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      in Television

      In ‘Nobody Wants This,’ Adam Brody Keeps the Faith

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      Adam Brody’s bar mitzvah was held six months late. It was barely held at all. This was in San Diego, Calif., in the early 1990s, and Brody, who spent most of his free time surfing, attended Hebrew school only under duress. He knew few other Jews.“I wanted long, straight blond hair,” he said. “All my idols were named Shane.”A decade later, after a cursory stint at community college, an impulsive move to Los Angeles, a handful of television one-offs and a brief arc on “Gilmore Girls,” Brody became the most famous Jewish (well, half Jewish) high schooler in America. (He was actually 23, which made the fandom a little tricky.) Starring as Seth Cohen on the sun-kissed teen romantic dramedy “The O.C.,” he played a curly-haired heartthrob, responsible for introducing the holiday portmanteau “Chrismukkah” into the lexicon.“Adam has that quality of it being very Adam,” said Valerie Faris, the director of “Nobody Wants This.” “But at the same time, it’s perfect for the character too.” Josh Schwartz, a creator of “The O.C.” put a lot of himself into Seth. But Brody, he said in an interview, brought charisma and a surfer cool to a character who could have come off as merely nerdy. “He’s an aspirational Jew,” Schwartz joked of Brody.The “O.C.” ended four years later. (Beachy TV can accommodate only so many car crashes and love triangles, and 20-somethings can’t play teens forever.) Brody worked steadily for the next two decades, darting between film and television. Mostly he played variations on a theme, the nice guy, although they aren’t always so nice. As he reminded me over lunch in Santa Monica, “I’ve played my fair share of rapists and murderers.”But Brody’s gift is for comedy — comedy flecked with emotional complication. He reminded viewers of this in the 2022 limited series “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” in which he plays another aspirational Jew, a likable finance guy. (This is harder than it looks.) He is now the star of “Nobody Wants This,” a Netflix romantic comedy about Noah (Brody), a Los Angeles rabbi, who falls for Joanne (Kristen Bell), an outspoken non-Jewish podcaster. It premieres on Sept. 26.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Walter Arlen, Holocaust Refugee and Belated Composer, Is Dead at 103

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      After fleeing Vienna, he was a music critic and teacher before returning to composing in the 1980s. His memories of Nazi barbarism inspired his music.Walter Arlen, a Viennese musical prodigy who fled to the United States after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and became a music critic and a late-in-life composer of Holocaust and Jewish-exile remembrances in song, died on Sept. 3, 2023, in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 103. The death, in a hospital, was not widely reported at the time; Howard Myers, Mr. Arlen’s husband and sole survivor, confirmed it to The New York Times only recently. Mr. Arlen and Mr. Myers, longtime residents of Santa Monica, had been companions for 65 years and were married in 2008 after California’s Supreme Court upheld the legality of same-sex marriages.Even after eight decades, Mr. Arlen’s memories remained vivid — of his father being dragged off to a concentration camp; of his mother’s nervous breakdown and suicide; of his family’s home, business and bank accounts stolen by the Nazi authorities; and of witnessing the vicious murder of an older Jew by an SS guard.The scion of a prosperous Jewish family that had owned a department store in Vienna since 1890, Mr. Arlen, whose family name was Aptowitzer, was an 18-year-old high school student in 1938, nearing graduation with a brilliant musical future ahead, when German troops invaded and absorbed German-speaking Austria into Hitler’s Third Reich in what was known as the Anschluss.As waves of Nazi violence and property expropriations crushed Jewish life across Austria, the department store was seized and “Aryanized,” the family was evicted from its apartments on the top floor, and Walter’s father was sent to a series of concentration camps, ending at Buchenwald. Walter, his mother and his younger sister, Edith, took refuge in a pensione.Mr. Arlen and his sister, Edith Arlen-Wachtel, visited Vienna, their native city, in March 2008 for the first time since their family fled Nazi-occupied Austria.Christian Fürst/Picture-Alliance/DPA, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Amid Outcry, Academy Museum to Revise Exhibit on Hollywood’s Jewish Roots

