Finally, Dave Franco and Alison Brie have tied the knot!

The (Jewish, funny, unfairly attractive) couple has been dating since 2012 and engaged since 2015. In that time, Franco has been in like a dozen movies, and Brie has wrapped up both Community and Mad Men (oh don’t worry; she still has more than enough on her plate).

There’s no word on if the ceremony was Jewish at all; after all, both Franco, 31, and Brie, 34, (both from interfaith families) were raised culturally Jewish, rather than religiously. Besides, they’re being private about the details of the event (the odds are good that at least James Franco was there, though, since Dave is his brother).

A la Chelsea Peretti (Jewish) and Jordan Peele (not Jewish but great), when the Dabrie (Franison? DaFrAB?) were engaged, they made a TV commercial together… for a mobile game, as you do.

But the most important question remaining: Are Franco and Brie going to appear on Jewcy‘s March Madness Jewish Celebrity bracket? We’ll tell you now— yes. But will they at some point be up against one another?

Wait and see.

In the meantime, mazel tov to Dave and Alison, and here’s a weird (slightly NSFW) comedy video they made together back in 2013:

Image via YouTube

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It being the summer, it’s wedding season. I admit, it’s also less than a fortnight to my own wedding, and I’ve tried to avoid doing productive things like find a florist by diving into the coolest wedding traditions I can find, more obscure gems than just breaking a glass. There are lots of amazing ones that you can’t seem to find on the Internet, which seems mostly focused on explaining for the 613th time what a chuppah is. And so, here a few favorites I have gleaned:

Helping your friends find a match

Throwing a bouquet to give luck in finding a match is way too limited. Why leave that up to chance, when your most deserving, most eligible friend has to miss out because they didn’t play sports in High School? Jewish weddings are peppered with chances to distribute matchmaking mazel, and what’s more, the bride has the power to pick the recipients.

For example, in Ashkenazi tradition, women don’t wear jewelry under the chuppah during the ceremony. The sweet explanation is that a couple is marrying for partnership, not material gain, but this may also be because a formal part of the ceremony is the giving of a ring; it may be “legalistically” confusing for the bride to have other jewelry at the time she receives the ring.

But of course you’re going to wear jewelry at your wedding, so what do you do? Right before the ceremony, the bride may remove all of her other jewelry and give it to friends to hold. Those who have the honor of holding this jewelry are said to have extra luck in finding a spouse of their own.

The same applies to Jewish weddings where a plate is broken before the ceremony. If you can get a shard (careful with that!), more good luck.

Another one is that after dinner, the bride and groom share a drink of wine during birkat hamazon (grace after meals). If you can get a sip of that too, you share in their luck (and germs).

Plus, some brides pray the morning of their weddings, and collect names of people who want matches, healing, et cetera. Apparently, her prayers are super potent that day. Get in on that.

Henna Party

In some Sephardic and Mizrahi traditions, before her wedding, a bride is adorned with henna, in a layered and deeply meaningful event. This can include drumming, ululation, and fertility rituals. Also, henna body art is absolutely stunning.

DEMONS DEMONS DEMONS

It is absolutely amazing how much of Jewish wedding traditions involve fear of demons. Of course, the famous play The Dybbuk involves a bride suffering demonic possession, but her position as newlywed was not only chosen to create high drama. Demons in Judaism famously love ruining happy moments (babies pre-bris are also vulnerable), so you have to be ON GUARD for about a week up to the big day, or something terrible and demonic (e.g. possession) will occur.

A lot of the Jewish rituals you do know have alternate explanations based in demonology. Carrying candles (like in Fiddler on the Roof)? Demons hate light. Marrying under a canopy? Protect the couple from demons. Breaking a glass? Demons hate that sort of thing, apparently. Circling your spouse-to-be at the start of the ceremony? Creating an anti-demonic force-field. The above-mentioned henna party? It also protects against demons!

But maybe my absolute favorite has been the role of bridesmaids in the wedding. I’ve heard a lot of variations on this custom, but the gist is that you can’t leave a bride alone, and therefore vulnerable to dybbuks or other nasties. Some say that for a week before the wedding, the bride needs constant surveillance, perhaps by a friend or family member serving as a bridesmaid. At the very least, the night before her wedding, a bride should not sleep alone (one friend had to share her sister’s bed to protect her for this very reason).

Imagine the movie Bridesmaids crossed with Ghostbusters— Kristen Wiig is in both after all, and has a Jewish boyfriend. She should definitely star in a movie about a friend asked to serve as maid of honor for her Jewish friend’s wedding, only to find out that fighting demons comes with the job description.

Hollywood, call me.

