Finally! The Natalie Portman-led Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic that has been stalling in development hell for years is finally going to start filming in September.

There’s just one problem— Portman’s not in it anymore.

…

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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Like choosing between your grandmother and grandfather, here at the end of Jewish Celebrity March Madness, we asked you to choose between Mel Brooks and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Some of you were certain of your path. Some made your choice begrudgingly, tears in your eyes. Some of you even refused to vote when faced with such a difficult choice.  It’s understandable, but there can only be one winner this year.  And so, we present to you… your champion:

That’s right, after extremely strong leads every other round of the competition, the Notorious R.B.G. kept it going when it mattered most.  All hail your victor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: SCOTUS judge, feminist icon, Bubby. Notorious.

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We’ve been through a lot over the past few weeks with Jewish Celebrity March Madness. We’ve seen underdogs rise and titans fall. Just last round we had to bid goodbye to both Natalie Portman and Bette Midler.

But now, the most difficult choice is upon us.

In this, our sixth and final round, we ask you to choose between two kickass native Brooklynites: Mel Brooks, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

So get out there and tell everyone you know why your pick should be our reigning 2017 Jewish Celebrity champion.

Polls close tomorrow night, Tuesday, March 4th, just before midnight.

Plus, if you want to know the winner before we make the results public, sign up for our email list. Learn the truth. Taunt your friends with your inside knowledge:

Let’s do this:

Images via Wikimedia

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After three rounds with some really close competitions, Round 4 was almost entirely landslides! Andy Samberg, Gal Gadot, and Steven Spielberg all did really well up to this point, but you wouldn’t know it from how hard they fell.

The only person who came even close to their opponent and lost this round was Daveed Diggs. Let’s raise a glass to the rising star.

And so, our remaining Top 4 are now all the heaviest of hitters: Mel “The Man” Brooks, Natalie “Natch” Portman, Bette “Beat You” Midler, and the Notorious RBG (OK, that last nickname is real).

Who will win? Who will lose? Who’s the best at singing the blues (OK, probably Midler, but still)? We need your help to decide.

(For your consideration, after polls we’ve added some relevant clips of the nominees being great.)

New subscribers to our email list will know who’s going to the finals before we announce the results:

You know the drill by now. Vote, and you have until Sunday, April 2nd, at 10 p.m. And the next day, THE FINALS BEGIN.

YOUR FINAL PICK FROM THE “ACTORS” SIDE:

YOUR FINAL PICK FROM THE “OTHERS” SIDE:

Image via Wikimedia.

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Round 3 of this bizarre tourney was harsh and unforgiving, like a 19th century schoolmaster before some Anne Shirley-type waltzes in and gently points out that you don’t need to strike children for them to learn in a classroom environment.

Anyway, what we mean to say is, Scarlett Johansson is gone. As is Daniel Radcliffe, Mayim Bialk, Lenny Kravitz, Rachel Bloom, Aly Raisman, Rachel Platten, and Mark Zuckerberg. A moment of respect for our fallen heroes…

OK, time to regroup. We’re voting to turn out remaining 8 into a Fab Four. That’s right; this is the quarterfinals. The competition is getting tighter. Choose wisely.

New subscribers to our email list will get the results of this round before we post Round 5:

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!

Voting ends this Thursday night, March 30th, at 8 p.m. And you can still tweet us with why you think your fave deserves to go all the way to number 1!  For example here are a couple of reader arguments for (and against) two of our top competitors:

RBG is 84 but could beat up anyone else on that list. Also, she is basically standing between us and the apocalypse. She should win this award and also every other award.— Ayelet Parness

Mel Brooks will win. As great and awesome and Jewish as Ruth BG is, Mel Brooks’s career has done more for the culture, people, heritage, and world than any judge could hope to accomplish in a lifetime. — Dov Alpert

So how are you voting?

THE ACTORS:

THE MUSICIANS (For the last time!):

THE OTHERS:

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Well, that was exhausting.

