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The most Jewish moments from Barbra Streisand’s memoir
(JTA) — Throughout Hollywood history, many stars of Jewish ancestry have soft-pedaled that heritage, changing their names or speaking rarely, if at all, about their Jewishness.
No one can accuse Barbra Streisand of either.
The singer and actress of the stage and screen — one of the most beloved Jewish American icons of the past half-century — published her long-awaited memoir, “My Name is Barbra,” earlier this month. Throughout, Streisand references her Jewish background constantly, often peppering in Yiddish words and callbacks to her Brooklyn Jewish upbringing.
Here are the Jewish highlights from “My Name is Barbra.”
Brooklyn days
Streisand was born in Brooklyn, in April 1942. In the book, she writes of her grandfather taking her to an Orthodox synagogue and of attending a yeshiva when she was young — an experience that later prepared her for her movie “Yentl.”
Streisand’s father died when she was 15 months old. She first lived with her grandparents, on Pulaski Street in Williamsburg. When she was eight, her mother remarried and they moved to a different part of Brooklyn.
“We pulled up to a tall brick building (one of many that all looked alike) on Newkirk Avenue in Flatbush, part of a big public housing project called the Vanderveer Estates (a very fancy name for a not-so-fancy place),” she writes in the book. “I remember being very impressed that there was an elevator. I thought we were rich now.”
Broadway bound
The very first Broadway show Streisand ever attended, at age 14, was a 1950s staging of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and it activated ambitions to one day star on Broadway herself.
“I was mesmerized by the play,” she writes. “Anne is fourteen, I’m fourteen. She’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. Why couldn’t I play the part?” In an early theater role, she appeared in the same cast as legendary Jewish comedian Joan Rivers, then still going by her given name Joan Molinsky.
Later, Streisand’s first big Broadway part was in the musical “I Can Get It For You Wholesale,” in which she played a Jewish secretary named Yetta Tessie Marmelstein. While working on that show, she met Elliott Gould, the Jewish actor who would become her first husband and the father of her son Jason.
Streisand shown with her then-husband Elliott Gould, March 17, 1966. (Harry Dempster/Express/Getty Images)
Described by the author as “two Jewish oddballs who found each other,” Gould and Streisand married and divorced entirely prior to their respective movie star heydays in the 1970s.
Jewish food
Streisand writes repeatedly about her love of food — from complaining about the subpar offerings at a Jewish camp she attended in the Catskills at age 8 to her inability to find New York-quality food while traveling overseas. She also discusses her habit of bringing food with her everywhere.
“Maybe it’s part a collective unconscious of European Jews, because what if a pogrom came and you had to get across the border fast?” she writes. “You have to have a little something to eat until you get to the next country.”
Later, she gushes about knishes from Yonah Schimmel’s on Houston Street in New York.
Jewish collaborators
Streisand worked with many Jewish songwriters, directors, and arrangers during her Broadway days, including Jerome Robbins, Marvin Hamlisch and Jule Styne. “My Name is Barbara,” the song that provides the book its title (albeit with a slightly different spelling), was written by Leonard Bernstein, and she took it up after discovering a book of sheet music of Bernstein’s compositions.
“Can you believe it? I was amazed that such a thing existed,” Streisand writes of finding the song. “Now that’s bashert,” she added, using the Yiddish word for “meant to be.”
“Funny Girl,” on stage and screen
“Funny Girl,” the 1964 Broadway musical in which Streisand played the Jewish comedian Fanny Brice, made her a household name.
“Obviously, we were both Jewish, born in New York City… she was raised on the Lower East Side… so there would be a similar cadence in our speech,” Streisand writes of playing Brice. “I’d already noticed that if I spoke in the Brooklyn accent I had heard growing up, with that distinctive Jewish delivery, people would often laugh… we both had Jewish mothers who were concerned about food and marrying us off.. not necessarily in that order.”
The Jewish Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim, who had been considered to write “Funny Girl” but ultimately didn’t, had insisted that a Jewish performer play Brice. “And if she’s not Jewish — she at least has to have the nose!” Sondheim said at the time, according to Streisand. In 1985, Streisand would lead off her “Broadway Album” with Sondheim’s “Putting It Together” and include several other of his songs.
A troubled production that became a huge hit, the success of “Funny Girl” on Broadway led to a 1968 film adaptation, directed by Jewish filmmaker William Wyler, that won Streisand the Best Actress Oscar. In the film, the Egyptian actor Omar Sharif was cast in the male lead opposite Streisand. In a movie shot not long after the Six-Day War, Streisand writes, “Some people didn’t like the idea of an Arab man romancing a Jewish woman.”
When headlines stated that the reaction to the casting in Sharif’s homeland had been negative, Streisand joked, “‘Egypt angry?’ You should hear what my aunt Anna said.”
