By EMILY BURACK NEW YORK CITY (JTA) – After winning an Emmy Award for the second straight year, Alex Borstein of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” movingly dedicated this victory to her Holocaust survivor grandmother, who defied the Nazis to stay alive. “Step Out Of Line!” “My grandmother turned to a guard … She was in line to be shot into […]

By JOSEFIN DOLSTEN NEW YORK CITY (JTA) – For “Borat,” his 2006 film, Sacha Baron Cohen went undercover as a made-up Kazakh journalist who travels America and gets unwitting targets to share his boorish and sometimes bigoted opinions. In “Who Is America,” the Jewish actor creates a variety of characters who manage to get prominent Americans to say shockingly offensive […]

By ERIC ROZENMAN (JNS) – “Mike Wallace is on the phone and he sounds angry,” a colleague said as she transferred the call. It was the early 1990s, and I was managing editor of The Miami Jewish Tribune. We’d just published an editorial urging a local synagogue to rescind its decision to honor Wallace. Wallace Demands Explanation Wallace, of course, was the […]

By ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL NEW YORK CITY (JTA) – Theater folk in England are debating a recent revival of the musical “Falsettos,” asking whether non-Jews should be playing its Jewish characters. In an open letter, critics of the religion-blind casting complain that non-Jewish actors can at best portray only a “secondary understanding” of Jewish mannerisms but have no awareness of the […]

By JOSEFIN DOLSTEN NEW YORK CITY (JTA) – It’s Emmy season again and Jews in the TV industry have plenty of reason to celebrate. Here’s a roundup of the Jewish picks on the list. Winners will be announced on Sept. 22 at Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theater. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which follows the life of feisty comedian Midge Maisel from the […]

BY MARCY OSTER NEW YORK CITY (JTA) – From Michael Douglas’ Yiddish exclamation to more success for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” to Regina King’s Hebrew-letter tattoo, the 2019 Golden Globes had its fair share of Jewish moments. Rachel Brosnahan is not Jewish, but she does a convincing job playing a very Jewish woman in “Mrs. Maisel.” She won best actress in […]

By LIOR ZALTZMAN NEW YORK CITY (JTA) — It was quite a Jewish night at the 70th Emmy Awards. While co-host Michael Che joked that most of the first winners, despite being white, did not thank Jesus, the explanation may have been that almost all of them were Jewish. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the Amazon show about a Jewish housewife turned stand-up […]

When Rachel “Ruchie” Freier introduces us to Borough Park, Brooklyn, one of the world’s largest enclaves of Chasidic Jews, she acknowledges the community’s prevailing view of a woman’s role: “The focus of a woman is being a mother. Any profession, or extra schooling, is discouraged.” In Paula Eiselt’s debut feature documentary, “93Queen,” America’s first all-female EMT corps is born against […]

NEW YORK CITY (JTA) – Actress Charlotte Rae, who won acclaim playing the housemother Edna Garrett on the sitcom “The Facts of Life,” has died. She was 92. Rae, who was nominated for Emmy and Tony Awards, died Sunday, Aug. 5, at her home in Los Angeles. She was diagnosed last year with bone cancer; she had survived pancreatic cancer. […]

By RON KAMPEAS WASHINGTON (JTA) – Sacha Baron Cohen is back, and he is taking aim at a strain of “pro-Israel” thought that has both delighted and unsettled many American Jews: the unconditional love engendered by the country among deeply conservative Americans. In “Who is America?,” a show that made its debut Sunday night July 15, on Showtime, the British Jewish […]