Nate Bloom blogs on this week's Jews in the News.

 

Big Movie with Jewish Star, Arendt & Ian are American Masters, Noah Schnapp & a Tiktok Snap-Back

 

Handsome Jewish actor is the star of a probable huge hit. “28 Years Later” opened in theaters on June 19 and no doubt it will play for several weeks. This film will probably be a “blockbuster”. Well over 10 million people viewed the recently released trailer on Youtube. It is the sequel to “28 Days Later” (2002) and “28 Weeks Later” (2027). All the” bad things” in the three films trace back to an event in the first film. Animal activists broke into a British lab and accidentally released the “Rage Virus”. It is a highly infectious disease that turns victims into raving people who seek to bite others and turns them into “the infected”.

 

“28 Days” was a big critical and box-office hit. As the first film ended, a few people have escaped infection, but almost all the people in the U.K. are infected. The 2nd film showed tiny groups of survivors trying to find safe refuges and the help they got from others uninfected.

 

The 2025 film first focuses on a small number of the “uninfected” who live on an island just off shore from England. Its heavily defended causeway keeps out the infected. Things change when Jamie, a scavenger, manages to walk over to the mainland. He is accompanied by Spike, his 12-year-old-son. They discover many secrets and horrors of the outside world.

 

All three films were made in the U.K. and virtually all the actors in the films were British or Irish—and the same thing is true of the writers, directors, etc. There wasn’t a Jewish actor, director, or writer, working in the first two films.

 

Here’s a kvell-worthy biggie: British Jewish actor AARON TAYLOR-JOHNSON, 34, is the 3rd film’s star!! He plays Jamie. Aaron (as Jamie) will also star in a 4th “28” film. Its completed and it will open next January.

 

IN 2015, Aaron told the Guardian (a U.K. paper) that he was pleased when someone told him he resembled a fashionable Hasidic Jew. “That was nice because I have really curly hair and also I’m Jewish,” he told the Guardian.

 

The American Masters PBS program premieres a biographical film about HANNAH ARENDT on June 27. Repeat showings later in the week.

 

Arendt (1906-1975) is usually referred to as a political scholar or political thinker. It is hard to briefly summarize who Arendt was. She wrote “very deeply” on wide-ranging subjects, and her life was event-filled .

 

Here is as good a brief summary as one can find. It is in the PBS web page on the film: Hannah Arendt came of age in Germany as Hitler rose to power, before escaping to the United States as a Jewish refugee. Through her unflinching capacity to demand attention to facts and reality, Arendt’s time as a political prisoner, refugee and survivor in Europe informed her groundbreaking insights in the human condition, the refugee crisis and totalitarianism.

 

I am pretty sure the film will show her origins (well off, educated, secular Jewish parents). I know the film will cover the two biggest controversies in her life: (1) she was a student of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and, soon after meeting him, she was his mistress for several years. Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 . His Nazi membership cleared the way for him to be take the top post at a prestigious college. There are many. public and private ‘clues’ that he often had some sympathy for the Nazi party. Arendt knew “his hands weren’t clean”, but she defended him in a post-war “denazification” hearing—and (2) Her articles and books on the Eichmann trial. There was her controversial “take” on the thinking of bureaucrats like Eichman, and her opinion that some Jews ‘acted badly’ when they cooperated with Nazis. They were wrong, in her view, even if they were tying to save their loved ones.

 

Many scholars, and others, disagreed so much with Arendt’s views that they cut off her entirely.

 

“Stranger Things”, the hit fantasy/sci-fi Netflix series will end fairly soon. The 5th season will “probably” end with the release of three episodes in November and December, 2025—and that’s the series finale, too.

 

Seven episodes of the 4th season series were released on May 27 and the release of (last) two episodes will be on July 1 (next Tuesday).

 

It isn’t exactly a major controversy, but I learned that in the land of “Stanger Things”, many say that NOAH SCHNAPP, 20, has been in some hot water. Schnapp was just 12 when he became a “recurring” actor in the first season of the series. He has been a regular cast member in the following seasons. He plays Will Byers, the son of Joyce Byers (a star of the series.) Joyce is played by WINONA RYDER, 53.

 

In November 2023 (a month after the Hamas attack), he wrote on Tik Tok: You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism. (He has 32 million Tik Tok followers).

 

He got a lot of push-back, sometimes polite, but some replies were threatening. He has tried to calm the waters with statements and with a Tik Tok video. He said in the video: “I only want peace and safety and security for all innocent people affected by this conflict. I’ve had many opens conversations with friends with a Palestinian background and I think they are very important conversations to have and I’ve learned a lot,”

 

I should have alerted you sooner to a new American Masters documentary about singer, songwriter, and poet JANIS IAN, 74. The documentary premiered on PBS on June 20 . There was a date mistake ( it said “June 29”) in an on-line source I looked at weeks ago.

 

The good news. The program will be free on the PBS app for about a month. For a mere $5.00 monthly donation to your PBS station and you can get a “Passport” and see the documentary, anytime, on-line, or on your TV (with devices like Amazon Fire or Roku). It may be on Youtube (free) in the near future. I will alert you of that.

 

Ian was born Janis Fink. She grew-up in New Jersey. Her parents were secular Jews. She was only 14(!) when she wrote and played her first big hit. It was “Society’s Child (1965)”. In the song, she says that she is trying to have a romantic relationship with a black man her age, but everyone around her (parents, teachers) says she has to stop seeing him.

 

The song finally took off in 1967 when it was played in a TV program hosted by LEONARD BERNSTEIN. It sold 600,000 “single” records. In 1974, Ian had another big hit (“At Seventeen”). In the following years, her records have had a fairly big audience. She was also one of the first celebrities to be an open, lesbian woman (1983).