January 10, 2011 | 12:47 am

Top 10 Jews with capes

Posted by Jay Firestone

With all the hype over NBC’s newest midseason replacement, The Cape, I started thinking if I know anyone who wears a cape.  I don’t (thank god).  But here’s a list of Jews who do.

1) Larry David

Who doesn’t remember Frank Costanza’s cape-wearing attorney? (Season 6, Ep. 4)

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2) Superman

While he’s technically not Jewish, Superman exhibits many Jewish qualities (he’s and outsider, he’s committed to justice, he wears glasses).  Not to mention his parents, or rather, creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster were both Jewish.

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3) Harry Potter

That’s not a wand in Daniel Radcliffe‘s hand, it’s a yad.

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4) Maimonides

Tell me this guy didn’t wear a cape…

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5) Dracula

He’s an Eastern-European immigrant, his day begins at night, doesn’t like crosses and always wears black.

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6) Capers

They’re amazing on a bagel and lox with a side of herring and chopped liver.

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7) Moses

So it was really a cloak, but whatever.

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8) Chabad of Cape Cod

Donate here.

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9) Magneto

This Marvel Comics supervillian, Erik Lehnsherr, clings to his Jewish roots and constant fear of suppression.

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10) Every Jew on Shabbat

Cape, tallis - same thing…

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April 6, 2010 | 1:10 pm

David Shuster cheats on MSNBC with CNN [UPDATE: SUSPENDED!]

Posted by Jay Firestone

UPDATE: MSNBC suspends David Shuster ‘indefinitely.’

More on this here.

What does Halachah say about this?

From NYTimes.com:

David Shuster, an anchor on MSNBC, recently participated in a test of a new show. But not for his own network.

David Shuster, an anchor on MSNBC, recently participated in a CNN pilot.

MSNBC executives were highly displeased when they learned about his test for the competing news channel CNN through a New York Observer article Friday morning, and they are now contemplating their response.

“If true, this is unacceptable and David will be punished appropriately,” an MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, said Friday afternoon.

Read the full story at NYTimes.com.

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November 23, 2009 | 2:05 am

Curb Your Enthusiasm Review Finale: November 22, 2009 - Seinfeld Reunion

Posted by  Eddy Friedfeld

The season finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” resumes with a bang and a boom (no, sorry, that was “F-Troop”).  This episode had vintage Seinfeld and vintage Larry David in a combination that was pleasingly sharp and entertaining.

We begin at the rehearsal for the Seinfeld reunion, where George tells ex-wife Cheryl: “I’ve been dreading telling you about this whole Madoff thing- but look at me, I’m living with Jerry.”

Cheryl thinks she’s not fantastic.

“Why does George have tinted windows on his car?” Larry asks.

“Well he’s a big star,”

“He’s not George Clooney.”

Larry confesses to Jeff that his secret plan is working. “Your whole plan is coming true. Make a move,” Jeff says.

“Whenever I make a move you can see it a mile away.  It’s like a poker tell.”

The gang meets at Julia’s house for a book warming party for Jason Alexander’s new book:  “Acting Without Acting.”

“Not so much a book as a pamphlet,” Larry says.

“It’s annoying that everyone says “Having said that” after everything,” Jerry tells Larry in the comedic musing that spawned their legendary partnership.

“You could tell an audience- you’re all a bunch of idiots.  Having said that, I’m very happy to be here,” Larry replies.

In another dig to Jason, Larry comments on the book:  “It’s very concise.  I’ll read it with dinner.”

Julia accuses Larry of putting his glass down leaving a water ring stain on the wooden table “that has been in the Louis Dreyfus family for years.”

Larry confronts Mocha Joe, the coffee man, who Larry asked to deliver jumper cables to his office.  “I understand you’re upset that I didn’t give you a tip.

“Not upset, disappointed…  If you do me a favor, then we’re even.”

Driving to pick up the beans for Mocha Joe’s coffee (which is closed) makes him late for his “date” with Cheryl and she cancels on him.

“Mocha Joe has nothing to show for your attempted favor.”

“What happened to E for effort? Larry asks.

“It’s C for coffee!” Jerry says.

Cheryl winds up calling Jason to come over and review lines.

Jason and Cheryl have great chemistry.  “This is the best relationship George has ever had. I’m watching Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss,” Jerry says.

“Who knows what goes on behind tinted windows?” Larry asks Jeff about Jason and Cheryl.

“You sound crazy,” Jeff replies.

Julia asks Larry for the $500 to repair the table.

“I didn’t do it.  I respect wood,” Larry says, and is determined to find the culprit.

