A blonde bombshell wearing a gold lamé leotard and over-the-top Xena: Warrior Princess-style accessories ditches rapper Sean Kingston–you know, the chubby Jamaican kid from the 2007 hit “Beautiful Girls”–as she jumps from a golden airplane, landing in a group of dancers gyrating in the desert. A strawberry-blonde waif in knee-high socks is carried on a man’s back all the way from the suburbs of New York to Manhattan, pausing only to lie naked on a couch and strike teasing poses in the grass while singing a quirky, uber-chic pop song. A seductive brunette femme fatale in black lingerie is lying on the floor, singing a dramatic piano ballad with a slight lisp.

No, these aren’t low-budget soft-core porn films, they’re three music videos released in the past year. And the pop harlots starring in them are none other than Israel’s latest cultural exports—nice Jewish girls with a seriously sexy twist (though honestly, you’d never know they were Jewish).

The sky-diving diva? Israeli actress and singer Meital Dohan. Born and raised in a village outside Raanana, Dohan made it all the way from the IDF Entertainment Corps to land a recurring role as Yael Hoffman on the Showtime series Weeds. She also had a role in the 2010 dramatic thriller Monogamy, alongside Rashida Jones and Chris Messina.

The Xena-esque music video is for “On Ya”—as in, “I wanna be on ya, on ya”—which was released a few months ago in the United States. It’s the second single from her upcoming debut album, I’m In Hate With Love, which boasts producers like Rami Afuni of LMFAO and Che Pope, known for his work with Dr. Dre and Eminem. In the video for her clubby first single, “Yummy”, she plays a naked boxer in red leather knee-high boots—and two superimposed hot pink censor bars—who goes around town inexplicably punching people.

The little Lolita? Model, singer, and student Sivan Meller from Haifa, who adopted the convenient stage name Petite. She modeled for a while and later donned shiny leotards and embodied her nickname to perfection as the French-whispering, keyboard-playing, underage-seeming member of the electro-pop group Terry Poison. The band opened for Depeche Mode at the Ramat Gan Stadium, showcased at SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, and spent who knows how many nights playing club gigs throughout the world.

Now she’s launching a solo career in New York while finishing her thesis in the philosophy department of Tel Aviv University. Today she’s 30 going on 13—seriously, she hasn’t aged a bit—and in her debut video, “NYC Time,” released last summer, she falls back on reliable material, playing pouty Little Girl Lost who doesn’t like to wear much. She also, apparently, isn’t fond of walking; the bulk of the video features her listlessly being carried around by a large black man, walking from a small village into New York City. The rest of the video looks like a parody of smutty French Lolita films from the 1970s, and the fact that Petite is actually closer to middle age than barely legal makes it all the more confusing.

The brunette seductress? None other than Daniela Pick from Ramat Ha-Sharon, daughter of Israel’s most famous pop-star, Tsvika Pick. Known in Israel more as a celebrity than a singer, she entered the local music scene with her older sister Sharona as the pop-duo The Pick Sisters, and the highlight of her resume so far is dating Quentin Tarantino briefly in 2009.

Her new single, “Love Me,” is her third solo offering in English, following the Shakira-styled “Yalla Yalla” (recorded in London with well-known British producer Matt Schwartz) and a contemporary R&B rendition of Haddaway’s 1993 Eurodance hit, “What is Love”—immortalized by the Will Ferrell movie, A Night At the Roxbury. In that video, however, she opted for white lingerie instead of black.

These wannabe stars are prime examples of Israel’s latest attempt at Western pop culture dominance. All three women are around 30 years old, and, since slutty dance-pop never really crossed over into the Israeli mainstream, haven’t ever made it big in their home country. Now they’re angling for fame in the United States, shunning the earthy, exotic approach of Ofra Haza, the late Israeli singer who became one of the first world-music artists to reach crossover success on the pop charts, in favor of total assimilation—and hyper-sexualization.

As Petite eloquently explained in an interview for Tel Aviv magazine Achbar Ha-Ir: “Pop and sexuality go hand in hand.” In America, at least, that seems to be the case. From Madonna to Miley, American female pop culture icons have become overwhelmingly sexier, saucier, and more scantily clad. Ever since the gift of cable brought MTV to Israel in the early 1990s, instilling dreams of international stardom in the hearts of impressionable young girls across the country, they’ve felt just as much right to the pop throne as anyone else.