If you have other great Jewish wedding traditions, please comment below, or tweet us @Jewcymag!

Images: Still from film The Dybbuk. Henna image via Pixabay.

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Stephen Fry, our favorite multi-hyphenate Jewish British cultural icon, married his partner, 27-year-old Elliot Spencer, in a civil ceremony on Saturday.

The legendary actor-writer-intellectual-comedian, who is 57, tweeted the news yesterday, along with a picture of the couple signing the marriage register:

Gosh. @ElliottGSpencer and I go into a room as two people, sign a book and leave as one. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/bPDQD5WQoB

— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) January 17, 2015

The grooms both wore green carnations, in honor of the writer Oscar Wilde, who adopted the trend in the late 19th century (his fans and acolytes soon followed suit). Fry—who bears an uncanny resemblance to Wilde—portrayed the famous gay playwright in the 1997 biopic, Wilde.

Congratulations immediately rolled in from the four corners of the Twitterverse, including House star Hugh Laurie, who tweeted, “Bloody hell it’s happened! @ElliottGSpencer has made an honest man of m’col. Love and happiness to all!!” (Together, the two actors made up the eponymous 1990s comedy powerhouse, Fry & Laurie). Let us add our voices to the chorus: Mazal tov!

(Image: Twitter)

Related: Stephen Fry: Gay, Jewish, and Proud

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So, Cameron Diaz and Benji Madden got married on January 5, which is very nice. (Yes, I had no idea they even knew each other, either.) But what makes this celebrity wedding different from all other celebrity weddings? It was a Jewish ceremony, despite the fact that neither the bride nor the groom are members of the tribe.

According to Us Weekly, the ceremony was conducted underneath a chuppah, and culminated with the traditional breaking of the glass, plus a little sojourn in a yichud room—a super-authentic, inside-baseball touch if ever there was one. (I’ve gotta say, I’m impressed.) No-one seems to know exactly why Diaz and Madden decided to do the Jewish thing on their big day, but there’s a good chance their Israeli wedding planner had something to do with it.

But, seriously, why start at the chuppah and stop at the yichud room? There’s so much more Jewish ritual and symbolism to be had: Pre-marital mikveh dunks! Bedekens! Customized bentschers! Sheva brachot led by, I don’t know, John Legend! (We know he’s down for a bat mitzvah.) If you’re going to appropriate another culture, you might as well go all the way, no? Quoth Wham!, “If you’re gonna do it, do it right.”

Memo to Hollywood: next time, I’ll see you at the pareve dessert buffet table. (I know a great caterer, if you need.)

(Image: Andrey Bayda / Shutterstock.com)

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his partner Tasha McCauley quietly married on December 20 at their home in Los Angeles, The Daily Mail reports. “I have a girlfriend but I tend not to really like to talk about it in public,” the actor said in a 2013 interview with Howard Stern. “The girl that I’m with, she really doesn’t want to be a part of it and you can imagine not wanting to have that kind of scrutiny.”

We’re guessing that’s because she’s busy being a genius, multi-lingual roboticist. McCauley speaks English, Spanish, and Arabic, has an MBA, and is the co-founder and former CEO of Fellow Robots, a company based in Silicon Valley. (“Robotics CEO marries trophy boyfriend Joseph Gordon-Levitt,” tweeted The Cut, offering a deliciously feminist take on the happy, banal piece of celebrity news.)

Here’s McCauley describing how she approaches the unknown, in an interview with Toy & Game Conference: “Optimistically and skeptically! I guess I should clarify that by skeptically, I don’t mean cynically. Both are Greek in origin. Cynical, in early English, denoted faultfinding, while skeptical means “to consider or examine.” I’m skeptical because I love pushing limits in order to understand how things really work. And I’m optimistic because, so far in my life, the unknown has revealed many wonderful possibilities.”

Mazal tov, guys! (Now to find our new Official Single Jewish Millennial Heartthrob. Leave your nominations in the comments.)

(Photo by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

Related: Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a Feminist

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Former NSYNC star Lance Bass married his partner, artist Michael Turchin, in Los Angeles on Saturday night. The couple met four years ago and became engaged in September 2013 after about a year-and-a-half of dating, but Bass told The New York Times that they were “best friends before anything got romantic.”

The grooms were given away by their mothers and “wed under a canopy in honor of Mr. Turchin’s Jewish heritage,” reports the Times. Sounds lovely, right? Right. But then, this is perplexing: “They decided to abandon the tradition of being surrounded by a wedding party and chose instead to ask four models, clad in ivory dresses, to mimic flower girls.” What does this even mean? Were the models children? Adult women pretending to be children? Why would you have complete strangers mimicking flower girls at your chuppah? I would love to know more. (Send tips/pics to elissa@jewcy.com).

