Currently Browsing: television 25 articles
New Trek is Jew-Trek
First airing in 1966, Star Trek was always heavily influenced by Jews and Jewish thought but now it’s Jewier than ever. Famously Kirk, Spock and Chekov were all played by Jews (William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and Walter Keonig). Some of the writers who worked on the original series such as the noted sci-fi authors Harlan Ellison (City […]
Britain’s Small Screen Jewish Gangsters
Contining with our series on Jews and Crime, Nathan Abrams explores British Jewish gangsters and criminals on the small screen. The image of the British Jewish gangster isn’t an obvious one but we’ve had two significant crime families on British television in recent years. McMafia (BBC, 2018) was an eight-part British crime drama television series […]
The Party Started Three Decades Ago
Nathan Abrams responds to an article in The Guardian about British Jewry’s alleged awakening from its timidity. Hadley Freeman’s assertation that ‘British Jews have always been self-effacing, but we’re starting to show our chutzpah’ overstates the point. Freeman is right that Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour Party has obscured that fact but British […]
WandaVision and the Spectre of the Jewish Nazi
Alana Vincent The latest episode of WandaVision has re-ignited a long-running point of discomfort among Jewish comics fans, as it reminds us that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the young Wanda Maximoff willingly joined Hydra—a shadowy successor organisation to the Third Reich—as a volunteer. Why is this an issue? Well, in the comic books, […]
Discounted Jews
Nathan Abrams finds flaws in David Baddiel’s new book about antisemitism Jews Don’t Count. I finally got my copy of Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel’s new book about antisemitism. Despite being a longtime fan and bearing more than a passing physical resemblance to him, I desperately didn’t want to like this book. Maybe it’s because the media only seems to pay attention to these issues when it’s a celebrity like Baddiel, Simon Schama or Anthony Julius. As he puts it himself in the book, ‘I am, […]
JewTh!nk’s Year in Review
Given that we only launched in July, this will have to be a half-year review. Here is our roundup of the top five films, television shows and books of (the second half of) 2020. Films Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Was this the best Jewish film of the year? Technically and aesthetically, probably not but in terms […]
Up Schitt’s Creek
Schitt’s Creek may not be The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, says Vince Brook, but It Is Marvellous and Very, Very Jewish! Let’s start with Eugene and Dan Levy, co-creators of the hugely popular, Emmy-monopolizing CBC sitcom Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020). This actual Jewish father and son team also co-star in the series as the fictionally Jewish Johnny […]
What’s in a Name? Lovecraft Country’s Hiram Epstein
Elyce Rae Helford takes another look at the troubling and antisemitic character of Hiram Epstein on HBO’s Lovecraft Country. In September 2020, in The Times of Israel, Philissa Cramer asked, ‘Why does HBO’s anti-racist ‘Lovecraft Country’ stumble into anti-Semitic tropes?‘ The question came to me as well, and Cramer does a superb job of clarifying […]
Is She or Isn’t She . . . Jewish?: ‘The Queen’s Gambit’
Vincent Brook reviews new Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit. SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains major reveals! We all know about Bobby Fischer, the paranoid, self-hating Jewish chess wiz featured in two American movies (Meeting Bobby Fischer, 1993; Pawn Sacrifice, 2015). Fischer became U.S. champion at fourteen and, marred by his antisemitic rantings, defeated the […]
A Golden Age of Jewish Television?
Nathan Abrams reflects on current Jewish television, wondering if we are now enjoying a golden age of Jews on the box. ‘When Did TV Get So Jewish?’ proclaimed Vanity Fair recently. On almost every channel, we find Jews on television, both factual and fictional. We have also seen more and more Jews both as central and incidental characters and […]