However, while American pop culture is eagerly absorbed by Israeli consumers, it hasn’t yet found a proper outlet. MTV-style dance-pop never found success the Israeli market, even when recorded in Hebrew. Israeli mainstream radio prefers its female singers sensitive and heart-broken, so if you grew up on Madonna and want to sing like her, your only option is to try and repackage it for the place it came from: America. Unfortunately, though, not only are these girls trying to sell ice to eskimos, their slushies aren’t exactly high quality.

Contemporary Israeli pop singers like Ninet Tayeb and Riff Cohen, trying to make it in the European market, established sophisticated personas to set themselves apart. But in America, sex sells—and if that’s where you want to go, it seems you’d better be prepared to put out. As Dohan, Petite, and Pick show, that certainly isn’t a problem. But while these women certainly can turn heads, can they make a lasting impression?

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In the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, text flashes onto the screen: “1858. Two years before the Civil War.” Tarantino has not only given us the year, but also added its relation to an monumentally important event in American history. He assumed, perhaps correctly, that this chronological hand-holding was necessary to adequately situate the film for viewers. Of course, it’s appropriate that it’s Tarantino, whose fidelity to history is nonexistent, who offers this curiously didactic moment.

This week—after celebrating a holiday that often displays only a dim relationship to its historical inspiration—many American families will go to the movies. And many of them will, in turn, see a movie that dramatizes a particular moment in American history—Lincoln, Django Unchained, or Zero Dark Thirty. Ever since Lincoln’s debut in early October, much ink has been spilled about the film’s purported accuracy and whether it appropriately dramatizes the effort to end slavery. Similar debates have followed the release of Django and Zero Dark Thirty, each of which, to varying degrees, relies on the audience’s built-in historical knowledge to tell a particular kind of story.

A great deal seems to be at stake in these arguments, not least because, for many Americans, big-budget cinema is one of the primary ways to absorb history. How many holiday movie-goers will have read Mark Owen’s No Easy Day—an account of the bin Laden raid from one of the members of the SEAL team involved—or Mark Bowden’s The Finish? Or Doris Kearns Godwin’s Team of Rivals, which Steven Spielberg drew on for his Lincoln biopic? All of these books are bestsellers and claim some expertise in their field (though you can find worthy critics of each), but none will ever have the reach, the low barrier to entry, or the hold on the public imagination that these two-hour, forty-foot high entertainments do. Despite whatever challenges mainstream Hollywood filmmaking may face, it still remains the greatest force for distributing this kind of content, and indeed these versions of our national history, to the public.

The critics of these films are more often right than they are wrong (Eric Foner’s letter to the New York Times is a particular treat), but they also proceed from a flawed premise. It seems misguided, if not naïve, that we should continue, year after year, to expect fine-grained accuracy on the big screen, that Hollywood will subordinate dramatic possibility (or the opinions of focus groups) to picayune details of the historical record. These are spectacles, mass culture on the largest scale, and we are long past the point where even the manipulative possibilities of documentaries—and reality television, for that matter—are widely understood. We should know better and adjust our outrage-meters accordingly.

Instead, what is most revealing about these films is our practically carnal appetite to see history writ large and to arbitrate the film’s treatment of this history. (Every movie-going group has at least one person whose first post-film response is to point out some inaccuracy.) Filmmakers play off of this desire as well. They buy into the discourse of authenticity and accuracy. They make heavy use of academics and expert sources, they pay homage to their source materials. In interviews, they speak of the historical personages in the present tense, as if they know them deeply. They talk about the hardships and sacrifices of their subjects.

In the case of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, they trumpet access to members of the intelligence community and the Obama administration (access which has proven controversial). With an event like the bin Laden raid, initially so highly secretive, with the dissemination of information cleverly stage-managed, the filmmakers can claim an authority that perhaps surpasses that of former SEAL Mark Owen, with his ground-level view. And given that this is a recent affair, the first books on the subject having appeared in the last few months, there’s a fresh-off-the-presses air to this film. Commentators and Kathryn Bigelow herself have compared the film to a piece of journalism. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Zero Dark Thirty is positioning itself as the work of a reporter embedded at the most covert levels; this film is the exclusive.