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      When the museum first opened, it was criticized for omitting Hollywood’s Jewish pioneers. Now it is under fire for what its new exhibit says about them.When the popular Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021 with exhibits celebrating the diversity of the film industry, the museum was criticized for having largely omitted one group: the Jewish founders of Hollywood.Last month, the museum aimed to correct that oversight by opening a permanent new exhibition highlighting the formative role that Jewish immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer played in creating the American film industry.But the new exhibition, which turns a sometimes critical eye on Hollywood’s founders, ignited an uproar. An open letter that a group called United Jewish Writers sent to the museum on Monday objected to the use of words including “tyrant,” “oppressive,” “womanizer” and “predator” in its wall text, called the exhibit “antisemitic” and described it as “the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate.”In response to the growing outcry, the Academy Museum said in a statement Monday that it had “heard the concerns from members of the Jewish community” and that it was “committed to making changes to the exhibition to address them.”“We will be implementing the first set of changes immediately — they will allow us to tell these important stories without using phrasing that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes,” the museum said.The museum announced the changes just before receiving the open letter, which was signed by more than 300 Hollywood professionals. “While we acknowledge the value in confronting Hollywood’s problematic past, the despicable double standard of the Jewish Founders exhibit, blaming only the Jews for that problematic past, is unacceptable and, whether intentional or not, antisemitic,” said the letter. “We call on the Academy Museum to thoroughly redo this exhibit so that it celebrates the Jewish founders of Hollywood with the same respect and enthusiasm granted to those celebrated throughout the rest of the museum.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      A Celebration of Frank London’s Music Will Be Missing One Thing: Him

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      The trumpeter, composer and bandleader who helped revitalize klezmer is battling cancer. But his work hasn’t slowed, and his longtime associates are rallying around him.Frank London is one of those musicians who somehow seems to be everywhere, participating in a bit of everything. At 66, the trumpeter, composer, arranger and bandleader has collaborated with everyone from Mel Tormé to LL Cool J. A founding member of the Klezmatics, a band that helped to revitalize the klezmer style during the late ’80s, London has worked for decades at a fertile crossroads where Jewish music meets downtown jazz. With two new albums involving both styles arriving imminently, he arranged to throw a party, and invited dozens of friends and colleagues to play.The celebration, happening on Monday at the Brooklyn venue Roulette, features the Klezmatics alongside three of London’s bands: Conspiracy Brass, a buoyant, funky horns-and-percussion aggregation; the Elders, a soulful, hard-swinging quintet of seasoned jazzers; and Klezmer Brass Allstars, who meld traditional Yiddish and Hasidic music with electronic beats.The only thing missing will be London himself, now hospitalized for treatment of a rare cancer he became aware of four years ago. During unrelated medical testing in 2020, doctors detected signs of myelofibrosis, a chronic leukemia characterized by a buildup of scar tissue in the bone marrow. The median survival rate for the disease is six years.“I didn’t tell anyone much about it, because this is a very weird disease,” London said during an interview before his hospitalization, in the cozy East Village apartment he shares with his wife, Tine Kindermann, an artist and musician.“Some people die within a year,” he said. “Some people live with it for 30 years. I’m in this statistical norm where it’s like, after three to five years it starts to get worse. So for the last four years, I’ve just been leading my life.”For London, that meant taking care of business. In addition to wrapping up his two new albums, “Brass Conspiracy” by Conspiracy Brass and “Spirit Stronger Than Blood” by the Elders, he delivered a Klezmer Brass Allstars album, “Chronika,” last December. He wrote music for an independent film, completed a score for a forthcoming Karin Coonrod production of “King Lear,” and recorded a commissioned set of niggunim — Jewish spiritual melodies — with a starry ensemble of fellow iconoclasts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara’ Review: Church vs. State

