Four \”Roseanne\” seasons and several failed sitcom pilots later, a WB executive urged Amy Sherman-Palladino to pitch an hour-long show to the network. Her response was \”Gilmore Girls,\” whose pilot featured dialogue she had scribbled during that fateful trip to Washington Depot.
Is Jewish the new gay? That\’s how it\’s looking this season on NBC\’s \”Will and Grace.\”
Rena Sofer always seems to land ethnic roles. As the newest regular on NBC\’s \”Just Shoot Me,\” Sofer plays Vicki Costa, a hairdresser from Brooklyn, whose name is Greek, but whose ethnicity is undefined. It\’s reminiscent of her Emmy-award winning role of Lois Cerullo Ashton, the brassy Italian Brooklynite she played for five years on the soap opera \”General Hospital.\”
She\’s also known for playing journalist Rachel Rose, the stereotypically ideal Jewish woman who goes out with a Reform rabbi (Ben Stiller), in the 2000 film \”Keeping the Faith.\”
Cinematic voyeurism is what the Gantz brothers do best.
With time-honored recipes for such dishes as cholent and brisket relying on intuition and a pinch of this and a dash of that, family culinary traditions tend to get lost — or not nearly as tasty — as one generation yields to the next.
\”Six Feet Under\” writer-producer Jill Soloway admits the HBO funeral parlor family drama is like a weekly commercial for taharah, the Jewish ritual of cleansing a dead body prior to burial.\n\nForget the no-open-casket Jewish tradition: On Alan Ball\’s quirky hit, words like \”skin slippage\” are de rigueur and corpses are regularly drained and made-up for display. \”It\’s pretty gross,\” concedes Temple Israel of Hollywood member Soloway, who\’s invented a rabbi character to proffer Jewish perspectives on death.\n\n
Is it an Italian sensibility? Or is Raymond a crypto-Jew?
\”Testimonies of Triumph,\” a short film about a Jewish Polish family that endured years in hiding to escape the Holocaust, is to have its first broadcast Dec. 17 at 7:30 p.m. on public television station KOCE.
\”Uprising,\” the TV miniseries about the Warsaw Resistance, is being released in theaters Dec. 7, and on DVD and VHS Dec. 18. Some actors shared with The Journal their personal experiences on the set.\n\n
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