“Do you respect wood, Susie?” Larry grills Susie about the ring stain.

“I respect wood so much that if I had a piece of wood in my hand I’d beat the s**t out of you! Now get the f**k out!” (the finale would not be the same without one more f-bomb from Susie).

Now Cheryl has gotten her own car windows tinted.

Larry wants to change the blocking on the scene to keep Jason away from Cheryl.

Larry seeing Jason’s car rocking back and forth suspects the worst.  He opens the door, only to reveal Jason’s dogs who bolt out and attack Mocha Joe. Mocha Joe’s complaint will have the dogs put down, unless Larry intervenes.

“Your heart bleeds for wood but not for actual life,” Jerry says. “When you go to a funeral do you feel sorry for the coffin?”       

“They’re going to be put down,” Larry pleads with Mocha Joe.

“I know.  If I could I’d do it myself.”

Larry pays Mocha Joe off for a “stay of execution.”

Larry confronts Cheryl about why she likes Jason.

“He’s sensitive, he’s neurotic.”

“That’s me!  I wrote that character!”

Larry tries to rewrite the script to keep Jason and Cheryl apart.

“Larry, we already screwed up one finale,” Jerry says.

“We didn’t screw up the finale.  That’s was a great finale.”

When he sees the changes Jason quits.

“I’ll play George,” Larry says.

“You’ll play George’s butler?” Jerry asks.

“There were two Darrins on Bewitched.”

“Look, we are all icons.  You’re a no-con,” Jerry tells Larry.

Larry is actually great as George, but the cast does not like it.

Larry quits, but not before Cheryl overhears him (through tinted windows) say that he only undertook the show to get Cheryl back.

Larry watches the final show (now with Elizabeth Shue re-cast as George’s ex), when Cheryl appears at his door, with two cups of Mocha Joe’s coffee.  As the two are about to reconcile, Larry realizes that it was Cheryl who left the cup ring on Julia’s table.

“Having said that…”

The mini-Seinfeld show was terrific- funny and true to all the characters.  While the series can go out on this high note, I would welcome another season.  I would also welcome an actual Seinfeld reunion on NBC.  The four still look great and have the same superb chemistry that made them television icons.

Eddy Friedfeld is a film and entertainment journalist and the co-author of “Caesar’s Hours” with Sid Caesar and teaches the history of comedy in America at Yale and NYU.

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November 16, 2009 | 3:42 am

Curb Your Enthusiasm Review: November 15, 2009 - Seinfeld Reunion

Posted by  Eddy Friedfeld

This week’s entry of Curb is a fun introduction to next week’s big finale.  With the cast of Seinfeld at the rehearsal table, it feels like old home week- a renuion of friends you missed.  You not only enjoy seeing them, you’re intrigued by how they have changed.

Curb begins on a perfect recreation of the Seinfeld set.

“I didn’t know Cheryl was an actress.  What’s she done?” Julia asks.

“She’s done some stuff.  I don’t know exactly what,” is Larry’s awkward reply.

“This is strong stuff- you done good,” Jason Alexander tells Larry about the script, and he is also curious about how Larry’s ex-wife Cheryl got the part as George’s ex-wife.

“Cheryl was the best,” Larry says.

“Who was second best?”

The plot of the reunion, which is presented in snippets, is fun:  George talks about an I-Phone that locates a bathroom anywhere in the world that he invented.  But the perpetually ne’er do well George invested and lost all his money with Bernie Madoff.

“You gave Madoff all your money?”

“All of it.”

They are at their best when they take life’s great tragedies and poke fun at them.

Even recurring character, bad comedian Kenny Bania (Steve Hytner) is affected by the recession- he tells Jerry- “it’s tough out there.”

“You weren’t working in the good economy,” Jerry snarkily replies.

“Ex-wife Cheryl explains that she met Madoff on the street.  “He was wearing a quilted jacket with collar up- it creeped me out- so I withdrew all the money.  I did quite well”- which infuriates George who claims that it was half his money.

Larry is unnerved by George’s constant scratching with the pen he borrowed from Larry.  “The pen was in every orifice of your body,” he tells George. “You don’t loan Jason anything that can be inserted,” Jerry tells Larry.

When Larry demands a replacement pen and George gives him a regular pen, the banter between Larry and Jason continues with subtext abounding:

“It’s not an eye for a lesser eye, it’s an eye for an eye,” Jason says.

“This pen is almost blind compared to my eye,” Larry replies

Watching the two of them go at each other is like watching Larry in stereo.