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      This film, based on a true story about the kidnapping of a Jewish child in 19th-century Italy, underscores the devastating consequences of family separation.In the film “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” a representative of Pope Pius IX arrives at a Jewish family’s home in Bologna, Italy, on a June night in 1858. This unsettling intrusion quickly gains force as it becomes clear the representative intends to take their 6-year-old son, Edgardo (Enea Sala).Unbeknown to Salomone and Marianna Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi), a housekeeper had their son Edgardo baptized as an infant. In the parts of Italy that were under papal rule at the time, it was illegal for Christian children to be raised in non-Christian households. The Mortara case — covered by the Italian author Daniele Scalise, whose book the film is based upon, and by David Kertzer, an American scholar and expert on the papacy and antisemitism — became an international cause for Jewish organizations in Europe as well as proponents of the unification of Italy, including the papal states, into a kingdom. Even Napoleon III, an ally of the pope, expressed concern.The director, Marco Bellocchio, anchors the period with a somber visual elegance and employs surreal gestures to tease out the psychological and spiritual aspects of the tragedy. Political cartoons lambasting Pope Pius IX come to life through animation. During an especially sorrowful moment in Edgardo’s confinement, one of the figures of the crucified Christ in the Roman dormitory for child converts takes leave of his cross with the help of little Edgardo.Throughout his life, Edgardo remained faithful to the church. In the film, one gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo MortaraNot rated. In Italian and Hebrew. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      Jerry Seinfeld Can No Longer Be About Nothing

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      The comedian, long beloved for his apolitical riffs, has been wrestling with what it means to be Jewish amid the Israel-Hamas war. Not everyone is pleased.Jerry Seinfeld became a mic-cradling, cereal-eating, “did-you-ever-notice”-ing avatar of American Jewish life with a brazenly shrugging persona: a merry indifference to weighty material as a comedian and in his megahit TV show about nothing, as petty and apolitical as he seemed to be.Now — off-camera, at least — Mr. Seinfeld appears to have reached his post-nothing period.Since the attacks of Oct. 7 in Israel, and through their bloody and volatile aftermath in Gaza, Mr. Seinfeld, 70, has emerged as a strikingly public voice against antisemitism and in support of Jews in Israel and the United States, edging warily toward a more forward-facing advocacy role than he ever seemed to seek across his decades of fame.He has shared reflections about life on a kibbutz in his teens, and in December traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with hostages’ families, soberly recounting afterward the missile attack that greeted him during the trip.He has participated, to a point, in the kind of celebrity activism with which few associate him — letter-signing campaigns, earnest messages on social media — answering simply recently when asked about the motivation for his visit to Israel: “I’m Jewish.”And as some American cities and college campuses simmer with conflict over the Middle East crisis and Israel’s military response, Mr. Seinfeld has faced a measure of public scorn that he has rarely courted as a breakfast-obsessed comedian, intensified by the more vocal advocacy of his wife, Jessica, a cookbook author.This week, as the couple and their children appeared together at the premiere of Mr. Seinfeld’s new movie (“Unfrosted,” about Pop-Tarts), Ms. Seinfeld attracted attention for another reason: She promoted on Instagram, and said she had helped bankroll, a counterprotest at the University of California, Los Angeles, where clashes with pro-Palestinian demonstrators have turned violent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Maurice El Medioni, Jewish Algerian Pianist, Dies at 95

