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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Guess what! My new book, Love Me, just came out this week, and I am relatively confident that you are going to. Love it, that is. (I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy and I no longer need you to personally love me.)

It’s the scintillating sequel to my book Starstruck, which came out last year, and the second in my YA series set in the Golden Age of Hollywood. That “scintillating” is the precise word used by Kirkus Reviews to describe it, and if you’re at all familiar with how Kirkus normally reviews things, you’ll know that really means something. They also called it “sizzling,” “with more twists and turns than Mulholland Drive,” and a variety of other nice things. I’m sorry. I’m not a braggart by nature, but my grandmother is dead so now I have to tell you these things myself.

The bottom line is you should buy it, and you should also buy the first book in the series so you’ll know what’s going on. Let me put it this way, if you loved Valley of the Dolls, but thought what was really missing from it was a scene where your Yiddish-speaking great-grandmother complained to her Oscar nominated son about the fruit in her hotel (“it’s too shiny!”), then this is the book for you.

Anyway, in honor of the holiday we’re observing today, the delightful people here at Jewcy asked me to share my knowledge on how to celebrate a real old-fashioned Valentine’s Day in Hollywood, 1939. Ready? Here goes!

Wake up face down on the floor of a hotel, still fully clothed from the night before. Stagger to the bathroom and throw up. Ugh, is that really you in the mirror? Well, they can fix it in make-up. Light up a cigarette. Call the studio and have them send a car over and an errand boy with a change of clothes for you to leave in. Is the boy blind? No? Can they get a blind one? Well, can they blind him specially? Because seriously, no one can see you like this and live. Seriously.

Finish screaming at the secretary who refuses to cooperate. You’ll get her fired later today. Light another cigarette. Call down to order a huge elaborate breakfast, which you’ll charge to the studio. When it comes, send the whole thing away again immediately and pop a couple of those little green pills Dr. Lipkin prescribes to keep you up, up, up, peppy peppypeppy. And thin. Don’t forget thin. But you still have a headache, so you have to look around for some Scotch. Oh, there it is, under the bed. It spilled, but you can mop most of it up with a handkerchief and wring it into your mouth, the way you fed milk to the orphaned baby bird you found in the barn that time, back on your parents withered farm in the Dust Bowl, when you were a different person with a different name.

The studio car arrives with the blindfolded boy (it was the best they could do, you guess) who brings your clothes up to the room. He’s docile and surprisingly good-looking, and you briefly consider seducing him, but there’s no time. You have to get home for a Valentine’s Day photo shoot with your studio-mandated co-star in life and art. You despise each other, but manage to look convincingly in love for the cameras, as you always do. After the shoot his over, your co-star propositions you, “because it’s Valentine’s Day, what the hell.” You’ve got a throbbing pounding headache, but you figure, why not? Might as well go through with it once, just to see what you’re not missing.

It’s over quick, although you managed to make a lot of noise so the photographers packing up outside can go spread it all over town how you two are really in love. After a few final insults, you leave, feeling completely disgusted with yourself and the lie your life as become, and pop a few more green pills before you take the car over to see your actual lover, which has to be done in complete secrecy because a) you’re married b) they’re married c) you are of the same sex or d) they can’t do anything for your career. You spend a blissful few hours together indoors and in bed, fantasizing aloud about why you can’t do this all the time. Why you can’t just run away together and live on a farm or something. But you can’t, because then you wouldn’t be famous anymore, and you would rather be dead.

Oh, and you should probably fret out loud about Hitler and whether he’s really going to invade Poland or not, because this is 1939 and his decision could have serious repercussions for the whole world. You know?

That evening, the studio sends you on another date at the Cocoanut Grove with the despised co-star you nonetheless slept with that morning. You feel disgusted with yourself and full of self-hatred for this double life you’re leading. But the cameras, oh, the cameras. Pepped up on pills, you know you’re talking too fast, so you have a bottle of Scotch to slow you down. But things are going badly, and you know you’re acting not quite right, so you decide to leave. I mean, not before you manage to spill a plate of Lobster Newburg all over yourself and then vomit right at the feet of the coat check girl. You get in your car and immediately crash it straight into the wall of the Ambassador Hotel, possibly injuring or even killing an innocent bellman. Don’t worry, the studio fixers will take care of that and make sure his remains are returned to his loved one.

In the meantime, you figure you might as well get a room for the night and we find you in the morning exactly as you were at the beginning of this day. It’s just like Inside Llewyn Davis.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Buy LOVE ME for whoever you love!

Rachel Shukert, a Tablet Magazine columnist on pop culture, is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great. Love Me, the second in a series of three novels, is new from Random House. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.

