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How this Jewish refugee became Times Square’s queen of porn
(New York Jewish Week) — “She was the most un-grandma person that anyone could have,” says David Bourla at the beginning of a film about his one-of-a-kind grandmother, Chelly Wilson. “Except for the fact that she was Jewish, we celebrated Christmas in a porn theater. It doesn’t get any weirder than that.”
So begins Valerie Kontakos’ documentary, “Queen of the Deuce,” which tells the unlikely story of how a tough-as-nails Jewish lesbian narrowly escaped the Holocaust in Greece and became the successful owner of several pornographic movie theaters in New York City in the the 1970s. The documentary, which premieres in New York on Friday, Nov. 11, is one of several Jewish films playing the documentary film festival DOC NYC, which runs this year from Nov. 9 through Nov. 27.
Born in 1908, Wilson grew up in a religious Sephardic family in Thessaloniki — also known as Salonika in Judeo-Spanish — and was ambitious from a young age. “She had this fierce desire to achieve something,” said Kontakos. “When she was younger, she wanted to be a doctor. But of course that wasn’t an option for her at that point, and given her circumstances, given the fact that she was a Jewish Sephardic woman in Salonika. She came from a very conservative community.”
Relying on a mix of archival footage, interviews and animated sequences, “Queen of the Deuce” is a wide-ranging look at Wilson’s improbable life: her various business ventures, her marriages to men and romances with women, the pain of the loss of her family and more. Central to the film are Wilson’s now-grown grandchildren, who describe their unconventional Jewish grandmother as tough and eccentric, with the confident body language of a mob boss. (Wilson, who died in 1994, appears in the film through home videos.)
As a young woman, Wilson left Athens just before the outbreak of World War II, narrowly escaping the devastating destruction of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community. According to Yad Vashem, out of the approximate 56,000 Jews who lived in Thessaloniki before the war, some 54,000 were killed in the Holocaust.
Wilson got her start in New York selling hot dogs and soda. She sent some of her earnings to Greece to buy newsreel footage and turned the footage into a film called “Greece on the March” — an effort to raise money in the U.S. for the Greek war effort against the Germans. When she played the film at a New York movie theater she met a Jewish film projectionist named Rex Wilson. Although they lacked a common language, he became her second husband.
“He was nice,” Wilson says of Rex in her husky, accented voice. “He provided me with cigarettes.”
(Her first husband, whom she divorced after having two children, Paulette and Dino, was the product of an arranged marriage in Greece. Wilson compares his kisses to “torture” in the film. Later in her life, after Wilson and her second husband split up, her preference for women became an open secret.)
From there, Wilson fell into the movie theater business — first “regular” movies, and then, by the late 1960s, sensing opportunity, she became the owner of several adult movie theaters. Many of them were located on 42nd Street, nicknamed “the Deuce,” which was New York’s infamously gritty red light district at the time.
“It’s unusual not to be surprised by something that she did,” said Kontakos, who first met Wilson in the early 1970s when, as a teenager, she worked at the Wilsons’ Tivoli Theatre on 8th Avenue. “It showed Greek films on Sundays, which were PG, completely family material. The rest of the week they would show porn.”
“Times Square [in the ‘70s] was like the underworld,” added Kontakos, whose family is Greek though not Jewish. “You had drugs there, prostitution, and then you had porn. It was really quite extreme.”
The Adonis Theater marquee, as seen in “Queen of the Deuce.” (Courtesy of the Wilson family)
Wilson was, by all accounts, an exceptionally tough character — she rarely smiled, and usually had a cigarette or a cigar in hand. She frequently held court reclining on the sofa of her living room — her Times Square apartment was above the Eros, a gay porn theater that opened in 1962 — with bags of cash in the corner. Wilson also owned the Adonis, an all-male adult theater so legendary for cruising that it became the locale for a meta, well-known 1978 gay porno film “A Night at the Adonis.”