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      He fused the music of his Sephardic roots with Arab traditions, incorporating boogie-woogie and other influences, to create a singular style.Maurice El Medioni, an Algerian-born pianist who fused Jewish and Arab musical traditions into a singular style he called “Pianoriental,” died on March 25 in Israel. He was 95.His death, at a nursing home in Herzliya, on Israel’s central coast, was confirmed by his manager, Yvonne Kahan.Mr. Medioni was a last representative of a once vibrant Jewish-Arab musical culture that flourished in North Africa before and after World War II and proudly drew from both heritages.In Oran, the Algerian port where he was born, he was sought after by Arabs and Jews alike to play at weddings and at banquets, in the years between the war and 1961, when the threat of violence and Algeria’s new independence from France drove Mr. Medioni and thousands of other Jews to flee.With his bounding octaves, his quasi-microtonal shifts in the style of traditional Arab music, his cheeky rumba rhythms learned from American G.I.s after the 1942 Allied invasion and his roots in the Jewish-Arab musical heritage called andalous, Mr. Medioni had honed a distinctive piano style by his early 20s. The singers he accompanied often alternated phrases in French and Arabic in a style known as “Françarabe.” His uncle Messaoud El Medioni was the famous musician known as Saoud L’Oranais, a leading practitioner of andalous who was deported by the Germans to the Sobibor death camp in 1943.The Medioni style remained buried and nearly forgotten for four decades as he pursued his trade as a men’s tailor. He kept it alive in private, performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs after he was forced to flee to France, until he released a breakthrough album, “Café Oran,” in 1996 at the age of 68. That led to a belated second life as a star of so-called world music — concert tours in Europe, appearances in documentary films and a major role as mentor to a new generation of Israeli musicians anxious to recover the musical heritage of their Sephardic heritage. In 2017, he published an autobiography, “A Memoir: From Oran to Marseilles (1938-1992),” which reproduces Mr. Medioni’s cursive scrawl, with a translation from the French.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Academy Museum to Highlight Hollywood’s Jewish History After All

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      The museum was criticized earlier for failing to acknowledge the contributions of the Jewish pioneers who helped establish the American film studio system.Having initially drawn criticism for failing to acknowledge the formative role that Jewish immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer played in creating Hollywood and the film industry, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Thursday announced the details of a new permanent exhibition that will spotlight their contributions.The show, called “Hollywoodland,” is scheduled to open May 19, the museum said in its news release, and will spotlight “the impact of the predominately Jewish filmmakers whose establishment of the American film studio system transformed Los Angeles into a global epicenter of cinema.”When the museum opened in 2021, it made a point of highlighting the contributions of women, artists of color and people from other backgrounds, but there was barely a mention of the Jewish immigrants who were central to founding the Hollywood studio system — titans like Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Goldwyn and Mayer.The omission, coming at a time of growing concerns about antisemitism, drew complaints from Jewish leaders and concern from the museum’s supporters, many of whom saw it as example of Hollywood’s strained relationship with its Jewish history. Striving to assimilate, Hollywood’s founders feared being identified as Jews.The museum’s permanent exhibition about Jewish contributions is called “Hollywoodland.” via Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and SciencesVarious publications called out the affront, like The Forward, which ran a piece headlined “Jews built Hollywood. So why is their history erased from the Academy’s new museum?”The museum said then that it had always intended to open a temporary exhibit devoted to the subject, but in response to the backlash it decided to make a permanent gallery, and it consulted rabbis and Jewish scholars on what should be included.“We learned,” Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who was then the museum’s director, said in an interview. “We took a lot of the information from the conversations that we’ve had and grew from that.“The show will be organized in three distinct parts: “Studio Origins,” which explores the founding of Hollywood’s original eight major film studios and their studio heads; “Los Angeles: From Film Frontier to Industry Town, 1902-1929,” which traces how the city evolved alongside the movie industry; and “From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood,” a short-form documentary — narrated by Ben Mankiewicz, the TCM host and author — that looks at the Jewish immigrants and first-generation Jewish Americans who built the Hollywood studio system.The exhibition was organized by Dara Jaffe, an associate curator, with help from Gary Dauphin, a former associate curator of digital presentations, and Josue L. Lopez, a research assistant. Neal Gabler, the author and film critic who wrote “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” served as an adviser.“They were the ones who established this system,” Jaffe said of the pioneering Jewish filmmakers. “They were drawn to this industry because they were restricted from so many others.” More