Round One of our Jewish Celebrity March Madness had some predictable results (did anyone really think Jake Tapper could take the Notorious RBG?), but also some upsets, and some really close races.  Here’s a recap of just a few showdowns:

• Neither member of Broad City is making it past the first round! Abbi and Ilana won’t have to go head to head.
• Winona Ryder held a lead on Rachel Weisz until the last few hours of the competition, and then BOOM! Ditto a last-minute reversal taking the round from Paul Rudd and giving it to ScarJo.
• Bette vs. Babs? Dylan vs. Joel? Bette, and Joel, it turns out.
• In a stunning turn of events, Drake is out in the first round! Let’s hear it for Daveed Diggs!
• Bernie loses, yet again, though this was much closer than the 2016 primaries.

And so, we present to you, the Round 2 bracket:

Go ahead and vote below; you have until Friday morning the 24th, 9 a.m. Eastern Time. Also, keep tweeting us angrily (new hashtag— #JewishCelebs); you had the moral high-ground for Round 1, but now, these are your picks.

And is the anticipation killing you? Well, if you sign up for emails below, you’ll have the results of Round 2 emailed to you, before Round 3 is live:

THE ACTORS:

THE MUSICIANS:

MOVERS AND SHAKERS:

OTHER:

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Editors Note: This is part 2 of our 2 essays on Jewish experience in the post-Inauguration Women’s March. Part 1 can be found here.

In the weeks leading up to the Women’s March on Washington this past Saturday, an online community of Jewish women formed and pooled resources for participating in a demonstration over Shabbat, organizing ride shares to D.C., arranging Friday night meals through friends and local synagogues, and posting updates on Jewish groups and institutions offering services and/or swag in support of the March. On the morning of January 21, 2017, they met outside Sixth & I Historic Synagogue and marched toward the National Mall with fellow Israelites of every age, gender, and affiliation, claiming the pavement of the United States capital like the chasm of the Red Sea out of Egypt toward Independence Avenue, where over the course of the next few hours Michael Moore taught America to memorize the number to call the office of any member of Congress, Cecile Richards pledged to keep Planned Parenthood’s doors open, the Mothers of the Movement rallied the audience in the names of their murdered children, Sophie Cruz led hundreds of thousands of voices chanting “¡Sí se puede!” in unison, Van Jones called for a movement based on love—“that mama-bear love”—and the ground shook with Angelique Kidjo singing Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

“This makes me proud to be a Jew,” my father—who insisted on wearing his own hot pink pussy hat the whole day—said quietly as we set out from the Chinatown Park rendezvous point, beaming at the signs quoting the Talmud, Deuteronomy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Emma Goldman, Hillel, and other seminal Jewish texts and voices. As Orthodox Jews, my family had rushed to make our own posters Friday afternoon, before Shabbat began, checking the city’s eruv map to make sure we could carry them without violating our traditional observance, and coordinated with friends in advance to find one another at or after the march without our phones. “I haven’t come to Washington to protest since… Vietnam!” my parents’ friend Miriam, who had come on her own from the Bay Area, declared proudly as we neared the Mall, quickly making friends with the Jewish mothers and bubbes flanking our party who echoed her realization.

The skies were grey but the streets were vibrant: like a foal recognizes its mother by her stripes among a zeal of zebras, members of the assembly tracked their marching companions by the specific hue and texture of one another’s pussy hats amid a sea of pink wool, felt, and fleece. Cheers rippled through the crowd in call-and-response; strangers shared snacks from regulation clear plastic backpacks and introduced themselves by asking each other from where they had come. Volunteers handed out stickers and posters from Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Emily’s List, and flash mobs and faith groups burst into song inspired by the movement and its historical moment.

It was a day that inadvertently celebrated the legacy of Jewish women, among others, who emblemized or at least symbolized femme empowerment and activism. The bespectacled visage of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, shlita, floated among a cluster of the faces of great women painted on large cardboard cutouts and held aloft by a group who happily chirped, “This is what happens when women puts their heads together!” when asked about the project. Another group claimed a street corner with a large banner quoting Emma Lazarus: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Everywhere you looked, there were enough A Woman’s Place Is in the Resistance posters to summon the Second Coming of Carrie Fisher.