In family footage shown in the film, she puffs a cigarette and tells stories in imperfect, Greek-accented English of how she smuggled her children to New York from Palestine and Greece. “I had Dino stolen from Israel, you know?” she says, reclining on her couch in a red silk robe. The story that unfolds is an improbable one, involving secret boat rides, misbehaving children and a chance encounter with a sympathetic official in Athens.
Similar to the fate of Thessaloniki’s Jews, most of Wilson’s family died in the Holocaust. But her shrewdness had saved Paulette: Before she departed for the United States in 1939, Wilson left her daughter in the care of a non-Jewish Greek family — with the specific instructions not to turn her over to her Jewish relatives, even if they came looking for her (which, of course, they did).
Still, Wilson kept her difficult past mostly hidden from her children and grandchildren. And in the film’s interviews, her offspring express the pain of their lost family and histories. They remember that Wilson refused to seek out reparations for her murdered family, saying it was blood money.
For Kontakos, it was important to tell this Holocaust story well, noting that the history the persecution of Greek Jews isn’t as well known as other European Jews. “I do feel it’s still not really discussed as openly as it should be,” she said.
Though Wilson may not have been the warm, nurturing type, she had a fierce dedication to her family, and her children and grandchildren reminisce in the film about her creative spirit and zest for life. Kontakos hopes audiences walk away from the film with a sense of “the joy of life, regardless of the hardships,” she said.
“Queen of the Deuce” is screening in New York on Friday, Nov. 11 and Saturday, Nov. 12 as part of the DOC NYC film festival, and will be available for online streaming Nov. 12 through Nov. 27. For details, click here.
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The post How this Jewish refugee became Times Square’s queen of porn appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI
As friends, relatives and even colleagues dive headlong into our AI future, I’ve been stuck nervously on the platform’s edge. I’m not a skeptic of technology by nature, but by experience. I’ve watched too many shiny new toys come along, promising to make society smarter or better connected, only to become superspreaders of confusion, alienation and disenfranchisement.
So when you tell me a machine can summarize any book, draw any picture or write any email, my first thought is going to be, What could possibly go wrong?
This, too, was the reaction of the Haredi rabbis who declared a communal fast over AI last month.
“If at the push of a button, I can get a hold of a d’var torah for my Shabbos meal from AI, to us, that’s a problem,” a Haredi leader told me at the time. “No, no — I want you to open the book and read it and come up with a question and come up with an answer. That’s part of what’s holy about learning Torah. It’s not just end result. It’s the process.”
Curious about their logic, I spent some time tracking down Lakewood’s gedolim to learn more. This was no straightforward task — I found it easier to get a hold of their wives than the great rabbis themselves. Even at dinner hour, these titans of Torah study were still in the beit midrash. But eventually I got through to three — thanks to my cousin Jeffrey, who knew a rav who knew a rav — and that was fortunate, because I came away with the Jewish skeleton key to our brave new world.
That key is the Jewish value of עֲמֵילוּת (ameilut), or toil. As far as Jewish values go, ameilut is an obscure one. It lacks the celebrity swagger of its better-known peers like chesed and tzedakah or the political power of tikkun olam. It was never associated with a biblical matriarch or carved into a golem’s forehead. Yet I believe it is just as crucial. Yes, toiling is a mitzvah. And in the age of AI, ameilut can be a human road map.
The word’s root appears a couple dozen times in the Hebrew Bible — unsurprisingly, it’s a recurring theme in Job — but its salience comes not from the Torah but from commentary on Leviticus 26:3, which establishes ameilut as a sacred endeavor. When God implores Israel to “walk with” the commandments, Rashi, an 11th century rabbi whose commentaries are considered authoritative, reinterpreted this to mean that God wants Jews to be ameilim b’torah — toiling in Torah study. He is reinterpreting God’s command that we walk and move forward to also mean that we should take time to stand still, turn over (and over) the same words to find new meaning and view getting stuck as a sign of progress.