It’s in the interest of these movies to never quite settle the question over their accuracy. They’re better off when adhering closely to the historical record but also leaving some wiggle room. Otherwise, we would have little to debate; controversy surrounding a new movie generates easy copy. But whether Zero Dark Thirty promotes the incorrect view that torture yielded intelligence that led to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout is ultimately less important than what this argument reveals about how an “accepted” historical narrative is created. (And as a friend of mine commented, it’s odd that Bigelow is seemingly receiving more flack for her dramatization of torture than the Bush administration did for actually ordering and countenancing torture.)

No, what these films reveal most are our fears about our society’s historical literacy, that these mass entertainments must be counted on to give us a true vision of who we are. Salon critic Andrew O’Hehir may have said it best when he remarked, “for Tarantino, history is just another movie to strip for parts.” With Django, it’s easy to conclude that the antebellum South just provides a useful thematic backdrop and moral structure for a particular kind of revenge-driven gore-fest. The movie is a fantasy from first to last, with anachronisms and disturbing liberties taken throughout (mandingo fighting). In this sense, Tarantino isn’t the greatest violator of the historical record. Among this season’s directors, he’s simply the most honest.

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One of the elements that, however unintentionally, makes foreign films produced about the Holocaust so effective is that each face is unrecognizable, and audiences aren’t too busy looking for stars in the cast to distract from the monumental nature of its content. That was the crucial difference between the first two major films about Sept. 11—United 93 and World Trade Center—where the former succeeded in creating a tense, claustrophobic environment with mostly unknown actors and the latter flopped by casting Nicolas Cage in a central role, diminishing the severity of the situation.

When it comes to Holocaust movies produced in the United States, stars tend to appear in the lead roles. Meryl Streep won her first Oscar for a Holocaust movie, Sophie’s Choice. Kate Winslet did the same a few decades later for The Reader. Italian comedian Roberto Benigni cast himself in his heartwarming Holocaust movie, Life Is Beautiful, which was a hit in the United States, and Daniel Craig got the lead role in Defiance.

Other times, actors have become famous as a result of their breakthrough roles in Holocaust movies, namely Ralph Fiennes for Schindler’s List and Adrien Brody for The Pianist. Eagerly pointing out a familiar face can feel inappropriate, even uncomfortable, when witnessing a cinematic recreation of the horrors of the Holocaust. It can sometimes be difficult to separate these performances from their other memorable roles, be they in romantic comedies, action movies, or dramas, a similar phenomenon to what Starlee Kine noted about TV show actors in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year.

Rose Bosch’s La Rafle, the true story of the roundup of French Jews by French police in 1942, represents an interesting contradiction. Among the Jews portrayed in the film, the only one likely to be recognized by American audiences is non-Jew Jean Reno, star of Leon: The Professional. Then there’s Mélanie Laurent, first seen in the United States as Jewish movie theater owner Shoshanna in Quentin Tarantino’s Holocaust-set Inglourious Basterds. In La Rafle, however, Laurent doesn’t play a Jew. She portrays a Righteous Gentile, the Protestant nurse Annette Monod, who is not content to stand by and witness the mistreatment of the Jews.

Casting what may be the most well-known French-Jewish actress working today as a non-Jew in a film about Jews is an intriguing move. Like the devastating shot of the red coat that serves as the sole instance of color in Schindler’s List, Laurent’s Monod is the face that American audiences will notice most throughout the film. She represents the crusade against injustice and persecution, while the Jews in the movie are largely nameless and anonymous. Recognizing Laurent enhances rather than detracts, since she is a capable actress with a proven track record of playing someone who stands up for her beliefs and for good. Connecting her with Inglourious Basterds helps to contextualize the setting of the film, which tells an important story of one country’s complicity in the Holocaust that deserves to be seen by audiences worldwide.

The post The Trouble With Casting Hollywood Faces in Holocaust Films appeared first on Jewcy.