The snippets of dialogue of the “reunion show” were fun as well:

“It would help if he knew who his real father was,” Elaine tells Jerry.

“Clark Kent didn’t know who his father was till he was 16,” Jerry says.

“His planet was destroyed,” she replies.

And no Seinfeld reunion would be complete without a “Hellooooo Newman!”

Kramer brings in a black hooker who will get him into the carpool lane (art imitating reality imitating art, perhaps).

In another subplot, Michael Richards believes he has a disease and cannot focus on the show.  Larry knows someone who has the same disease, Danny Duberstein, and offers to introduce him to Richards.  When Larry learns that Duberstein passed away a few months ago, he gets Leon to pretend to be Duberstein.

In a laugh out loud moment, Richards opens the door in horror to see Leon.

“Please don’t hurt me.  It was three years ago, I didn’t mean it,” referring to his racial slurs at a comedy club and the appropriate retribution he still receives for it.

“Duberstein, that’s a Jewish name?”

“I was adopted by some lovely Jews.”

“And you were bar mitsvahed?”

“Three times.  The last time in Atlantic City.”

“I thought you only get one bar mitsvah when you’re 13?

“No, you get one every 13 years, so you can recharge your batteries.”

“Everything I ate tasted like peaches and I forgot how to multiply,” Leon tells him about the disease.

And we close with Larry about to get falsely arrested for child molestation.

See you next week for the big finale.

Eddy Friedfeld is a film and entertainment journalist and the co-author of “Caesar’s Hours” with Sid Caesar and teaches the history of comedy in America at Yale and NYU.

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November 9, 2009 | 2:45 am

Curb Your Enthusiasm Review: November 8, 2009

Posted by  Eddy Friedfeld

This week’s entry of Curb is a weak entry at best.  When Susie finds a pair of panties in the glove compartment, the philandering Jeff scrambles.  “I told her that they were yours,” he tells Larry.  “That you like wearing women’s panties.”

“Oy, Ve’is Meir,” Larry replies.

“It’s my best one ever,” Jeff says.

Meanwhile, while trying on pants in Banana Republic, there is a fire alarm and the building is evacuated.  Larry leaves his own pants in the dressing room.  He is told there is a two hour wait by an “Officer Krupke,” who does not know the character in West Side Story, even after Larry sings a few bars.  Larry does not want to wait for two hours to get his pants back and leaves with the pants he tried on, which were still tagged.

Back at Jeff’s house, Larry leaves Susie and Virginia Sloane (Elizabeth Shue) and her husband (John Schneider) for a walk because “I find “how we met stories” clawing and annoying.” He is urged to take a walk around the block till the story is over.”

Larry buys the worst lemonade he’s ever tasted from a kid’s stand and his altercation results in a rebuking and threat from their mother (Carol Leifer).

Virginia is auditioning for the part of George’s ex-wife in the Seinfeld reunion and nails the audition. Cheryl’s audition painfully relives the experience that precipitated their divorce.

“We’ll talk later- it’s a formality, right? Cheryl whispers to Larry.

“You should be glad that there’s no chance of you and Cheryl getting involved again,” Jerry tells Larry.

Still wearing the tagged pants, Larry returns to Banana Republic, to find (of course) that his pants are gone.  “How could I pay for the pants if you lost my pants?”

“They’re not lost, they’re gone,” the salesperson tells him.

The inevitable Susie Green inquisition about the underwear begins.  “I’m trying to play slight transvestite,” Larry tells Jeff.

“You’re Larry David and you like the comfort of women’s panties!” Jeff instructs him.

Other than the fun cameos, this episode was pareve, neither fish nor fowl comedically, formulaic and uninspired, even with Krupke returning and making Larry remove the tagged pants, revealing red panties.  Neither particularly controversial nor especially funny:  I look forward to next week with the reunion of the Seinfeld cast.  Larry and company are at the free-throw line:  With two episodes left, they have two chances to sink two buckets.  Hopefully with no net.

See you next week.

Eddy Friedfeld is a film and entertainment journalist and the co-author of “Caesar’s Hours” with Sid Caesar and teaches the history of comedy in America at Yale and NYU.

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November 2, 2009 | 3:32 pm

The Leo Frank case isn’t dead

Posted by Jay Firestone

From LATimes.com:

On Aug. 17, 1915, Leo Frank, a Cornell-educated Jewish industrialist, was lynched just outside Atlanta. The atrocity marked the culmination of an ugly conflict that began with the 1913 murder of a child laborer named Mary Phagan, who toiled for pennies an hour in Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory. Frank, the plant superintendent, was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death, though he always maintained his innocence. He appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, losing each time, whereupon Georgia Gov. John Slaton commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. The decision so angered the general populace that a mob organized by a Superior Court judge, the son of a U.S. senator and a former governor abducted Frank from a well-guarded state prison and hanged him from an oak tree.