For Haredim — who pronounce it ameilus — the notion that struggle can be its own reward underpins a life spent poring over sefarim in the beit midrash (and missing phone calls from the Jewish press). It follows that ChatGPT, which transforms knowledge from something developed to something consumed, is anathema to their approach. They’ve realized that making learning easy has actually made learning hard.
To be sure, the goals of the Haredi world are not exactly the same as mine. Those communities are famously insular, wary of the internet and especially cognizant of secular society’s pernicious influence. I’m basically the opposite: I love to mix it up (including with Haredi Jews) and am extremely online. A little narishkeit is good for the soul, as far as I can tell.
But I’ve found that ameilut-maxxing translates pretty well to non-religious life, too. It’s an imperative to embrace the challenge. As a notoriously limited chef, I’m now toiling in cookbooks; as a writer, I can cherish the blank page. Reframing the hard part as the good part, then, is a reminder that the toil is actually our divine right. Because ameilut is something AI can’t experience, replicate or understand. It is the very essence of what it means to be alive.
The post The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI appeared first on The Forward.
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Mistrial Declared in Case of Students Charged After Stanford Anti-Israel Protests
FILE PHOTO: A student attends an event at a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at Stanford University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Stanford, California U.S., April 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
A judge declared a mistrial on Friday in a case of five current and former Stanford University students related to the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests when demonstrators barricaded themselves inside the school president’s office.
Twelve protesters were initially charged last year with felony vandalism, according to prosecutors who said at least one suspect entered the building by breaking a window. Police arrested 13 people on June 5, 2024, in relation to the incident and the university said the building underwent “extensive” damage.
The case was tried in Santa Clara County Superior Court against five defendants charged with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass. The rest previously accepted plea deals or diversion programs.
The jury was deadlocked. It voted nine to three to convict on the felony charge of vandalism and eight to four to convict on the felony charge to trespass. Jurors failed to reach a verdict after deliberations.
The charges were among the most serious against participants in the 2024 pro-Palestinian protest movement on US colleges in which demonstrators demanded an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and Washington’s support for its ally along with a divestment of funds by their universities from companies supporting Israel.
Prosecutors in the case said the defendants engaged in unlawful property destruction.
“This case is about a group of people who destroyed someone else’s property and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. That is against the law,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement, adding he sought a new trial.
Anthony Brass, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told the New York Times his side was not defending lawlessness but “the concept of transparency and ethical investment.”
“This is a win for these young people of conscience and a win for free speech,” Brass said, adding “humanitarian activism has no place in a criminal courtroom.”
Protesters had renamed the building “Dr. Adnan’s Office” after Adnan Al-Bursh, a Palestinian doctor who died in an Israeli prison after months of detention.
Over 3,000 were arrested during the 2024 US pro-Palestinian protest movement, according to media tallies. Some students faced suspension, expulsion and degree revocation.
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Exclusive: FM Gideon Sa’ar to Represent Israel at 1st Board of Peace Meeting in Washington on Thursday
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar speaks next to High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas, and EU commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Suica as they hold a press conference on the day of an EU-Israel Association Council with European Union foreign ministers in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
i24 News – Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar will represent the country at the inaugural meeting of the Gaza Board of Peace in Washington on Thursday, i24NEWS learned on Saturday.
The arrangement was agreed upon following a request from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will not be able to attend.
Netanyahu pushed his Washington visit forward by a week, meeting with US President Donald Trump this week to discuss the Iran situation.
A U.N. Security Council resolution, adopted in mid-November, authorized the Board of Peace and countries working with it to establish an international stabilization force in Gaza and build on the ceasefire agreed in October under a Trump plan.
Under Trump’s Gaza plan, the board was meant to supervise Gaza’s temporary governance. Trump thereafter said the board, with him as chair, would be expanded to tackle global conflicts.