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• “Dustin Hoffman wore a 34B in Tootsie.” That is all. [NYP]

• While in Beijing filming her award-winning documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, filmmaker Alison Klayman also became an in-demand bat mitzvah tutor. [Forward]

• Rachel Shukert’s upcoming novel, Starstruck, made the Atlantic’s list of Young Adult books to look out for. [Atlantic Wire]

• Chicago, meet Jewish food. [Serious Eats]

• Looking for Spanish history in Spain? Google’s got you covered. [Google]

• Gary Shteyngart’s blurbs, still a thing.

The post Daily Jewce: Dustin Hoffman’s ‘Tootsie’ Bra, Chicago Gets Jewish Food appeared first on Jewcy.

Something is troubling Rachel Shukert. Despite all of the bells and Steve Buscemi whistles, HBO’s Prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire just doesn’t do it for her. Why? “It’s because I want Boardwalk Empire to be a show all about the Jewish gangsters,” she explains. After all, they’re the most unpredictable characters on the show:

What we get on the show is just enough to whet my appetite. I thrill every time the legendary criminal mastermind Arnold Rothstein (played by the great Michael Stuhlbarg), the man who fixed the 1919 World Series and inspired the character of Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, appears on screen, demurely sipping a cup of coffee and smiling quietly at something known only to himself; why do we get him in such small doses, and mainly reacting to the machinations of Nucky Thompson, the world’s most sheepish crime boss? When Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusuf) first showed up, I let out a Belieber-esque squeal; this season he’s playing second fiddle to Gyp Rosetti (Bobby Cannavale), your standard-issue maniac killer/sex pervert (he likes women to tie him up and choke him. Snore.) I was fascinated by the character of Manny Horvitz, the garrulous kosher-butcher-cum-bloodthirsty-gangster who calls everybody “boychik” and dry-ages his enemies on meat hooks in the deep freeze, until (spoiler alert!) they let the guy with half a face (who is Anjelica Huston’s nephew and even with his Phantom of the Opera mask on, is still attractive beyond all sense) blow him away in the first episode of the new season. That was five weeks ago. I’m still sitting shiva.

Read the rest at Tablet Magazine.

Jewcy on Boardwalk Empire: Culture Kvetch: The Jews of HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’
Meyer Lansky Lives: Talking With Anatol Yusef Of Boardwalk Empire
The Unkillable Kosher Butcher Of Boardwalk Empire
From Boardwalk Empire To Gatsby: Top Five Arnold Rothstein Pop Culture Moments

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Rachel Shukert breaks down what Anne Hathaway’s recent Jewish wedding (omg!) says about the tribe in Tablet Magazine, and the verdict is good. We’re cool! And normal:

And that’s precisely the point. The current vogue for Jewishness, in weddings or otherwise, is less notable for its exoticism—the kind of thing that might seem irresistibly “edgy” to a Crayola-haired pop star who uses that word a lot—than for its normalcy. When Drew Barrymore stands under a chuppah, or Anne Hathaway accompanies her fiancé to Yom Kippur services, or the husbands of Queen Natalie and her lady-in-waiting Rachel Weisz (and believe me, the thoughts I have about Daniel “James Bond” Craig as the ultimate trophy husband could fill a doctoral dissertation) slip on a yarmulke or wrap themselves in a tallis, they’re doing so because it’s normal, and the mainstream nature of the ritual is the key to its desirability. For the first time in the history of America, Jewishness—and not just the bagels-and-lox part—is aspirational.

Intermarried A-Listers and Us [Tablet Magazine]

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• Rachel Shukert on the lessons of Yom Kippur…and Chatroulette?

• Max Greenfield, aka New Girl’s Schmidt, has been “trying to insert my neurotic Judaism into this show since day one.”

• The Times of Israel talked to female Mossad agents about what they will and will not do to advance a mission. Example: “We flirt, but the line is drawn at sex.”

• Vanessa Redgrave has signed on to play Jesse Eisenberg’s cousin, a Polish Holocaust survivor, in Eisenberg’s latest play, The Revisionist.

• Jake Gyllenhaal got tased in preparation for his new police film, End of Watch.

• Watch Mel Brooks cursing at Jerry Seinfeld:

The post Daily Jewce: Female Mossad Agents Talk Flirting; Watch Mel Brooks Cursing appeared first on Jewcy.

• Law and Order: SVU’s B.D. Wong’s New York City apartment used to be, variously, a Yiddish theater, a sweatshop, and a porno theater.