Modern Jewish heroes were well represented on the stage, as well. Senator Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was a vision in pink—two different shades of it, in fact—standing by her colleagues Kamala Harris, Tammy Duckworth, and Kirsten Gillibrand as they each took the mic to define what “women’s issues” are. IKAR founder and senior rabbi Sharon Brous wished the crowd a Shabbat Shalom at the end of an impassioned speech delivered with Linda Sarsour’s white hijab in view over her shoulder throughout:

Sometimes it happens—maybe once in a generation—that a spirit of resistance is awakened at the intersection of love, faith, and holy outrage. And in those moments, we are reminded what we’re fighting for, what this country was built for, what our armed forces are willing to die for, what our flag flies for, and that is liberty and justice, for all. This is one of those moments.

And let us not forget Our Lady, Gloria Steinem smiling benevolently from her seat upon the stage, thanking the audience “for understanding that sometimes we must put our bodies where our beliefs are,” and commanding, “Make sure you introduce yourselves to each other, and decide what we’re going to do tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

But most of the crowd only witnessed these appearances later, from or on their way home, streaming the footage on laptops and smartphones long after the events had concluded. About five times the number of people expected by the Women’s March organizers crammed into streets and spaces parallel and perpendicular to the stage; visibility to even the jumbotrons was limited, and the sound was inadequately amplified to reach the ears of over half a million listeners. So great was the turnout that the march itself was all but disbanded, the planned route eschewed for the spontaneous directive to “go North,” toward Pennsylvania Avenue, nearly an hour after the scheduled departure—and the final speakers still had yet to take the stage.

Rivulets of the assembly headed for the Mall in hand-holding human chains, gathering force until the current turned with them, leaving islands of die-hards standing their ground to watch Angela Davis’s projection and hear the echoes of her voice bounce off the National Museum of the American Indian. An African American family squeezing past a rooted cluster of Jews stopped to look back, bringing me—an Orthodox Ashkenazi 20-something sporting a sweatshirt reading THE FUTURE IS FEMALE and a vivid pink pussy hat bedecked with a wreath of flowers—face-to-face with a birdlike grandmother held at either elbow by her offspring as they waited to continue passing.

“I like your hat,” the black woman grinned shyly. “I’ve been looking at it. It makes me smile.”

“It’s a day for smiling!” I answered, thanking my tiny stranger for the compliment.

“It sure is,” the grandmother’s face crinkled into a full smile as she looked at the crowd around us. “It sure is.”

Nat Bernstein is the contributing editor at Jewish Book Council, managing the organization’s digital content, media, and special projects. Nat is a 2011 Ingenuity Award recipient and an F’07 graduate of Hampshire College with a Division II in pedagogical content knowledge for English education and a Division III on the representation of modern genocide in American culture and education.  

Photo by Dan Rosen

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We here at Jewcy would like to introduce you to a new feature we call: “Did you know this famous Jewish person has attractive progeny?”

We would like to launch this important series with the tale of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Feminist hero, Judicial Solomon, and fashion icon. And, now, it turns out, the grandmother of your new Jewish crush.

Meet Paul Spera, son of Ginsburg’s daughter Jane, a law professor. Spera is about 30 years old (it seems he graduated Yale in 2008). He was born in Paris, and raised bilingual in New York. These days, he lives in France where he has been working as an actor (he studied both French and theatre in college—swoon!).

Spera’s latest project is elsewhere in Europe: a production of The Merchant of Venice. This special series of performances through early August is actually staged in the Jewish ghetto, commemorating the 500th anniversary of its creation. Spera plays Lorenzo, a non-Jewish man who elopes with Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, who converts to Christianity. His grandmother not only travelled to Italy to see the show, but presided over a mock trial of Shylock accompanying a performance July 27th.

Spera does not describe himself as a practicing Jew (and his father isn’t Jewish), but describes his bonds with the Jewish “religion or ethnicity” as being connected to his sense of family. This sense of family, it would seem, includes calling his grandmother by the Yiddish word, Bubbe!

One more adorable parting factoid: When Paul was about 6, and his grandmother was going through the confirmation process for SCOTUS, he wrote her a book called My Grandma is Very, Very Special, which included a map of the U.S. that he illustrated. Aw!

We look forward to watching Spera’s career advance, and seeing Ginsburg continue to dominate the courts.

Image via “The Merchant in Venice“

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYcx43AmAyY

Here’s the thing: It gives one great hope that one can be, say, an academic, and be portrayed in a film by Rachel Weisz. This isn’t to denigrate Lipstadt’s appearance or Weisz’s acting abilities; they just really don’t look alike. Still, at least Weisz is actually a Jewish woman portraying a Jewish woman.

