Uncategorized
Meet the real-life rabbi in the synagogue scene of ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’
(JTA) — Rabbi Michael Wolk was nervous when he stepped foot onto his synagogue’s bimah in May 2021 — but not because his congregation was returning to in-person prayer after a pandemic pause.
The jitters were because he was about to debut as an actor, in a role for which he hadn’t auditioned: as the rabbi in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” which debuted in theaters on Friday.
Wolk was initially brought on as a consultant for the synagogue scene in the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s classic coming-of-age novel, published in 1970 — more than a decade before he was born. He was elevated to on-screen talent when the original actor for the role of Rabbi Kellerman left the project.
“They called me that night and said he doesn’t feel that he can do it — would I be willing to play the rabbi?” Wolk told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He said yes.
The story centers on a sixth-grader, Margaret (played by Abby Ryder Fortson), who has a Christian mother and Jewish father who have raised her in neither tradition. As part of Margaret’s grappling with her anxiety about growing up, she embarks on an effort to explore religion and visits a synagogue with her grandmother Sylvia, portrayed by Kathy Bates, who is pushing her to identify with Judaism.
Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret Simon in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” with Kathy Bates as Sylvia Simon, her Jewish grandmother. (Dana Hawley/LionsGate Publicity)
In the story, Margaret and her family live in New Jersey, but the filming took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Wolk has been the rabbi of Temple Israel, a Conservative synagogue, since 2020. (That year, the synagogue petitioned to have its name removed from a local memorial to Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy’s most prominent Jew.) A Long Island native, he came to the synagogue from a pulpit in Louisville, Kentucky.
The film’s producers asked Wolk to prepare what he referred to as a “sermonette” and to stand in the prayer leader’s traditional spot on the bimah in Temple Israel’s sanctuary, surrounded by stained glass. Some of his congregants sat in the pews as extras, which Wolk recalled as a breakthrough moment for Temple Israel, coming a year into the pandemic.
“It was my first time being in the room, being on the bimah with the people in the congregation,” he said. “Even little things like that moment of people responding ‘Shabbat shalom’ when I said it to them, there was something very moving about that.”
But the moment was hardly a typical Shabbat service. For one thing, it was a weekday. For another, Wolk was wearing a black robe, commonly worn by Conservative rabbis and cantors in the mid-20th century but not in fashion today. And his sermon was interrupted repeatedly.
Margaret, the main character in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” prays by herself as she searches for meaning in her life. (Screenshot from YouTube)
“It did not feel like I was leading a service at any given time because they would have me say ‘Shabbat shalom’ 100 times and have the people and the extras in the room respond ‘Shabbat Shalom’ over and over again,” Wolk said.
The synagogue scene, which is just a few minutes long, took 14 hours to film.
Besides the rabbi’s attire, there are a few differences between the American Jewish world of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” in the 1960s and 1970s and the one today. The film has a female cantor, which wouldn’t have been the case at the time the movie takes place. While the book and movie don’t specify which movement of Judaism the synagogue Margaret visits belongs to, women weren’t ordained in the Reform movement until 1972 and in the Conservative movement until 1985.
“I did point that out and they were interested in representation,” Wolk said. “And that doesn’t bother me that much, but I know that it’s historically inaccurate.”
There are some other continuity issues with the scene: The actors used the prayer books in Temple Israel’s sanctuary, which were only published in the last decade. While the congregation is well over a century old, its current building wasn’t constructed until 1992. And, Wolk confessed, he is wearing an Apple watch, though it is obscured by his robe.
But also, he said, norms around interfaith families like Margaret’s have changed over the decades. In the United States, Jews who married before 1970 married non-Jews 17% of the time, according to a 2013 population study; now, that number is well over 50%. But contrary to what some feared, many of those interfaith couples are raising their children at least in part with Judaism. Their synagogues have adjusted accordingly.
“At the point when the book was written, there was no expectation that an interfaith family would want to participate in the religious life and Jewish life of a synagogue,” Wolk said. “And we know that’s not true right now. We have any number of interfaith families who are active and involved in Temple Israel.”
—
The post Meet the real-life rabbi in the synagogue scene of ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
At Sundance, the AIDS crisis through the eyes of a bar mitzvah boy
If you were swept up by Aftersun when it debuted on the festival circuit three years ago, Israeli director Moshe Rosenthal’s new film Tell Me Everything may hit you immediately with a sense of deja vu.
