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Article 86
Television’s small pantheon of animated Jewish characters just got a bit bigger: On Sunday night’s episode, entitled “Family Goy,” Lois Griffin, the matriarch on Seth MacFarlane’s Fox hit Family Guy,...
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Article 85
ParentDish blogger Susan Avery interviewed reality-TV star-cum-cad Jon Gosselin last week, and we here present a selection from that interview, offered with no comment beyond ParentDish’s headline,...
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Article 84
Jerusalem’s Shaare Tzedek Medical Center—one of the world’s busiest hospitals—normally treats secular and Haredi Jews, Israeli-Arabs and West Bank Palestinians, and Jewish settlers. But even emergency...
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Article 83
I’m writing this column at four in the morning, and not because I’ve decided to pursue a second career as an insomniac or a vampire. It’s just a nagging case of jetlag that I hope will pass by Kol...
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Article 82
The summer of 1960 was a challenging one for Joe Barbera. A mogul of animation—together with his partner, Bill Hanna, he had created immensely popular characters like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and...
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Article 81
When he was newly divorced from his first wife, my brother moved into a small apartment near the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. Emotionally shattered, he didn’t even bother to hook up the gas and...
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Article 80
Maxine, my 5-year-old, was home sick last week, dripping snot and hacking like a two-pack-a-day smoker in Boca. I drugged her up, plunked her down on the couch, wrapped her in a blanket, and put on...
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Article 79
Even though it is a work of fiction, The Promise—a four-part miniseries that aired last month on Great Britain’s public-owned but commercially sponsored Channel 4—is a strong candidate to redeem the...
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Article 78
As I write this, public school is on break, the Seders are over, and parents want nothing more than to plop their children in front of the TV. But we’re also beginning the period of reflection known as...
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Article 77
In the interest of time, I’ll keep this column short. Maybe then more of you will find the time to read it. You, after all, have other things going on in your lives: More than 85 percent of you, if...
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Article 76
This week’s parasha contains one of the most astonishingly strange moments in a book generally bursting with them. It merits being read in full, but for the hurried, here’s a condensed version: If a...
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Article 75
I loathe stupid tween TV. But one show redeems the entire genre. All hail Phineas and Ferb, now midway through its third season on the Disney Channel. Phineas and Ferb, as I will endeavor to explain to...
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The Russian-American Jews of ‘Russian Dolls’
In the first episode of Russian Dolls, a new Lifetime reality show set in Brooklyn and billed as a cross between Jersey Shore and the Real Housewives franchise, a 23-year-old bleached-blonde named...
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FX’s Rescue Me and Sept. 11
Tomorrow, I will get up from the longest, funniest, dirtiest, least politically correct, and most meaningful shiva of my life, when the final episode of Rescue Me airs on FX. The series, which...
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Article 72
Tomorrow, Jewish News One, the network billed as the ‘Jewish al Jazeera’—owned by European Jewish Union president, Igor Kolomoisky, and vice president, Vadim Rabinovich—will join the airwaves,...
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'Mad About You' Is Soulless Dreck
The Arbiter is a weekly column dedicated to revisiting canonical works of art, high and low alike, in an attempt to reevaluate their merit. All media are considered; none are pitied. As an homage to...
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Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger, an Icon for Our Times
Patti Stanger, host of the polarizing Bravo Television reality show Millionaire Matchmaker, the woman called the “Simon Cowell of dating,” is not just a TV host. She is a post-modern version of...
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Sarah Silverman Should Get Back to Her Funny Stuff
Dear Sarah, The letter thing works for me because, for some reason, I’ve always had strange feelings toward you, feelings I don’t usually reserve for entertainers, especially ones whose career highs...
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Where Did the Figure of the Nebbish Come From?
The Tattler is a new weekly column on contemporary culture. There’s a cartoon in this week’s New Yorker. A couple—shlumpy, but clearly urban—are seated at a coffee table, reading a newspaper that,...
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Like Judaism, 'The Simpsons' Knows How to Tell Stories—'Downton Abbey' Doesn't
Last Sunday night, with a mere flick of a finger on the remote control, viewers were able to catch a glimpse of television at its highest and lowest. Up above, in the thin air of Olympus, stood the...
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