“Blossom” Star Mayim Bialik Meets “Blossom” Seder Doll
Ah, the power of television and the internet to bring people (and their dolls) together.
In our Modern Jewish Mom Passover Special, still airing on The Jewish Channel, we feature the quirky Barbie-doll-centered seder table centerpieces made by Helen Schwimmer, author and mother of PopJudaica.com creator Sara Schwimmer. Well, as Sara points out, one of the dolls, the one posed as Moses’ sister, Miriam, is not a Barbie but a “Blossom” — from the sitcom of the same name, starring Jewish actress Mayim Bialik, that ran on NBC in the early 1990s (remember Blossom’s best-friend named “Six” and the funny hats they both wore?).
We thought that was just an amusing side tidbit to a fun segment, but the online clip caught the attention of none other than “Blossom” star Mayim Bialik herself! Tickled, Bialik emailed Sara Schwimmer through PopJudaica.com, and, long story short, the two met up recently while Bialik was in New York shooting an episode of the TLC network’s “What Not To Wear,” with the now famous Blossom-cum-Miriam doll that started it all in tow (see picture)!
And Schwimmer was not disappointed by the meeting with her childhood doll’s real-life counterpart. “She’s so great,” Schwimmer told The Docent of Bialik.
So the moral of the story is that while Barbie dolls represent an ideal unattainable by real live women, the real live “Blossom” easily surpasses the doll. (Though we are disappointed by the absence of a silly hat on both doll and human versions.)
Non Sequitor: Female Action Directors
The Tollbooth is the only feature film currently playing on The Jewish Channel whose director (Debra Kirschner) is a woman. The film is a comedy — a broad genre tackled by plenty of female filmmakers — but what about darker genres? How many women are directing wide-release action, sci-fi and horror? Well, as it turns out, not that many. But those that are, have produced some hard-hitting and innovative cinematic works.
The American grande dame of action is Kathryn Bigelow. Back in 1978, while still at Colombia University’s film school, she directed The Set-Up — a deconstruction of film violence in which we hear two professors analyze a fistfight. In 1987, Bigelow earned critical notice for Near Dark, a genre-bending vampire western. Next came films like 1991’s Point Break, about thrill-seeking bank robbers; 1995’s Strange Days, about a near-future murder mystery; and 2002’s K19: The Widowmaker, about the doomed crew of Russia’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Her latest film, The Hurt Locker, tracks an under-fire U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq.
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Everything But The Girl: Inside Haredi Cinema
Say, when did you first learn about sex? How about profanity? What about the very existence of women on this planet? What tipped you off to them?
Well, if you grew up watching feature films produced for the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, then you wouldn’t find any of those subjects addressed on-screen — because none of them make the final cut.
And who’s holding the scissors? That would be filmmakers like Yehuda Grovais and Shalom Eisenbach — who are the subjects of two fascinating documentaries playing on The Jewish Channel.
Band of Basterds: Jewish Soldiers in FilmAudiences will see a group of Jewish-American G.I.’s turn the tables on the Nazis this summer with the release of Inglourious Basterds, the latest film by Quentin Tarantino. The plot sends a strike force — led by Brad Pitt’s “Lt. Aldo Raine” — deep behind enemy lines to kill members of the Third Reich with guns, knives, baseball bats and, well, anything else at hand…
The film is in the tradition of 1967’s The Dirty Dozen, 1968’s Where Eagles Dare and (of course) 1978’s Inglorious Bastards — all three of which set their story in the midst of World War II, and where the focus was more on rip-roaring action than on what happened when the bullets stopped flying.
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Adapting Saviors For The Screen
Cinema loves a hero. But not all of life’s heroic tales make it to the big screen. At least, not right away. When Schindler’s List premiered in 1993, it introduced audiences around the globe to Oskar Schindler — a German industrialist who risked his life and fortune to save 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust.
Schindler’s new celebrity status came almost 20 years after his death, but his brave actions were already long known. In 1963, Yad Vashem had named him Righteous Among the Nations — the first former Nazi Party member to be so honored — and an award-winning 1982 novel, Schindler’s Ark, would later serve as the basis for the Steven Spielberg film.
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Black Books and Commissars
It was a film censored and shelved by the KGB for more than 20 years, because its favorable depiction of Jews didn’t jibe with Party doctrine. Based on the short story that launched Vasily Grossman’s Soviet literary career, 1967’s Commissar brought his 1934 tale “In the Town of Berdichev” to the big screen.
For ten years, Grossman’s career would be marked by his ability to publish works of striking realism on the plight of all Russians, including Jews, but with a patriotic style that satisfied Soviet censors. As Keith Gessen wrote in a 2006 New Yorker article, Grossman “understood the rules and he was going to play by them.”
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A Very Clooney ChristmasActor Richard Kind tells us about the time his good friend George Clooney begged him for a Christmas tree and what Clooney did when Kind refused. Rapper Y-Love and New York magazine editor Jesse Oxfeld comment. It’s all part of the newest episode of Holy Dazed: Chanukah, now playing on TJC.
Click here to watch in HD.
Happy Chanukah!
Funny, He Doesn’t Look Like a ChristopherIn the film Circumcise Me, lapsed Catholic-turned-Orthodox-Jewish-comedian Yisrael Campbell shares the life story that inspired his hilarious comedy act, but on a recent trip to New York City, Campbell revealed some tidbits about his life that you won’t see in the film.
We caught up with Campbell at his alma mater, the Circle in The Square Drama School, to find out how he went from being a struggling actor named Christopher in Los Angeles to a successful comedian named Yisrael in Jerusalem.
You can also see the video at full size on your television screen as part of the latest episode of the TJC Original Series TJC Movie Talk.
Host Alana Newhouse provides the voice over here.
“Mama Mia” — ABBA Star’s Nazi FatherHer father was actually a Nazi, and she was actually conceived as part of Hitler’s program to propagate the Aryan race.
Her shocking story, as revealed in Cover Up: Norway’s Nazi Secret, brought to you by The Jewish Channel.
Sing a Song, Save a Language| Isa Kremer singing in Yiddish. |
Amidst the current revival of Yiddish music and culture in attempts to keep the language from “dying out,” it’s easy to forget that Yiddish has led a tenuous existence through much of the 20th Century. Long seen by the wider world as the Jewish tongue, Yiddish has survived suppression, obsolescence and the extermination of most of its native speakers. Today, its musical torchbearers offer CDs and digital downloads to fans of all religions. But back when opera was the only place to hear the greatest singers of the age, the renowned voice that brought Yiddish songs to non-Jewish ears belonged to Isa Kremer, the subject of the film Isa Kremer: The People’s Diva.
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