Anyway, mazal tov Bass-Turchins! Long life and happiness to you both.

(Image: Michael Turchin and Lance Bass, après-engagement, December 2013. Credit: Robin Marchant/Getty)

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Ah, Jemima Kirke and Michael Mosberg! Glam-Jewy-indie couple extraordinaire! You either want to be them, or you— wait, no, you pretty much just want to be them. That’s the only option.

First, we saw the inside of their Brooklyn home and read about their Shabbat dinners. Now, a new slideshow up at Refinery 29 provides an intimate glimpse into their 2009 wedding. Each photo is accompanied by commentary from Kirke, and first few slides—in which she describes falling in love with Mosberg—are pretty swoony:

I loved his gentility, but his kindness was what struck me. He had this patience and stoicism; I had never met anyone like him… He just felt so much more awesome than any guy I’d ever dated. Every guy I dated before had been abusive and made me feel like shit. I was like, “Wow, this just might be the person I deserve.”

The traditional, Orthodox Jewish ceremony took place at the bride’s mother’s beach house, under a “driftwood chuppah covered in flowers.” Kirke was untraditionally—but gloriously—pregnant. She wore a rad vintage Jill Stuart dress which she purchased a few days before the wedding for $200, and immediately after the ceremony, the bride and groom jumped into the water. The guests ate “bagels and lox and cereal,” it was over by noon, and everyone lived happily ever after. Sounds like a dream.

Related: ‘Girls’ Star Jemima Kirke and Husband Michael Mosberg Do Shabbat, Have Many Tattoos, Are Very Beautiful

Image: Not the actual wedding (via HBO.com)

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Oh, don’t mind us, we’re just crying happy tears into our afternoon coffee over this ridiculously charming New York Times video of three bubbes who were bridesmaids at their granddaughters’ weddings.

Yep, it’s the hot new old trend: grandma as the Maid of Honor. According to Ariel Meadow Stallings, the founder of Offbeat Bride, couples are increasingly seeking out non-traditional wedding roles for family members. “For a lot of couples and their families, there’s friction between the traditional role that families play in weddings and the couple’s concerns about where those traditions come from and the feeling that they don’t reflect their lives,” she explained.

Enter: the bubbe bridesmaid, the perfect role for grand dames not content with front-row seats at the chuppah.

Dorothy Shapiro, 95, says it was “one of the biggest honors that a grandmother could have. That she chose me! An old lady!” 88-year-old Lila Leblang, who runs an annuity sales firm and can do 40 push-ups (check out her reps at 00:12, solid), told the Times that granddaughter Jenny Illes Wood was sending ” a wonderful message… it’s O.K. to deal with people who are a little older than the typical bridesmaids.” And Sylvia Helfen, who was 89 at her granddaughter’s 2011 wedding, said with tears in her eyes, “It makes my heart feel good that she feels that close to me.”

Is there a word for grandchildren schepping nachas from their grandparents? Meta-nachas?

Image: Eric Stephenson Weddings (via New York Times YouTube)

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Sob. Adam Brody, my erstwhile television boyfriend, is married. IRL! To Leighton Meester!

In case you were living under a rock/in elementary school in the early 2000s, Adam Brody as Seth Cohen was the best thing on TV for years. YEARS. He was also my television boyfriend when I was far too old to have a television boyfriend, BUT NO MATTER. (Now that I’m thirty I have a television husband: Jon Stewart.)

Because the wedding was secret, I’ve no tidbits to share about dresses/vows/famous guests. In lieu of gifts—or anything that actually happened in real life—here are compilations of Seth and Blair’s finest moments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8GPgn4lCg

Mazal tov, guys!

The post Seth Cohen and Blair Waldorf Are Married! appeared first on Jewcy.

I guess we always knew this day would come. Former SNL cast member and Digital Shorts guru Andy Samberg popped the question to his longtime girlfriend, musician Joanna Newsom. The fact that Newsom is talented and probably really cool and smart seems irrelevant in light of the fact that, whether they admit it or not, every Jewish girl in the world has a crush on Samberg and it’s just not fair.

There’s still that other Jewish guy from The Lonely Island though, right? Oh, he’s married? Cool, just asking for a friend.

(Photo by JOE KLAMAR/AFP/GettyImages)

Previously: The Top Five Jewish Guest Stars in Andy Samberg’s SNL Digital Shorts
Andy Samberg Out-Blossoms Former ‘Blossom’ star Mayim Bialik on ‘SNL’

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