Stop us if this sounds familiar: A prisoner learns that Jewish inmates are entitled to kosher meals, more expensive to the state, prepared separately, and, perhaps, better than the food produced in far greater bulk. So they claim they’re Jewish, and since the state can’t impugn on their religious freedom, get the kosher meal. And then, word spreads, and soon, a large number of crypto-Jews comes out of the woodwork, frustrating a prison system that doesn’t like spending more than the bare minimum.

This may be familiar for a couple of reasons. The first, is that it was a plot-line on Orange is the New Black, a couple of seasons ago. And now, prisoners in Scotland are following suit, and over 100 inmates in an institution in Edinburgh are claiming to be Jewish, racking up a food bill of an additional £242,000 ($313,000). Authorities are beginning an investigation to disentangle the delicate mess of not infringing on religious freedoms, but not let nonbelievers game the system. (On Orange is the New Black, for what it’s worth, they brought in a rabbi to quiz the inmates and then filter them, and one eventually underwent a sincere conversion.)

There are about 6,500 Jews living in Scotland, and with about nine of them incarcerated throughout the entire country (about 2 in the Edinburgh prison in question) before this trend began. That makes them very roughly equally represented (slightly underrepresented) in the general Scottish prison population.

But here’s the second reason this story may have been familiar: This has happened before. Last year, a prison in Clackmannanshire (say it five times fast) reported a similar number of prisoners claiming to be Jewish (for a smaller prison population overall, so a higher percentage of inmates), in addition to smaller numbers of other prisoners throughout the U.K. It looks like the problem, once it faded from the news, has slowly been spreading, now reaching a boiling point where it’s in the spotlight once again.

The story hits on everything from religious liberties, to prison reform, to arguing over the use of public funds. But the biggest issue of all is the irony that non-Jews are scrambling for access to kosher food, assuming that it’s better. Talk to most secular Jewish New Yorkers about buying good pizza and they’ll tell you to avoid the kosher stuff at all costs.

I’d say that kosher business should adapt a new business model of selling to prison commissaries, but after the Bernie Madoff prison hot chocolate racket, we probably don’t need to risk the anti-Semitic backlash.

Screenshot from Orange is the New Black via Previously.tv

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Come June 6th, you can catch me on a serious Netflix binge of Jenji Kohan’s hit jail-bird series, Orange is the New Black. The trailer released yesterday, and the gangs all back! Red, Taystee, and my personal favorite, Nicky, played by Jewish actress Natasha Lyonne, are all back for round two, and it’s clear that Piper’s WASP-y shell has hardened quite a bit from her stint in solitary confinement.

Although Laura Preppon’s character, Alex, will reportedly make her exit this season, she also appears in the trailer. And we see there’s a new matriarch on the block threatening Red’s cell-supremacy! Of course, her name is “Vee.” Such a tough jail-chic name. That one, abrupt syllable thing.

Check the trailer for yourself, and scroll below for a video of the cast summing up season 2. Let’s just say it’s “deep, dangerous, and extraordinary.”

(Image: promo)

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For the fans of Girls and Orange Is the New Black, have we got news for you: Danielle Brooks, who plays Taystee in OITNB, will be on the next season of Girls—and she’ll be the first black woman on the show.

Lena Dunham has faced much criticism over her very white cast, but she’s since defended her choices on NPR’s Fresh Air:

“I wrote the first season primarily by myself, and I co-wrote a few episodes. But I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, ‘I hear this and I want to respond to it.’ And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.”

It will be interesting to see what role Brooks plays in the new season. Hopefully she lasts longer than Donald Glover’s character, Sandy, the black Republican.

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If you missed binge-watching Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, leaving your house this summer must have been a fairly frustrating experience. In certain circles, “Have you seen Orange is the New Black?” “What did you think of the ending?” and “Aren’t you sad that Laura Prepon isn’t coming back as a regular next season?” are the only topics of conversation.