In 1973, another hit movie starring the actress, “The Way We Were,” involved a love story set against the backdrop of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, between a “Jewish girl” (Streisand) and “gentile boy” played by Robert Redford.
A “nice Jewish girl” on the cover of Playboy
A notable sex symbol throughout the 1970s, Streisand famously appeared on the cover of Playboy in 1977 with the headline “What’s a nice Jewish girl like me doing on the cover of Playboy?” She did not pose nude but did participate in a lengthy interview. The book, for the first time, includes a photograph, from that same shoot but unused, of Barbra in a Playboy bunny costume.
Barbra and Bella
Streisand has been a supporter and friend of numerous Democratic presidents and other political figures. When she started to get politically active, around 1970, she became a close friend and supporter of Jewish politician Bella Abzug, when she ran for Congress.
“Here we were, two Jewish girls… Bella from the Bronx and Barbra from Brooklyn… who made good!” Streisand writes.
Streisand later discovered that both she and Abzug were included on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list.
“Yentl” stories
In 1983, Streisand made her directorial debut with “Yentl,” an adaptation of the Isaac Bashevis Singer short story “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” about a girl in 19th-century Poland who disguises herself as a boy to attend a yeshiva.
“I’ve always been proud of my Jewish heritage,” Streisand writes, about her desire to make “Yentl.” “I never attempted to hide it when iI became an actress. It’s essential to who I am… And I wanted to make this movie about a smart Jewish woman who represented so many qualities I admire.”
Her son, Jason, studied for his bar mitzvah around the same time that his mother was preparing to make “Yentl.”
The movie was filmed in what was then Czechoslovakia, beyond the Iron Curtain, at a time when the communist government was cracking down on Jewish worship. But Streisand wore a Jewish star on her cap while in that country — and “wore it defiantly,” she writes.
Streisand also clashed with her co-star, the famed Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin, on the set of “Yentl.” She hadn’t wanted to cast Patinkin, who at that point was much better known as a Broadway actor, and she considered Richard Gere for the role. According to the book, once filming started, Patinkin behaved in a hostile way on the set. When Streisand asked why, he answered: “I thought we were going to have an affair.”
Amy Irving, Streisand and Mandy Patinkin on the set of “Yentl.” (Courtesy of Penguin Random House)
When Streisand replied “I don’t operate that way,” she writes, the actor, then in his late 20s, cried. She threatened to replace him, and they continued to clash after that, but Streisand ultimately praises Patinkin’s work in the film.
Many years later, Streisand writes, Patinkin asked Streisand to write a blurb on one of his albums, and she brought up what had happened on the set. As an explanation for his behavior, Patinkin told her that he was “scared.”
Barbra and Israel
A premiere was held for “Yentl” in Israel in April of 1984, and on the same visit, Streisand dedicated the Emanuel Streisand School of Jewish Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, named for her father. On the trip, she met with both the then-current prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, and a future prime minister and president, Shimon Peres. Streisand was not daunted by a terrorist shooting that took place in Jerusalem while she was in the country and continued her trip as scheduled.
In 1993, during the negotiations that would lead to the Oslo Accords, Streisand was invited to a luncheon with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, through her close friendship with President Bill Clinton. Streisand was later involved with an effort to make a film about the lives of Rabin and Yassir Arafat, leading up to their handshake at the White House. The project remained alive even after Rabin’s assassination in 1995 but later fell apart due to a financial dispute between the Showtime network and the director.
Streisand returned to Israel in 2013, for her first-ever concert in the country, and also to sing at a 90th birthday celebration for Shimon Peres. On that trip, she drew controversy when she gave a speech about the treatment of women in Israel.
“It’s distressing… to read about women in Israel being forced to sit in the back of the bus… or when we hear about the Women of the Wall having metal chairs hurled at them while they attempt to peacefully and legally pray,” she said in a speech while receiving an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University.
Obama’s Jewish joke
In 2015, Streisand received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with fellow honorees Sondheim and Steven Spielberg. “Born in Brooklyn to a middle-class Jewish family,” President Barack Obama joked in his introduction speech. “I didn’t know you were Jewish, Barbra.”
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The post The most Jewish moments from Barbra Streisand’s memoir appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Netanyahu Says Ready to Implement Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire, Biden Announces Truce to Begin Wednesday
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Feb. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday he was ready to implement a ceasefire deal with Lebanon and would respond forcefully to any violation by Hezbollah, declaring Israel would retain “complete military freedom of action.”
In a television address, Netanyahu said he would put the ceasefire accord to his full cabinet later in the evening. The more restricted security cabinet had earlier approved the deal by a majority of 10 ministers to one.
“Israel appreciates the US contribution to the process, and reserves the right to act against any threat to its security,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.
The accord was brokered by the United States and France and was expected to take effect on Wednesday.