• Rachel Shukert asks the question that’s been on all of our minds since those naked Vegas pictures of Prince Harry surfaced: “Roundhead, or Cavalier?”

• Cindy Sheehan is withdrawing as Roseanne Barr’s running-mate. Oh wait, it’s too late to do that?

• Judah Friedlander, stand-up comedy artist.

• Justin Bieber’s camp counselor Scooter Braun has signed K-Pop star Psy to his label. Call him, maybe?

• What the what? A Christmas Story 2 is happening:

The post Daily Jewce: Prince Harry’s Circumcision Debate, ‘A Christmas Story’ Sequel appeared first on Jewcy.

• We’re not really surprised: Rachel Shukert is the mastermind behind the hilarious new website, ‘Yiddish Curses for Republican Jews.’

• Groundbreaking radical feminist Shulamith Firestone was found dead in her East Village apartment.

• More sad news: Art Heyman, legendary Duke basketball player (and Long Island native), died at 71.

• An excerpt from Michael Chabon’s forthcoming book, Telegraph Avenue.

• Schmidt’s favorite New Girl episode, revealed.

The post Daily Jewce: The Mastermind Behind ‘Yiddish Curses for Republican Jews’ appeared first on Jewcy.

Today in Tablet Magazine, 2010 Big Jewcy Rachel Shukert takes on the suspicion that might have (or might not have, who knows) been nagging you during the Olympics Opening Ceremony on Friday: has the Queen of England become the world’s bubbe?

Shukert opines:

Most 86-year-old women, whatever their ethnic persuasion, do not arrive at important events via helicopter parachute, escorted by a hot piece like Daniel Craig; many of them can’t even stand up in the shower anymore. But everything else, from the ongepotchket peach lace dress to the passive-aggressive “oy, mein back” shuffle to the seats to that face, seemingly caught constantly in mid-kvetch, saying “For this you made me come out in the middle of the night, sitting outside in the rain like a dog?” Not a trace of her former impersonal friendliness, of smiling Gentile stoicism, remained. At the Olympic opening ceremony, somewhere in between the coal miners performing a Dickensian rendition of the “Stool Boom” number from Waiting for Guffman and the interpretive dance salute to the National Health Service, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, became the whole world’s bitchy Jewish bubbe.

Frankly, we see this as a wonderful development, since Jewish grandmothers are, in our opinion, just about the best thing ever. So welcome, Queen Elizabeth the Second, to team bubbe.

Related: Bubbe Elizabeth the Second [Tablet Magazine]

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Today I think only of Nora. Her work will forever be one of the greatest gifts of my life, her friendship even more so.

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) June 27, 2012

In early April, I saw the late Nora Ephron in conversation with Lena Dunham at BAM, part of a Dunham-curated film series (which Nona Willis Aronowitz also reflected on) that took place in the immediate pre-Girls madness. Ephron’s 1992 film, This is My Life, was screened at the event, but that’s not what we were there for. Something about the confluence of the two women–one of whom so perfectly understood and depicted our most profound, if subtle, cultural moments and the other endlessly touted as either about to do just that or entirely the opposite–was almost dizzyingly appealing.

Dunham, who seemed somewhat in awe of Ephron at the event (as all of us in the audience undoubtedly were), mentioned the screening in a New Yorker blog post today about Ephron, who died Tuesday of complications from leukemia:

The last time I saw her was in April, for a screening of “This Is My Life” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Delia and the writer Meg Wolitzer, whose book the movie was based on. We did a long Q. & A. in which she was so generous with an audience of hungry young people that I still get thankful e-mails about it. She discussed directing for the first time, learning to shot list and talk to a crew. The idea that it had taken her a moment to settle into filmmaking was so deeply comforting.

Gaby Hoffman, who played Julie Kavner’s youngest daughter in the film (and later, and perhaps more memorably, Samantha in Now and Then), joined the conversation, and when Dunham lamented the film not being available on Netflix, Hoffman suggested wryly that Dunham, of all people, should be able to do something about it. She said something vaguely along the lines of, ‘Aren’t you the president, or something?’

Watching the women sitting casually on stage, I couldn’t help but feel as though this event marked some kind of passing of the cultural chronicler’s torch, or at the very least signified Ephron’s wholehearted approval of the young filmmaker (Dunham’s New Yorker piece all but confirms this fact, and for that will likely rile up haters) and her much-discussed HBO series, Girls–which Ephron enthusiastically endorsed, having already seen the entire first season.

As Rachel Shukert noted in Tablet Magazine, “If a flash mob of middle-aged women formed tonight to fake an enormous collective orgasm at Katz’s Deli, there would be no more fitting tribute.” Your move, Dunham.

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