The series, which debuted July 11, is summer’s bona fide hit, and for good reason. Complex female characters are so rarely given a spotlight on television; OITNB thrives on them. Every character has a thorny, unexpected backstory. You have (spoilers ahead!) goody two-shoes Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), an upper-crust blonde who makes artisanal soaps and quotes Robert Frost, in prison for smuggling drugs. There’s blissed-out Buddhist Yoga Jones (Constance Shulman), locked up for shooting an eight-year-old boy. Quiet, proud Miss Claudette (Michelle Hurst) is revealed to be not your average elderly woman, but a cold-blooded murderer.

No one is quite whom they seem on the show. Series creator Jenji Kohan (the Jewish mastermind behind Showtime’s Weeds) excels at bending stereotypes backwards. But when it comes to Larry Bloom (Jason Biggs), Piper’s fiancé, she falls short.

It’s easy to fall in love with Bloom right away. Some men might recoil at the prospect of their girlfriend spending 15 months in prison. Not Bloom. Instead, he proposes on a beach and dutifully visits Piper in prison every other weekend. (“Why would I want a felonious, former lesbian, WASP, shiksa who’s about to go to prison to marry me?” he asks during his proposal. “Well, because this peculiar, under-achieving, under-employed Jew boy loves her.”) He’s every Brooklynite’s dream—he dresses like an Esquire model in plaid button-downs layered under cozy sweaters, eats organic kale, and is an occasionally successful freelance writer (appearing in the New York Times and on NPR). What’s not to adore?

That’s exactly the problem. Bloom is the stereotypical Nice Jewish Boy, no more, no less. He and his parents (Kathryn Kates and Todd Susman) are the lone flat characters among a cast of three-dimensional personalities. Most of their interactions are simply a series of self-deprecating Jewish jokes, like this one exchange in the season finale:

“Did you hear about this Google Glass thing? We’re all gonna look like cyborgs,” Bloom’s father says.

“Seibergs? Weren’t those your neighbors down in Florida?” Bloom asks.

His mother chimes in, “My friends loved your radio thing. Everyone was talking about it at mah johngg.”

Kohan doesn’t shy away from highlighting race and ethnicity. When Tiffany, a white evangelical Christian character advocates for a whites-only bathroom, Taystee, who is black, retorts, “This ain’t The mother-fucking Help, bitch.” The Bloom’s Jewish jokes aren’t out of place; most scenes are fraught with racially-driven comments. But whereas Tiffany and Taystee each have their own complex (not to mention heartbreaking) histories, Bloom does not. This might pass on a different show, but OITNB is built on the foundation of telling real, raw, unpredictable stories. Larry Bloom is as predictable as they come.

Nice Jewish Boys like Larry Bloom are old hat for Biggs. He got his big break on Broadway at age 13 as Judd Hirsch’s son in Conversations With My Father. In 1997, he played Robby Rosenfeld in the series Total Security. International stardom came in 1999, when he portrayed Jim Levenstein, an anxious, nebbishy high school senior on a quest to lose his virginity, in American Pie. It’s not so difficult to imagine Bloom as a grown-up Levenstein, especially when he makes an ominous reference to “the pie incident” (American Pie‘s most infamous scene involves Biggs getting intimate with an apple pie). Five years later, he portrayed an Orthodox Jew in Daniel Goldfarb’s play Modern Orthodox.

Biggs pulls off the mensch schtick so convincingly that you might be surprised to learn he’s actually Catholic. His Twitter bio reads, “The Jewiest looking non-Jew.” (His dark curls are courtesy of his English, Italian, and Sicilian ancestry.) While he has played non-Jewish roles in Scary Movie, Texas Rangers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, among others, he’s best known for playing the Nice Jewish Boy.

According to Biggs, that’s not exactly by choice. “The American Pie success has been so wonderful for me, but it’s also locked me into a certain type of role,” he told Rolling Stone in July. “It’s limited my options.” In other words, dayenu.

The first season of OITNB ends with Bloom and Chapman’s relationship on the rocks, so it’s unclear what Bloom’s role will be when the series resumes in 2014. Kohan is a brilliant writer and Bloom’s lines are genuinely funny, but cracks about overbearing mothers and lawyer fathers only go so far. Every other OITNB character has a few skeletons in their closet. We’re still waiting for Bloom’s.

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