The lynching of Frank seems like an incident out of another America, one of gray-bearded Civil War veterans and Jim Crow, Model Ts and ragtime. Woodrow Wilson was president. “The Birth of a Nation” was playing in theaters. The story, however, remains very much alive. Throughout the fall, “Parade,” the Alfred Uhry musical inspired by the affair, has been drawing crowds to the Mark Taper Forum. On Nov. 8, KCET will broadcast “The People v. Leo Frank,” the first full-length documentary to explore the topic.

Read the full story at LATimes.com.

Read more about Leo Frank and the historical musical “Parade,” here.

Leo Frank, Revisited

When T.R. Knight chants the Shema blindfolded and with a noose tightening around his neck in the role of Leo Frank, his character’s terror is palpable. The scene takes place as the inevitable tragic dénouement of the historical musical “Parade,” now playing at the Mark Taper Forum, the story of the anti-Semitic trial and lynching in 1915 of a pencil-factory manager accused of brutally murdering a 13-year-old girl. In this production, Frank lives again via this boyish, 36-year-old actor best known for his part in the original cast of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Read More.

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November 2, 2009 | 4:04 am

Curb Your Enthusiasm Review: November 1, 2009

Posted by  Eddy Friedfeld

This week’s relatively tame installment begins at the cemetery where Larry is at his mother’s grave with his father and cousin Andy (the great Shelley Berman and equally great Richard Kind).

The tombstone reads “Past Away.”  “I know how to spell it-it’s $50 a letter- I wanted to save money,” Larry’s Dad tells him.

Larry offers to spring for the 100 bucks to remedy the error.

At their golf club, Andy orders the omelet with the well done onions against Larry’s direction and the extra ten minutes causes them to lose their foursome spot to a slower team.

Caught talking on his cell phone in violation of club rules, Larry lies about his father having quadruple bypass surgery to Mr. Takahashi, the owner of the club.

Yet another debate over tipping ensues, with Larry protesting an 18% percent built-in tip included and doesn’t want to add an extra tip

“Don’t make me do math at the table,” Larry says.

“So you’re protesting math,” the waiter says.

Larry’s foursome, which includes Jeff, Andy, and the fabulously droll Funkhauser, is stuck behind the slow team, which prompts a yelling match with Norm (the legendary Paul Masursky in a fun cameo).

Back in the locker room, Larry is admonished, “You don’t yell at someone with high blood pressure- they die.” Which is exactly what happened to Norm.

“I heard so many stories about you when I joined this club and I can’t believe that so many stories were true about one person.”

“You’re a murderer, Larry, at least guilty of Manslaughter,” Funkhauser tells him.

Andy’s wife makes hats so she can pay for her daughter Skylar to go to college.  Larry graciously offers to pay Skylar’s college tuition.

A subsequent phone debate with stone mason devolves into whether Derek Jeter is overpaid.

Back on the golf course, Larry swings his club at an approaching swan and kills it.  The swan is Mr. Takjahashi’s pet. 

Takahashi interrogates the standing foursome and gives Larry Larry’s own patented stare of incredulity.

You’re stupid,” he tells Jeff.

“I’m not stupid.”

“Yes you are- you marry a big mouth wife.”

Andy asks Larry if he would put his wife through cosmetology school.  “She’s great with lotions.”

“A generous offer to pay for daughter’s college education and now you’re asking me to pay for cosmetology school.”  (I find it better when Larry is the rare reactor, not the instigator of socially inappropriate behavior).

And of course, at Norm’s funeral Larry badmouths the stonemason in front of the stonemason.

Larry gets an email from Jeff- he wants him to come clean about the swan.  At Norm’s funeral service Larry can’t turn cell phone off and tosses it to the back of the room.  The phone is retrieved by the waiter who reads Jeff’s email and which is followed by an 18% tip shakedown.

“A man who can give such a generous tip can never kill a swan,” Takahashi says.

And just when Larry is about to get away with it, there is a great close- to the newly altered tombstone by the vengeful stonemason.

For die-hard sitcom trivia fans- Takahashi was also Arnold’s real name from Happy Days.

See you next week.

Eddy Friedfeld is a film and entertainment journalist and the co-author of “Caesar’s Hours” with Sid Caesar and teaches the history of comedy in America at Yale and NYU.

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