aspirational douchebag”—somehow going from disgusting to endearing.

Of course a major part of all this is his Jewishness. But perhaps the best part is that the actor who plays him, Max Greenfield, is up for anything, whether it’s dressing up as a Jewish Assassin or making in-character spin videos. Let’s just hope he stops guest–editing GOOP.

2. Saul Berenson:

Dov Friedman called Mandy Patinkin’s turn as the CIA Middle East division chief “the most accurate depiction of an American Jewish identity ever portrayed on television.” And for good reason. Homeland finished off it’s second season [spoiler alert] with Saul saying kaddish yet again as David Estes and a whole bunch of other characters were blown to smithereens. It isn’t just Claire Danes who thinks of challah (or was it holla?) when she sees our favorite bearded CIA agent. Just watch this video.

OK, we may be getting distracted, we’re talking about Berenson, not Patinkin, though it can be difficult to separate the two. Inspired by the Israeli show—and some would say superior—Hatufim, there’s at least one place where there’s no competition: the character of older, wiser intelligence officer. We only hope that in Season 3 they figure out some way to let him sing.

3. Max Blum:

Probably the most underrated show on this list, Happy Endings’ six-person ensemble is held together by Max Blum. I know, I know. We just talked about how great Schmidt is, and here we’re saying that Happy Endings’ anti-Schmidt is also our favorite. You know what, we can have our cake and eat it too … with Max, while listening to Mandona.

The pop culture-obsessed sarcastic slob of a gay best friend is everything you’d want in a pop-culture obsessed sarcastic slob of a gay best friend. Don’t just take our word for it, Emily Nussbaum thinks the man who brought us Boyz II Menorah is Amahzing too.

4. Eli Gold:

The Good Wife may have started out as an Eliot Sptizer-style, ripped from the headlines, procedural-style show, and it might still be that, but somehow it rises above. While there’s lots to say about the shows women, and even Jewcy favorite Josh Charles, the biggest surprise has to be Alan Cumming’s Jewish turn as Eli Gold.

As Abe Fried-Tanzer wrote, “It’s no coincidence that Gold has been compared to a real-life famous Jew with a similar profession. Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff for President Obama … has quite a reputation for winning at all costs, and Gold has managed to earn that same status in what could easily have been (and originally was) merely a guest-starring role. Gold may reinforce the stereotype of Jews wanting all the power, but he’s definitely someone you’d want on your side.”

5. Ruxin:

There’s no getting around it: Nick Kroll’s Ruxin is a self-assured asshole. (In one episode, Ruxin defends a paint company whose cans explode by arguing that anyone buying such a cheap item should have “a reasonable expectation that that product will explode in your face.” “And, morally, you’re good with this?” asks his friend, Pete. “There was just one word in there that I am not familiar with,” Ruxin responds.) But, for Sala Levin, this is all the more reason to love him—and love him we do!

After all, “A man who coasts through life on his assimilated rudeness but maintains some iota of his people’s historical dread is, after all, every girl’s dream.”

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• Mark Zuckerberg donated $500 million to a Silicon Valley education and health initiative. [Newser]

• Bored to Death’s Jason Schwartzman is heading to Parks and Recreation. [HuffPo]

• We dare you to not read this Scroll post called ‘Homeland Is Obviously Anti-Semitic.’ [Tablet]

• Ramaz alum Natasha Lyonne has a new sitcom in the works loosely based on her post-rehab life. [Vulture]

• BuzzFeed’s most WTF celeb photo of 2012? Lena Dunham, pantsless at a premiere. [BuzzFeed]

• There’s Alison Brie again, rapping and being awesome. [Vulture]

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