This got me thinking: Who plays Jewish women in biopics, and what do they look like? I dove down the worst kind of rabbit hole: Wikipedia.

In a list of biopics (film or TV), Jews don’t tend to come up often; we’re a minority, fine. But (with the exception of Holocaust movies, ugh) Jewish women seem to be a rarity, and have films depicting their lives and accomplishments far less frequently than men. Furthermore, the women more often tend to be “glammed up” with their casting. It’s easier to be an accomplished actor without outlying attractiveness if you’re a man, and this is especially clear in biopics.

Male Jewish real-life folks on screen have a range of portrayals— in recent or prominent films depicting Jewish men, we’ve had Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram, Vincent D’Onofrio as Abbie Hoffman,Kevin Spacey as Jack Abromoff, and Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman. None of these men (actors or subjects) read immediately as heartthrobs, and none of the actors are Jewish. Or, you can have schlubby-coded Jewish men play these roles (very recently, Jonah Hill has portrayed Michael Finkel and Efraim Diveroli).

Occasionally, you can have heartthrobs portray Jewish characters: take Allen Ginsberg, who’s been portrayed by both James Franco  and Daniel Radcliffe (both of Jewish descent).

So what of the ladies?

It’s so hard to find real Jewish women portrayed on screen, particularly as the leads, and especially if you remove Holocaust victims and Biblical characters (enough Christian-made films about Esther. Please).

Somewhat recent Jewish women on film include:

• Keira Knightley as psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein— Jon Stewart once aptly said of Knightley that she “acts with cheekbones so improbable they were probably sprinkled with God Dust,” though to be fair, this film also cast Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, so, an upgrade all around.
  
• Helen Mirren has played Ayn Rand. I’m not even going to touch how ludicrous that is.
  
• An upcoming HBO series about the Madoffs (Bernie is Robert De Niro) has Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff.

Note that all of these woman are both Hollywood standards of attractive, and also not Jewish. Once again, there are exceptions; Natalie Portman plays Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an upcoming film, and she’s a Jewish actor. And Gertrude Stein has been played by a range of wonderful actors not cut from the Hollywood glamor mold, both Jewish (like Miriam Margolyes) and Gentile (like Kathy Bates). But honestly, the sample size is too small to get any reliable patterns, which in and of itself is telling.

And so, keep an eye out for my next piece: A list of ideas for Jewish female actresses that could easily star in biopics, and ideas for  who they might portray. We need more examples, period.

In the meantime, please comment below, or tweet Jewcy with your own ideas.  Try to keep both actor and subject of Jewish descent, and if possible, avoid movies about sex symbols,  therefore repeating casting the same three gorgeous Hollywood actors. As in, try to resist casting Mila Kunis as Hedy Lamarr, as great as that might be.

Images via YouTube

The post Jewish Women in Biopics? Part 1 appeared first on Jewcy.

Goddess knows, we don’t need another reason to love Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but sister just keeps dropping wisdom all over the place, and—as president of the Notorious R.B.G. fangirl club—it’s my duty to report the latest. In a talk at Georgetown University on Wednesday, the 82-year-old Supreme Court Justice described her early days in the law, when it “was not a welcoming profession for women.”

“In those days, in the Southern District, most judges wouldn’t hire women. In the U.S. attorney’s office, women were strictly forbidden in the Criminal Division,” she explained. “And the excuse for not hiring women in the Criminal Division was they have to deal with all these tough types, and women aren’t up to that. And I was amazed. I said, ‘Have you seen the lawyers at legal aid who are representing these tough types? They are women.'”

Another gem: people often ask R.B.G. when it will be “enough”—i.e. when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court. Her answer? “When there are nine.”

Yes, yes, YES. This is delicious, right? But wait, there’s more! When asked what talent she would choose if she could have any talent in the world, Ginsburg responded: “I would be a great diva.”

To which we all say, in unison: You are a great diva, R.B.G. (And you sure as hell have mastered the art of the mic drop.)

(Image: Portrait by Simmie Knox, under commission of the United States Supreme Court)

Related: Halloween is OVER, Ruth Baby Ginsburg Has Killed It
Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Share Personal Trainer, Mutual Admiration

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