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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Steven Spielberg’s next film is another Jewish piece, addressing one of the most notorious cases of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism of the nineteenth century: The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.

The short version of the story is this:

An Italian Jewish merchant family, the Mortaras, without warning had one of their children, Edgardo, forcibly taken from their home by military police when the boy was six, in 1858. This was because, as an infant, Edgardo had grown sick, and a Catholic servant claimed that she had given him an “emergency baptism,” so that he could enter heaven upon death. Edgardo survived, and years later the Church was claiming that the boy was technically a Christian, and therefore his Jewish family was forbidden from raising him. A storm of legal and political conflict followed as the Mortaras tried to get their son back, and he child became a pawn in larger conflicts of the very power of the papacy in Italian unifcation.

Spielberg is directing and producing the film adapted from a 1997 book of the same name by Jewish historian David Kertzer. And if Spielberg wasn’t impressive enough, adapting the book into a screenplay is playwright Tony Kushner.

What we know of the cast so far is impressive too, beginning with Spielberg’s latest recurring star Mark Rylance. Rylance will play Pope Pius IX, the central figure working against the Mortara family. This is exciting news; Rylance is one of the greatest living actors in the theatre world. Essentially, he thought, “Why not give movies a try?,” walked on to the film set for Bridge of Spies, and the Academy handed him an Oscar.

Speaking of Oscars, Star Wars star and real-life fairy-tale prince of our dreams Oscar Isaac is also set to star in this film, though it’s unclear as whom (could he be a member of the Mortara family, perhaps?).

The film is extremely promising, but prepare for a tragedy: The true story didn’t have a happy ending; Edgardo was not returned to his family, and in fact learned in custody of the Catholic Church to fear and reject the Mortaras. The arguably brainwashed young man became a priest, and though eventually reconnected with his mother in his twenties, he spent the remainder of her life urging her to convert to Catholicism (she did not).

The film is set to begin filming at the beginning of 2017, for release in the end of that year.

Image Credit: The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1862. Via Wikimedia.

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George Clooney, you wily prankster. At a gala for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, there were photo-ops aplenty. But one dream picture—with the faces that make up “If I could have dinner with one person, dead or alive” conversations—was taken. Enjoy and feel free to Photoshop yourself in and share with friends. It’s the kind of lie we support.

(Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty)

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Aaron Glaser really wants to be cast in Jurassic Park 4, the upcoming installment of Steven Spielberg’s prehistoric classic. So badly, in fact, that the Long Island-bred comedian, who ran against me for 11th grade student government vice president (we both lost, whatever), would play pretty much any part.

Here’s his audition video, courtesy of Funny or Die. His ideal role? The park hooker: “I hope it gets to Spielberg,” he told me via text message, “because I really, really want to play a prostitute.”

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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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• Steven Spielberg’s cinematographer, the Polish-born Janusz Kaminski, discusses how he created the iconic Schindler’s List shot of the girl in the red jacket. [Vulture]

• There’s a Pita Nazi in Tel Aviv, people. [Tablet]

• Because no interview with Lena Dunham is complete without her Instagram photos. [Esquire]

• Our girl Mayim Bialik on the red carpet for the Breaking Dawn 2 premiere. [EW]

• Watch the latest teaser for Bret Easton Ellis’ The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan and James Deen—a porn star who happens to be Jewish. [New York Post]

The post Daily Jewce: Spielberg’s Cinematographer, Tel Aviv’s Pita Nazi appeared first on Jewcy.

• 60 Minutes looks at Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Lincoln, which was apparently more than a decade in the making. Hope it’s good!

• Why sending The Big Bang Theory nebbish Howard Wolowitz might not have been the best idea.

• Jason Schwartzman likes clothing and Keith Moon.

• In today’s Homeland news, relive the glory of Mandy Patinkin’s Saul Berenson coming face to face with mini Darth Vader.

• The ladies of Community get NSFW—now will you finally premiere their show’s new season, NBC?

• Sarah Silverman and Lizz Winstead helpfully explain the difference between corporations and people.

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• Maggie Gyllenhaal’s other co-star in Won’t Back Down? Orthodox Jewish lawyer Jay Lefkowitz, the man behind the public-school reform legal battles.

• Sarah Silverman talks about why she made that expletive-laced voting video in an interview with the New York Times.

• Steven Spielberg opens up about his childhood struggle with Dyslexia.

• Meet Japan’s bagelheads.

• That new Philip Roth biography? Author Blake Bailey will have “unrestricted access” to him Roth and his material.

• Michael Richards gets real with Jerry Seinfeld about his stalled post-Seinfeld career:

The post Daily Jewce: Spielberg’s Dyslexia Battle, Bagel Heads Are a Real Thing appeared first on Jewcy.

• WQXR has great High Holiday programming running this weekend, including a never-before-heard recording of Itzhak Perlman playing Kol Nidre. Also check out host Naomi Lewin’s recipe for Apple Schalet.

• An ode to Manischewitz, by Daphne Merkin.

• Just what will Monica Lewinsky’s new book reveal? No one has any idea.

• The debate surrounding Jerusalem’s new national parks.

• Mandy Patinkin agrees that Criminal Minds is the creepiest show ever. Or as he calls it, “destructive to my soul.”

• It’s here: watch the trailer of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, starring Daniel Day Lewis:

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