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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.”
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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.
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Hamas Wants Guarantees of Israeli Troop Withdrawal Before Disarmament talks, sources say
The damaged Al-Shifa Hospital during the war in Gaza City, March 31, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has told mediators it will not discuss giving up arms without guarantees that Israel will fully quit Gaza as laid out in a disarmament plan from US President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” three sources told Reuters.
Hamas’ disarmament is a sticking point in talks to implement Trump’s plan for the Palestinian enclave and cement an October ceasefire that halted two years of full-blown war.
A Hamas delegation met with Egyptian, Qatari and Turkish mediators in Cairo on Wednesday and Thursday to give their initial response to a disarmament proposal presented to the group last month, two Egyptian sources and a Palestinian official said.
Hamas conveyed several demands and amendments to the board’s plan, including an end to Israeli violations, implementation of all provisions and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, the two Egyptian sources told Reuters.
Hamas accuses Israel of breaking the ceasefire with attacks that have killed hundreds in Gaza. Israel says its strikes are aimed at thwarting imminent attacks by militants.
The sources said Hamas also sought clarification about what it described as Israel’s continued expansion of areas under its control. Israel retained control of well over half of Gaza after the ceasefire.
The sources said Hamas does not want to discuss disarmament before those issues are addressed.
Two Hamas officials declined to comment on the content of the meetings. Israel’s government did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for the Board of Peace did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
BREAKTHROUGH UNLIKELY
Another source with direct knowledge of the Board of Peace’s thinking said that Hamas’ response meant that talks over the group laying down its arms were unlikely to immediately lead to a breakthrough. The source said Hamas was supposed to meet with mediators again next week.
The US may move forward with reconstruction absent Hamas disarmament, but only in areas under complete Israeli military control, the source said. Funding pledges important for reconstruction, many of which were from Gulf Arab states, were being held up during the Iran war, the source added.
The Palestinian official close to the talks said Hamas was unlikely to reject the plan out of hand but “it will not say yes until the remarks and demands of Palestinian factions are addressed.”
Israel says it will not agree to withdraw from Gaza unless Hamas is fully disarmed first.
Trump’s top Board of Peace envoy in the Middle East, Nickolay Mladenov, said in a social media post on Wednesday that all mediating parties had endorsed the plan.
“(The) international community has supported it, now is the time to agree to the framework for its implementation. For the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis, there is not time to lose,” Mladenov said in a post on X.
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Leo, the First US Pope, Emerges as Pointed Trump Critic
FILE PHOTO: Pope Leo XIV speaks to the media as he leaves the papal residence to head back to the Vatican, in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, March 31, 2026. REUTERS/Remo Casilli/File Photo
Pope Leo last May became the first US leader of the global Catholic Church, but for the initial 10 months of his tenure he mostly avoided comment about his home country and never once mentioned President Donald Trump publicly.
That era has come to an end.
In recent weeks the pope has emerged as a sharp critic of the Iran war. He named Trump, for the first time publicly, on Tuesday in a direct appeal urging the president to end the expanding conflict.
It is a significant shift in tone and approach that experts said indicated that the pope wanted to serve as a counterweight on the world stage to Trump and his foreign policy aims.
“I don’t think he wants the Vatican to be accused of being soft on Trumpism because he’s an American,” said Massimo Faggioli, an Italian academic who follows the Vatican closely.
Leo, known for choosing his words carefully, urged Trump to find an “off-ramp” to end the war, using an American colloquialism the president and administration officials would understand.
“When (Leo) speaks, he’s always careful,” said Faggioli, a professor at Trinity College Dublin. “I don’t think that was an accident.”
Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, a close ally of Leo, told Reuters the pope was taking up the mantle of a long line of pontiffs who have urged world leaders to turn away from war.
“What is different… is the voice of the messenger, for now Americans and the entire English-speaking world are hearing the message in an idiom familiar to them,” said the cardinal.
POPE SAYS GOD REJECTS PRAYERS OF WAR LEADERS
Two days before appealing to Trump directly, Leo said God rejected the prayers of leaders who start wars and have “hands full of blood,” in unusually forceful remarks for a Catholic pontiff.
Those comments were interpreted by conservative Catholic commentators as aimed at US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has invoked Christian language to justify the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran that initiated the war.
They also led to one of the Trump administration’s first direct responses to a comment by Leo.
“I don’t think there is anything wrong with our military leaders or with the president calling on the American people to pray for our service members,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, when asked about the pope’s remarks.
Marie Dennis, a former leader of the international Catholic peace movement Pax Christi, said Leo’s most recent comments and his direct appeal to Trump “reflect a heart broken by unrelenting violence.
“He is reaching out to all who are exhausted by this unrelenting violence and are hungry for courageous leadership,” she said.
POPE RAMPING UP CRITICISM FOR WEEKS
Leo had previously taken aim at Trump’s hardline immigration policies, questioning whether they were in line with the Church’s pro-life teachings. In those comments, which drew backlash from conservative Catholics, he refrained from naming Trump or any administration official directly.
The pope also carried out a major shake-up of US Catholic leadership in December, removing Cardinal Timothy Dolan as archbishop of New York. Dolan, seen as a leading conservative among the US bishops, was replaced by a relatively unknown cleric from Illinois, Archbishop Ronald Hicks.
Leo has been ramping up his criticism of the Iran war for weeks.
He said on March 13 that Christian political leaders who start wars should go to confession and assess whether they are following the teachings of Jesus. On March 23, Leo said military airstrikes were indiscriminate and should be banned.