It opens on thrashing bodies moving in slow motion in a dark club. Slowly, the strobe lights reveal a figure: a vision of a lost father, just out of reach to his adult child. The scene recalls, and could even be read as a quotation of Charlotte Wells’ semi-autobiographical portrait of a daughter and her tortured father on vacation at a Turkish resort in the 1990s.
While that sequence is very after Aftersun, Rosenthal’s film, in competition at Sundance, has its own merits and its own unwelcome glut of cliches. Tell Me Everything concerns the relationship of a son and a father, and where the source of the anguish of the father in Wells’ is never stated outright, here it’s made explicit.
A memory film split between the 1980s and 1990s, Rosenthal’s drama is told almost exclusively through the perspective of Boaz (Yair Mazor), introduced in the 1980s as a self-conscious soon-to-be bar mitzvah boy. One day, amid the confusion of the early AIDS crisis, Boaz sees his father Meir (Assi Cohen) with another man behind a stall at the pool showers.
Keeping the secret, Boaz grows paranoid about illness and insecure about his own masculinity. Where before he danced to Ilana Avital, voguing with the encouragement of his older sisters, he soon pivots to the edgier pop-rock of the Israeli band Mashina, punching the air with his sister’s mini weights. (He wraps the weights in black tape, he tells Meir, pointedly, using a slur for gay men, because they were pink.)
Teased in school for being small and coddled by the women in his family, not least his beautician mother Bella (Karen Tzur), when Boaz learns of Meir’s sexuality it awakens him to the ways he may fall short of the stereotypical Israeli swagger.
Rosenthal, who broke out four years ago with his debut feature Karaoke, has a deft touch for the period. Shooting in soft focus and working with a pastel palette, he evokes the haziness of the remembered past, half-understood even in the moment.
Tell Me Everything captures how kids process — in overheard snippets, glimpsed scenes — the adult world and the tactics of older siblings shielding a younger one from parental fights. (This family plays Scattergories when voices are raised in the hall.) It also gets at, a bit too strongly, the surrogate husband role often forced on a son by an unsatisfied and possessive mother.
Rosenthal sometimes overdoes it. He shows Boaz in bed, reading sensationalist newspaper headlines about AIDS by flashlight. His growing awareness of his father’s sexuality — and predicament — are shot like a horror film, a sarcoma lensed like a zombie bite. A later montage, showing the redesign of the home after Meir’s exit, is so on-the-nose it belongs in a different kind of ‘80s movie (one from the actual 1980s).
A cut to the late ‘90s, where Boaz (now played by Ido Tako) works at a gas station and nurses an ill-defined homophobia, brings a contrived closure that leaves an earlier plot point dangling.
But when the film works, as in a notable sequence set to Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” — Boaz and his sisters scramble to tape it off the car radio — it can be moving.
It won’t do for that song what Aftersun, a far quieter film, did for “Under Pressure” in the one moment it got loud, but the drama works as a time capsule. While today Israel is heralded as a gay mecca in the Middle East, the stigma the film hints at still exists with its own strain of toxic masculinity and machismo. (That Boaz’s army service doesn’t feature is notable, and could have made the film a richer text.)
Rosenthal has made a sensitive, if at times excessive, portrait of family life grounded in an uncertain past. That its story speaks to today is to be expected; that it might, at times, seem quaint or nostalgic is a sad truth of history.
Moshe Rosenthal’s Tell Me Everything debuts Jan. 25 at the Sundance Film Festival. More information can be found here.
The post At Sundance, the AIDS crisis through the eyes of a bar mitzvah boy appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
I’m a rabbi arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. The Book of Exodus shows us how this ends
On Friday, hours before Shabbat began, I was arrested with 96 other multifaith clergy members and Faith in Minnesota leaders while protesting ICE in Minneapolis.
“Who could have imagined such times as these?” we sang, in the words of local songmaker Sarina Partridge. “We will grieve through these times, and soon enough we’ll be grieving on the other side.”
We cannot keep on with business as usual when our federal government is engaged in escalating state terror right here, right now. To grieve through these times is not enough; we must also act.
In the bitter cold, thousands of Minnesotans gathered at that airport. Tens of thousands more marched downtown, and others simply stayed home in the largest work stoppage in this country in many decades, the Day of Truth and Freedom. Nearly one thousand interfaith clergy answered the call to come to Minnesota — as they did for the Civil Rights Movement call to march in Selma in 1965 — to join us in the fight.