“We will enforce the agreement and respond forcefully to any violation. Together, we will continue until victory,” Netanyahu said in his television address.
Netanyahu said there were three reasons to pursue a ceasefire: to focus on the threat from Iran, which backs the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah; replenish depleted arms supplies and give the army a rest; and to isolate Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that triggered war in the region when it attacked Israel from Gaza last Oct. 7.
“In full coordination with the United States, we retain complete military freedom of action. Should Hezbollah violate the agreement or attempt to rearm, we will strike decisively.”
Netanyahu said Hezbollah — which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon and is allied to Hamas, another Iran-backed Islamist group — was considerably weaker than it had been at the start of the conflict.
“We have set it back decades, eliminated … its top leaders, destroyed most of its rockets and missiles, neutralized thousands of fighters, and obliterated years of terror infrastructure near our border,” he said.
“We targeted strategic objectives across Lebanon, shaking Beirut to its core.”
US President Joe Biden was set to deliver remarks at the White House at 2:30 pm EST (1930 GMT).
ISRAEL RAMPS UP AIRSTRIKES
Despite the diplomatic breakthrough, hostilities raged as Israel dramatically ramped up its campaign of airstrikes in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon, with health authorities reporting at least 18 killed.
There was no indication that a truce in Lebanon would hasten a ceasefire and hostage-release deal in Gaza, where Israel is battling Hamas.
The Lebanon ceasefire agreement requires Israeli troops to withdraw from south Lebanon and Lebanon’s army to deploy in the region, officials say. Hezbollah would end its armed presence along the border south of the Litani River.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said the Lebanese army would be ready to have at least 5,000 troops deployed in southern Lebanon as Israeli troops withdraw, and that the United States could play a role in rebuilding infrastructure destroyed by Israeli strikes.
Not everyone in Israel supports a ceasefire. Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing member of Netanyahu’s government, said on social-media platform X the agreement does not ensure the return of Israelis to their homes in the country’s north and that the Lebanese army did not have the ability to overcome Hezbollah.
“In order to leave Lebanon, we must have our own security belt,” Ben-Gvir said.
Israel demands effective UN enforcement of an eventual ceasefire with Lebanon and will show “zero tolerance” toward any infraction, Defense Minister Israel Katz said earlier on Tuesday.
In the hours before the announcement, Israeli strikes smashed more of Beirut’s densely-populated southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold. The Israeli military said one barrage of strikes had hit 20 targets in the city in just 120 seconds, killing at least seven people and injuring 37, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Israel issued its biggest evacuation warning yet, telling civilians to leave 20 locations. Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee said the air force was conducting a “widespread attack” on Hezbollah targets across the city.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah has kept up rocket fire into Israel.
Israel has dealt Hezbollah massive blows since going on the offensive against the group in September, killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and other top commanders, and pounding areas of Lebanon where the group holds sway.
Over the past year, more than 3,750 people have been killed in Lebanon and over one million have been forced from their homes, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its figures.
Hezbollah strikes have killed 45 civilians in northern Israel and the Golan Heights. At least 73 Israeli soldiers have been killed in northern Israel, the Golan Heights and in combat in southern Lebanon, according to Israeli authorities.
Hezbollah has been launching barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones at northern Israel from neighboring Lebanon almost daily since Oct. 8 of last year, one day after Hamas’s invasion of the Jewish state from Gaza to the south.
The relentless attacks from Hezbollah have forced tens of thousands of Israelis to flee their homes in the north, and Israel has pledged to ensure their safe return.
Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah before drastically escalating its military operations over the last two months, seeking to push the terrorist army further away from the border with Lebanon.
The post Netanyahu Says Ready to Implement Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire, Biden Announces Truce to Begin Wednesday first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Islamic Group CAIR Ordered by Federal Judge to Reveal Funding Sources
CAIR officials give press conference on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been ordered by a US federal judge to reveal its funding sources, potentially opening up the controversial group, some of whose leadership had early connections with organizations linked to Hamas, to further scrutiny.
US Magistrate Judge David Schultz ordered CAIR to open its books following an unsuccessful attempt to countersue a former employee for defamation, the New York Post first reported on Monday night. Schultz asserted that information regarding the organization’s financial history and assets were within “scope of permissible discovery.”
CAIR originally filed a lawsuit against former chapter leader Lori Saroya, accusing the ex-employee of engaging in “defamation” against the organization by exposing its alleged ties to terrorist groups and funding by foreign governments. After CAIR eventually dropped its lawsuit in January 2022, Saroya slapped the organization with a lawsuit of her own, accusing the group of defaming her character.
Saroya’s lawyer, Jeffrey Robbins, told the Post that CAIR will be forced to “turn over evidence about everything from fundraising practices, such as having raised money from foreign sources and concealed it; whether it deceived donors; whether it mismanaged donor money; whether it retaliated against employees or threatened to retaliate against employees for raising concerns about sexual harassment or the like.”