Cardinal Michael Czerny, a senior Vatican official, said the pope’s voice would carry weight globally because “everyone can perceive that he speaks… for the common good, for all people and especially the vulnerable.”
“Pope Leo’s moral voice is credible, and the world wants desperately to believe that peace is possible,” said the cardinal.
Leo on Thursday began four days of Vatican events leading up to Easter Sunday when he will deliver a special blessing and message from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.
One of the most closely watched appointments on the Vatican’s calendar, the Easter speech is usually a time when the pope makes a major international appeal.
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In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026
The first hint that Reunion is an unusual kind of Holocaust film comes from a music cue.
An older man has traveled from New York City to Stuttgart, a trip that has clearly brought him immense psychological pain. His flashbacks to Nazi marches lead us to assume he lived in the German city during Adolf Hitler’s rise — but he doesn’t seem to know any German, opening every conversation by asking if the other party speaks English. Then he arrives at a warehouse, presumably to filter through belongings left to fester for decades after World War II, and begins a journey down a hallway that seems almost infinitely long.
As he walks the path back toward his past, the music marking his steps, composed by Philippe Sarde, is buoyant and lilting. The tune comes as a surprise. What’s this tripping sense of joy doing, following this man toward what we have every reason to assume is a museum of miseries?
Reunion, a 1989 film by director Jerry Schatzberg, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter based on a novel by Fred Uhlman, barely made a splash when it premiered in the United States, despite a largely positive European reception. Now, it’s being re-released, beginning with a two-week run at Manhattan’s Film Forum that opens this weekend. It’s almost a perfect Holocaust movie for our times — because it chronicles a moment much like our own, in which the gradual dissolution of society began to make itself known through the gradual dissolution of personal relationships. (Spoilers follow.)
The old man is Henry Strauss (Jason Robards) — who was once Hans (Christien Anholt), a lonely Jewish teenager at an elite all-boys Stuttgart school. The trip to Germany is his first since before the Holocaust. And the music, we quickly learn, is the soundtrack of what seems to have been the one great friendship of his life: it recurs at moments of particular meaning or joy during his brief, almost romantic engagement with an aristocratic boy called Count Konradin von Lohenburg (Samuel West).
The story of that adolescent friendship is the core of the film, an extended flashback to a time of great happiness as well as great peril, threaded through with that same uplifting melody.
Konradin is a bright, brave boy — ready to defend Hans to an antisemitic relative, or join his friend in striking back at Nazi youth who bully those without swastika armbands. But it’s also clear that he’s destined to get sucked into the Nazi machine: everything about his heritage, not to mention his prototypically Aryan looks, foreshadows that future. So from the first moment of his friendship with Hans, when the two connect over a shared love of collecting — with Konradin’s choice of companion clearly shocking a school in which Hans, as a Jew, resides somewhere far below the bottom of the social ladder — there’s a dominating sense of an invisible clock, counting down.
But oh, the halcyon days of this doomed duo.
They walk one another home from school, giggling in the age-old manner of teenagers for whom political upheavals are not yet real. They practice archery. They bicycle through the Black Forest, staying overnight at inns without the oppressive presence of their parents, whom both boys find embarrassing. (Konradin’s mother hates Jews, and Hans’ father is painfully enamored of Konradin’s elevated status.) When Konradin confesses that Hans is his first true friend, and Hans grins with quiet glee, it’s impossible not to hope that, somehow, they’ll stay this way — lovely, young and unchanged by the times in which they live.
For months, the Nazi threat only hovers around the edges of their relationship. Then it overtakes them. Rapid ruptures follow. And then it’s the 1980s, and Hans is back in Germany, seeking to figure out what happened to his old friend.
What prompts him to make the trip? There’s never a clear explanation. But it’s hinted that Hans has come to feel that he needs, at long last, some resolution to this passionate, formative relationship. He’s willing to risk his sense of self — the identity of the man who escaped to the U.S., and refused to ever speak a word of German again — to close that loop.
The sense that Hans’ whole life has turned on the events that marked his friendship with Konradin makes Reunion a profound watch, one that I suspect will be more effective for audiences in 2026 than it proved in 1989. Many of us have had once-close relationships begin to crack under the pressure of extreme polarization, and the insidious tensions of a political environment characterized by conspiratorial suspicion. Many of us love people we can no longer talk to, at least not freely.
It’s tempting to write these rifts off as personal. Reunion‘s terse message: don’t. A society doesn’t collapse all at once. It succumbs to hairline fractures; provoking a critical number of them is a strategy.
A Holocaust movie that spends so much of its runtime on a period of real contentment is an odd object. The break between its heroes comes late, meaning much of Reunion is a pleasure to watch. That is the point: under authoritarianism, life is still good until it’s not. Citizens have freedom, until they don’t. Friendship is trustworthy, until human weakness interferes. Liberal values are easy to hold onto, until you shake the demagogue’s hand.
But what makes Reunion most timely isn’t its somber portrayal of the connection between the minor tragedy of Hans and Konradin and the major one of World War II and the Holocaust. It’s that the film is hopeful.
To spoil the ending would be a shame. It is enough to know that Hans’ searching leads him to unexpected places, and while some are miserable and vicious, others are not. To let things stay broken, or assume that humans can’t change for good as well as for ill, is a choice. So is hearing and following the better music — the call to connect, and to resist being persuaded of something you know is wrong.
The post In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026 appeared first on The Forward.