Standing there among them, on erev shabbes in the cold, I thought about the Torah portion we would read the next morning in shul: parashat Bo, from the Book of Exodus.
In it, the darkness of the ninth plague that befell the Egyptians is described as something that the oppressors — the mitzrim, which I’ll translate as “the ones of narrowed sight” — could actually touch. It was so thick that it kept them isolated from each other, unable to move.
In contrast, the dwellings of those seeking liberation were full of light.
I imagined that palpable darkness not as a punishment, but as a reflection of reality. The oppressors were unwilling to see the humanity of their neighbors. But if they had been, they too could have found themselves in dwellings full of light, able to clearly perceive the richness and possibility of living in a multiethnic community.
So too with the federal oppressors here in Minnesota, and those who collude with them. They are so welcome to join us in the light of that recognition. We were there at the airport to invite them in.
Instead, they arrested nearly 100 of us, while we sang and prayed for the protection of our people in the languages of our diverse traditions. Doing this work in coalition builds the power we need to break through the oppression: Our differences make us stronger.
As a minister next to me chanted the Lord’s Prayer, and a clergy member close by meditated with closed eyes, I chimed in with “Ana Bekoach,” a kabbalistic prayer that is part of Friday night services, envisioning divine protection holding close all the people of this place.
At our airport, Signature Aviation is facilitating the internment of our fellow Minnesotans every day, adults and children alike, flying them to detention centers where they suffer in conditions that deny their humanity. ICE is even disappearing workers at that airport from the jobs they work every day, keeping all of us safe and supported as we travel.
The airport is supposed to encourage connection. Come join us in our city, it is supposed to say; come see the beauty of our communities. Come, with your eyes open, to join a dwelling of light. Instead, it has turned into a hub of darkness, and separation.
As Jews, so many aspects of our history are particularly resonant in this moment.
As ICE has engaged in a campaign of terror in our city since the start of the year, I have heard Jews in my community reflecting on their families’ experiences with state terror in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and under dictatorships in Latin America. We join neighbors, refugees and immigrants from around the world, who never thought those feelings of suffocating fear would again define their lives here in the United States.
Now that they are, our obligation is to resist.
I was moved to tears during a march last week, when I saw families in hiding peeking out from behind their attic blinds as we sang of our love for our immigrant neighbors. It reminded me of Jewish families reduced to hiding in Nazi Germany, and of those brave souls who tried to protect them.
When I was arrested, I felt my heart open to the clergy standing and kneeling together with me, and all those in our state who have stood up with courage and generosity throughout these weeks and months. I hoped that all those who would see or hear of our arrest would be motivated to join this work.
The safety of all marginalized communities in this country, our Jewish community included, depends on our efforts to protect our democratic practices, and one another. You can join us, in Minnesota, or wherever you are.
Call for ICE to get out of Minnesota. Their presence is endangering us all. Just yesterday, Alex Jeffrey Pretti — an ICU nurse, mountain bike enthusiast, dog lover and beloved community member — was shot and killed by federal agents while attempting to aid a fellow protester. Our government, rather than accept responsibility for the injustice of his death, and that of Renée Nicole Good, is already lying about who these upstanding Minnesotans were and what those agents did.
Learn from us and protect each other in your home communities. You can stand with Minnesota; we’ll stand with you too. Call your senators to demand that they deny ICE funding in an upcoming vote this week. Push for prosecution of ICE agents who kill our civilians. Together we will fight the plague of narrow sight, instead creating dwellings of warm light where we hold and honor the fullness of humanity of each and every one of us.
On Saturday night, Minnesotans gathered in candlelight vigils on street corners in our neighborhoods to mourn and remember Pretti. I was with hundreds of my students on campus. We imagined, together, all the vigil-goers, holding candles to decry Pretti’s death and honor his memory, as points of light, linked across Minnesota and the country, and around the world.
The stars came out just then, as if the universe was joining us in a vast web of care and light. We sang a song from Heidi Wilson: “Hold on, hold on, my dear ones, here comes the dawn.”
The post I’m a rabbi arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. The Book of Exodus shows us how this ends appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
US-Brokered Peace Talks Break Off Without Deal After Overnight Russian Bombardment of Ukraine
Some windows glow in a residential building left without heating and facing long power cuts after critical civil infrastructure was hit by recent Russian missile and drone strikes, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, January 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Alina Smutko
Ukraine and Russia ended a second day of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi on Saturday without a deal but with more talks expected next weekend, even as overnight Russian airstrikes knocked out power for over a million Ukrainians amid subzero winter cold.