The number of journalists who refer to the French/Israeli/Dutch composer-singer-songwriter-sound designer-engineer-producer Keren Ann as “mesmerizing” or “extraordinary” is almost laughable, and I agree.  Her deeply personal music is hard to neatly lump into a basket filled with her oft-less worldly female contemporaries, as she transcends the musical typecasting and organically pushes the boundaries of context, while expertly avoiding caricature.  Perhaps the British magazine Q said it best, “Few can manage this level of confidence and mystique.”  I caught up with Keren on her few days off between two shows in Germany and the start of a three week U.S. tour in an attempt to add to the mysterious canon of Keren Ann.

A friend from Paris told me to check out your eponymous album during a heat wave in NYC in 2007, and I vividly remember listening to the first 10 seconds of “It’s All A Lie” – the hammer-on vibrato guitar, the amp crackle, and your effortlessly, sultry opening words – and being totally drawn in…and that was before I learned that you also produce your albums.   How did you pick the sequence of songs for your new album 101?

Keren: It felt pretty natural. I needed to build a sequence that makes sence in terms of the sound evolution but also the stories told. I always knew that the title track will close the album, I just needed to set the right sound order for the rest. I also knew that “All The Beautiful Girls” would come third and “My Name Is Trouble” first. That was a given.

101 strikes me as a musical leap from your 2007 eponymous album – especially the beats, drum sounds, and key sounds, while still maintaining your breezy and beautiful vocal delivery.  What is really striking though is the image and content leap: from lovelorn contemplation of lies to holding a gun on your album cover and talking about being a “Sugar Mama”.  How conscious of this shift were you during the creative process?

The more I make music, the more I become obsessed with sound and frequencies and production. I know that songwriting is a big part of my life and I don’t see how I can do without it. However, the art of sound and the entire process of giving an emotion, a note, an instrument, a room, or an atmosphere an actual physical form is all I care about when I’m in the studio. I want the music to give the exact feel that is already in the words and the melody but I need to be able to paint a whole mew musical landscape with each song. I say so many things about myself in the songs that I can’t step back when it comes to their form. I need a song to be fully representative of what I have to say at that moment and I need an entire album to be a true chapter of my life.

One of the things that I love about your music is that every so often a lyric makes me squirm a little.  Lyrics like “There was blood on my fans/There was blood in my whiskey/Now there’s blood on my hands” almost have a Pixie-ish violent feel given the context of your lush melodies.  Where does that come from?

I love beauty and poetry but I think my observation is always trapped between the actual instinctive feel and what it can become. How to turn around a perfect situation or how to balance out an odd feeling of longing. This empathetic point of you helps me write things that are sometimes hard to say. Blood on my hands is more like “what would Tarantino do in my place”?

The title track on your new album, 101, references The Old Testament and Israel independence – do you think of yourself as a Jewish artist?  Or an Israeli artist?

My identity doesn’t necessarily exist through religion but I do carry my origins with me. When you are born in Israel you do not have the luxury of being an eternal pacifist because reality hits you from a very young age. I think that being, even partly, Israeli is a strong responsibility though I am rarely an activist in my songs. I do have statements but they are open to subjectivity. My countdown has to do with the last hours before my fathers death and he is all over that song. He was Israeli.

Do you actually have 48 pairs of shoes [as referenced in the track “101”]? Which are your favorites?

I do. I have a pair of classic red high heels that I rarely wear cause I can’t bare over an hour with them but I love having them.

Have you been following Obama and Netanyahu’s speeches on the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks?

I have and in order to speak about that we will probably need a lifetime.

Well – do you think peace is possible in our lifetime?

I think peace is possible in certain parts of the world, but unfortunately I am very pessimistic about peace in the Middle East.  We would need long hours of discussion to make this response more valuable.

Your U.S. tour starts today.  What do you do to fill the time while traveling between cities?

I write. I watch TV on my laptop. I have a pile of fun books to read. I try to blend in with the long highways and not make plans.

Full Keren Ann tour dates are here.  Catch her in NYC at Bowery Ballroom on Wednesday, June 8th, and in LA at Luckman Fine Arts Complex on Saturday, June 25th. 101 is now available on iTunes and Amazon, and in record stores that know what’s up.

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