Shultz, a Minnesota district judge, cited how the organization claimed that its former employee “falsely implied CAIR received funding from foreign governments and terrorists when she stated CAIR accepted ‘international funding through their Washington Trust Foundation.’”
The judge asserted that “discovery into these matters is proportionate to the needs of the case.”
CAIR has long been a controversial organization. In the 2000s, it was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves been embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said in a speech during the American Muslims for Palestine convention in Chicago last November. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
Awad was referring to the blockade that Israel and Egypt enforced on Gaza after Hamas took control of the Palestinian enclave in 2007, to prevent the terrorist group from importing weapons and other materials and equipment for attacks.
About a week later, the executive director of CAIR’s Los Angeles office, Hussam Ayloush, said that Israel “does not have the right” to defend itself from Palestinian violence. He added in his sermon at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City that for the Palestinians, “every single day” since the Jewish state’s establishment has been comparable to Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught.
The post US Islamic Group CAIR Ordered by Federal Judge to Reveal Funding Sources first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Massachusetts Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Kill Jews, Bomb Synagogues
A woman walks past the US Department of Justice Building, in Washington, DC, Dec. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Al Drago
The US Department of Justice has secured the conviction of a Massachusetts man who threatened to perpetrate mass killings of Jews, according to a new announcement by the agency.
Over several months, John Reardon, 59, called Jewish institutions across Massachusetts, proclaiming that he would kill Jewish men, women, and children in their houses of worship. His terroristic menacing included promises to plant bombs in synagogues in the cities of Sharon and Attleboro, as well as making 98 calls to the Israeli Consulate in Boston, a behavior which began on Oct. 7, 2023 and ended just days before his apprehension by law enforcement in January.
Reardon has declined to contest the federal government’s case against him and pled guilty on Monday to stalking, threatening “force” to obstruct religious freedom, and transmitting threats “in interstate commerce.” He faces up to 30 years in prison and $750,000 in fines.
“This defendant’s threats to bomb synagogues and kill Jewish children stoked fear in the hearts of congregants at a time when Jews are already facing a disturbing increase in threats,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “No person and no community in this country should have to live in fear of hate-fueled violence. The Justice Department is committed to using the full force of our investigative and prosecutorial authorities to root out these threats and ensure that all people are protected in the expression of their faith.”
FBI Boston Field Special Agent in Charge Jodi Cohen added, “When John Reardon threatened to kill members of the Jewish community and bomb places of worship, the FBI and our partners immediately mobilized. After all, you cannon call and threaten people with violent physical harm and not face repercussions. People of all races and faiths deserve to feel safe in their communities. With today’s guilty plea, John Reardon is now a convicted felon.”
Reardon’s conviction came amid a record surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes across the US following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.
Earlier this month, for example, law enforcement officials convicted a white supremacist who repeatedly vandalized a synagogue in Eugene, Oregon during spree of hate in 2023.
Motivated by antisemitism, Adam Edward Braun, 34, graffitied the Temple Beth Israel synagogue twice in September 2023, spraying “1377” for its resemblance to “1488,” a reference to Adolf Hitler and a white nationalist slogan. He came back several months later to vandalize the glazing of the synagogue’s entrance. However, he abandoned that activity after spotting a surveillance camera and opted to graffiti “white power” elsewhere on the grounds.
In addition to prison, Braun faces a maximum $100,000 fine, the total amount of which will be determined when he is sentenced in February by US District Court Judge Michael J. McShane. He has agreed to “pay restitution in full to the victim.”
In late September, federal prosecutors helped convict a gunman who shot two Jewish men as they exited a synagogue in Los Angeles.
Jaime Tran, 30 — an affiliate of the “Goyim Defense League” hate group — had gone on an antisemitic shooting spree in February 2023, attempting to murder two Jewish men in the Pico-Robertson section of Los Angeles. Prior to the crimes, Tran called Jews “primitive” and told a former classmate, “Someone is going to kill you, Jew” and “I want you dead, Jew.” According to the Justice Department, he even described himself as a “ticking time bomb,” broadcasting his murderous ideation to all who knew him.
Tran pled guilty in June to four charges the Justice Department described as “hate crimes with intent to kill” and “using, carrying, and discharging a firearm” in the commission of an act of violence. His sentencing of 35 years ensures that he will not again be free until the year 2059.
“After two years of spewing antisemitic vitriol, the defendant planned and carried out a two-day attack attempting to murder Jews leaving synagogue in Los Angeles,” Garland said at the time. “Vile acts of antisemitic hatred endanger the safety of individuals and entire communities, and allowing such crimes to go unchecked endangers the foundation of our democracy itself.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Massachusetts Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Kill Jews, Bomb Synagogues first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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