Taika Waititi is Hollywood’s new darling; the indie filmmaker has gone from making dark comedies in New Zealand to directing Thor: Ragnarok, the latest Marvel mega-flick. And he’s also been in the news as a minority in the film industry; a profile in the New York Times Magazine this past week, for example, talked about his Maori background, an aspect of his identity he publicly emphasizes, and often incorporates into his work.

These profiles often discuss him having a white mother, but few, The Times included, mention that she’s Jewish. Her maiden name is Cohen, and early in his career Waititi even went by Taika Cohen. But don’t expect to see him at shul anytime soon; religiously, the director doesn’t practice any faith, and culturally, he identifies more as Maori.

“I grew up in, thematically, pretty much all of my work is about outsiders and I think growing as neither full Maori nor full Pākehā or white,” he once said in an interview. “I’ve always been an outsider, felt like an outsider in both worlds, even as I identified more with my Maori side.”

And so, Waititi touches on a lot of the issues of the ever-vexing question, “Who is a Jew?” For hardliners who answer this question primarily with matrilineal descent, it’s no question: Taika is a Member of the Tribe, regardless of how he thinks of himself. But when you take into account personal identity, it becomes a bit thornier. Waititi doesn’t really identify as a Maori Jew, but a Maori person with some Jewish ancestry. So what does it mean to “claim” someone as part of your people who’s reticent to do so?

These questions can be thorny, but in the meantime, if you want to privately schep naches from Waititi’s accomplishments, go for it. Because have you seen the trailer for Thor? Jeff Goldblum for days.

Image via Wikimedia

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Brazilian director Héctor Eduardo Babenco died on Wednesday of a heart attack. Babenco, 70, was the first Latin American nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, for his film Kiss of the Spider Woman. (His other most famous films were probably Pixote and Ironweed.)

While Babenco was an international director based in Brazil, he was born and raised in Argentina. His mother, Janka Haberberg, was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. His father, Jaime, was a gaucho (cowboy) of Ukrainian origin (it seems unclear whether or not he was Jewish as well).

The New York Times completely failed to mention Babenco’s Jewishness in their obituary. What a surprise.

This isn’t to say that Babenco had a strong affinity with his identity. If he did, he didn’t speak publicly about it or include it in his work. His 1991 drama At Play in the Fields of the Lord was critical of Christianity, though being critical of systems of power was a theme in much of his work, from prisons to economic oppression. In his spot in the 2014 religious anthology film Words with Gods (Israeli director Amos Gitai did another segment), Babenco opted to explore Umbanda, a syncretic Brazilian tradition.

Babenco’s legacy continued in at least one other Jewish art form: Kiss of the Spider Woman was eventually adapted into a musical by powerhouse (Jewish) writing team John Kander and Fred Ebb.

Whether or not Babenco was influenced by his Jewish heritage isn’t an answerable question, but what we did have was a brilliant director, who was Jewish in origin, who through his work was always questioning, taking risks, facing injustice. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it’s a resonant one at the least.

The entirety of Kiss of the Spider Woman (the 1985 film) is actually on YouTube, and you can watch it below:

Thanks to film archivist Harry Eskin for his valuable input for this piece.

Image Credit:Wikimedia

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Imagine: you’re sitting at a Le Pain Quotidien, enjoying an overpriced croissant, jittering from your cold brew buzz. All seems well and fine, until… your glass shakes, your laptop loses power, your waiter gives you a nasty look (oh, wait, he’d do that anyway), and then the highly populated island of Manhattan breaks loose and sails away through the Atlantic Ocean. Well, this nightmare is coming to a theater near you. Directed by Shawn Levy and starring Will Smith, City That Sailed is a go. Eek. Deadline reports:

Shawn Levy has been tapped to develop and direct City That Sailed, the 20th Century Fox adventure pic that now officially has Will Smith aboard to star. Audrey Wells is penning the script for the tentpole and Smith and James Lassiter’s Overbrook Entertainment will produce. The story centers on a father and daughter on the island of Manhattan as it breaks loose and sails across the Atlantic Ocean.

Before you go and see this movie, which has been in production since 2008—so it may take a while—you should watch the trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. It looks pretty awesome, in an “are all of the biblical stories going to be turned into feature films” kind of way. If this goes down, Chumash teachers, like English teachers, would have to start writing questions for their quizzes that will elucidate who actually read the work and who watched Demi Moore and Gary Oldman go at it on screen, but with the story of King David and Bathsheba instead of The Scarlet Letter.

So in the meantime, watch the trailer for Noah, it is, as Tablet’s Yair Rosenberg put it, “the Most Anticipated Jewish Movie of the Year.”

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