Statements after the conclusion of the talks did not indicate that any agreements had been reached, but Moscow and Kyiv both said they were open to further dialogue.
“The central focus of the discussions was the possible parameters for ending the war,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X after the meeting.
More discussions were expected next Sunday in Abu Dhabi, said a US official who spoke to reporters immediately after the talks.
“We saw a lot of respect in the room between the parties because they were really looking to find solutions,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“We got to real granular detail and (we feel) that next Sunday will be, God willing, another meeting where we push this deal towards its final culmination.”
A UAE government spokesperson said there was face-to-face engagement between Ukraine and Russia — rare in the almost four-year-old war triggered by a full-scale Russian invasion — and negotiators tackled “outstanding elements” of Washington’s peace framework.
Looking beyond next week’s negotiations in Abu Dhabi, the US official voiced hopes for further talks, possibly in Moscow or Kyiv.
“Those sorts of meetings have to happen, in our view, before we get a bilateral between (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and Zelensky, or a trilateral with Putin, Zelensky and President Trump. But I don’t think we’re so far away from that,” the official said.
BOMBARDMENT OF UKRAINE BEFORE SECOND DAY OF TALKS
The bombardment of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and its second-largest city Kharkiv by hundreds of Russian drones and missiles prompted Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha – who was not at the talks – to accuse Putin of acting “cynically.”
“This barbaric attack once again proves that Putin’s place is not at (US President Donald Trump’s) Board of Peace, but in the dock of the special tribunal,” Sybiha wrote on X.
“His missiles hit not only our people, but also the negotiation table.”
Saturday was scheduled to be the final day of the talks, billed by Zelensky as the first trilateral meeting under the US-mediated peace process.
The UAE statement said the talks were conducted in a “constructive and positive atmosphere” and included discussions about confidence-building measures.
Kyiv is under mounting Trump administration pressure to make concessions to reach a deal to end Europe’s deadliest and most destructive conflict since World War Two.
US peace envoy Steve Witkoff said at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos this week that a lot of progress had been made in the talks and only one sticking point remained. However, Russian officials have sounded more skeptical.
RUSSIA WANTS ALL OF DONBAS
After Saturday’s talks, Zelensky said the US delegation had raised the issue of “potential formats for formalizing the parameters for ending the war, as well as the security conditions required to achieve this”.
The US official said the proposed security protocols were widely seen as “very, very strong.”
“The Ukrainians and many of the national security advisors of all the European countries have reviewed these security protocols. And to a person, and this includes NATO, including (NATO Secretary General) Mark Rutte, they have expressed the fact that they’ve never seen security protocols this robust,” the official said.
Ahead of the discussions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday Russia had not dropped its insistence on Ukraine yielding all of its eastern area of Donbas, the industrial heartland grouping the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Putin’s demand that Ukraine surrender the 20 percent it still holds of Donetsk – about 5,000 sq km (1,900 sq miles) – has proven a major stumbling block to any deal. Most countries recognize Donetsk as part of Ukraine. Putin says Donetsk is part of Russia’s “historical lands.”
Zelensky has ruled out giving up territory that Russia has not been able to capture in four years of grinding, attritional warfare against a much smaller foe. Polls show little appetite among Ukrainians for any territorial concessions.
Russia says it wants a diplomatic solution but will keep working to achieve its goals by military means as long as a negotiated solution remains elusive.
Umerov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said late on Friday that the first day of talks had addressed parameters for ending the war and the “further logic of the negotiation process.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine came under renewed Russian bombardment.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia had launched 375 drones and 21 missiles in the overnight salvo, which once again targeted energy infrastructure, knocking out power and heat for large parts of Kyiv, the capital. At least one person was killed and over 30 injured.
Before Saturday’s bombardment, Kyiv had already endured two mass overnight attacks since the New Year that cut electricity and heating to hundreds of residential buildings. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said on Saturday that 800,000 people in Kyiv – where temperatures were around -10 degrees Celsius – had been left without power after the latest Russian assault.
Zelensky said on Saturday Russia’s heavy overnight strikes showed that agreements on further air defense support made with Trump in Davos this week must be “fully implemented.”