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Steve Guttenberg, and his very Jewish life, take the stage for a play adaptation of his memoir
(JTA) — Actor Steve Guttenberg has had the kind of career that put him in touch with nearly every trend in Hollywood. There were prestige films like “Diner” and “Cocoon” and the lighter but wildly successful fare like the first four movies in the “Police Academy” series. “Three Men and a Baby” was the biggest American box office hit of 1987; the 2004 Christmas movie “Single Santa Seeks Mrs. Claus” somehow spawned a sequel.
In short, it’s the kind of career that would inspire a juicy, dishy memoir, which it did when he wrote “The Guttenberg Bible” in 2012.
Now a brand new stage adaptation, “Tales From the Guttenberg Bible,” is playing through May 21 at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Guttenberg plays himself in the show, in which he explores his career, his Judaism and much more.
“As a tradition and as a culture, [Judaism’s] been a huge part,” said Guttenberg, who was born in Brooklyn in 1958 and raised in Massapequa, on Long Island. “My family didn’t observe Friday nights, but my father was kosher… I was bar mitzvahed, and then when I went out to California when I was 17, I found the temple to be a great respite for me, especially from the loneliness.”
For years, Guttenberg regularly attended the Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles, and later joined Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades.
The show features four actors playing 90 different characters, including the Jewish movie producers Allan Carr and Robert Evans, the voiceover actor Michael Bell (who is Guttenberg’s godfather), as well as Paul Reiser, Merv Griffin and Kevin Bacon. It covers Guttenberg’s life from age 17 — when he famously snuck onto the Paramount Pictures lot, set up an office and sometimes claimed to be the stepson of then-Paramount executive Michael Eisner — through his late 20s.
“It’s been such a great career, and I’ve really enjoyed it,” Guttenberg said. He said that Julian Schlossberg, the veteran producer of movies and theater, read the book and told him that he thought there was a play in it.
“So I started writing it into a play,” he said, and Schlossberg thought they should bring it to “a great regional theater.”
Guttenberg is not new to the stage, having made his Broadway debut in the early 1990s, and later appearing in “Relatively Speaking,” the Schlossberg-produced, one-act anthology that played in 2011 and 2012. Guttenberg appeared in the one-act play written by Woody Allen, while the other two were by Ethan Coen and Elaine May.
But the actor’s relationship with Schlossberg goes back much further. One of his first movie parts was in the 1978 thriller “The Boys from Brazil,” which was about a Jewish Nazi hunter (Laurence Olivier) tracking Nazis in South America. Schlossberg, hosting a radio show at the time, proclaimed Guttenberg a “talent,” on a broadcast that Guttenberg’s mother happened to hear, leading her to call in.
Schlossberg, author of a recent memoir about his own adventures in showbiz, described Guttenberg as a “nice Jewish boy” in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency earlier this year.
Although he was seen more recently on TV in “The Goldbergs,” “Party Down” and “Dancing with the Stars,” Guttenberg mostly stepped away from acting for about five years to care for his ailing father, who passed away last July. That, along with the pandemic, had put the play on the back burner.
When asked which of his movies he’s asked about the most, Guttenberg names “Short Circuit” (a 1986 sci-fi comedy) and “The Bedroom Window” (a 1987 thriller) in addition to “Three Men and a Baby,” “Police Academy” and “Cocoon.”
“‘Can’t Stop the Music’ gets a lot of play. And of course, ‘The Day After,’” he said, referring to Nancy Walker’s 1980 musical comedy and the groundbreaking 1983 TV movie about a nuclear apocalypse. Guttenberg said he was “lucky enough that I have five or six or seven old movies that people ask about.”
Guttenberg has warm memories of Leonard Nimoy, the Jewish actor and “Star Trek” icon who directed “Three Men and a Baby.”
“As a person, he was a ball of fire inside an iceberg,” Guttenberg said of Nimoy, who died in 2015. “Very stoic, but extremely warm and loving. The first time I met him, he asked if I had his mother’s stuffed cabbage… a terrific artist, an incredible acting teacher, a well-versed writer, photographer, and director.”
While “Police Academy” — about an inept bunch of cops — is a rare franchise from the 1980s that has never had any kind of remake or reboot, Guttenberg said that there have been about “10 scripts developed” over the years, including from such big names as Jordan Peele. He added that Taika Waititi, the Jewish director of “Jojo Rabbit,” is “developing one now, or thinking about it.”
Even though his acting took a back seat in recent years, Guttenberg noted that he enjoyed his run as a science teacher on “The Goldbergs.” The long-running, soon-to-conclude ABC series about a suburban Jewish family is set amongst the popular culture of the 1980s — so it has touched on several of his movies.
“I like [creator Adam F. Goldberg] a lot, and I think any time that we can give support to shows that have Jewish culture in them, that, as a Jewish person, you’ve got to lend your name to it, especially with all that’s going on,’” he said.
After the New Jersey run, Guttenberg will bring the show to Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre in August, and, he and the producers hope, other engagements beyond that.
“I think it’s a great play, and I think we’re gonna be able to play it all over the country and in different cities, and one day back in New York.”
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Jewish lawyer quits Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force over Tucker Carlson defense
A prominent Jewish lawyer has quit a national initiative to fight antisemitism over comments by the president of the Heritage Foundation defending Tucker Carlson’s decision to host the white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his popular streaming show.
Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, announced in a letter posted to social media on Sunday that he is quitting the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, convened by the Heritage Foundation, because of Kevin Roberts’ comments last week. The president of the Heritage Foundation both rejected calls to cut ties with Carlson and called conservatives criticizing him “a venomous coalition” within the Republican Party.
Goldfeder wrote that he had joined the national task force, launched in 2023, because he believed it would be nonpartisan, “transcend[ing] politics, ideology, and institutional affiliation.” Roberts’ defense of Carlson, he said, showed that it had departed from those values.
“Elevating him and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles, no less, is not the protection of free speech. It is a moral collapse disguised as courage,” wrote Goldfeder, who is also an Orthodox rabbi.
He continued, “It is especially painful that Heritage, an institution with a historic role in shaping conservative policy, would choose this moment to blur the line between worthwhile debate and the normalization of hate.”
The episode comes as Republicans are increasingly divided over how to respond to antisemitism on the right, which many within the party say is surging. Some, including Sen. Ted Cruz, say antisemitism must be forcefully rejected, but other leading Republicans have downplayed the issue or, like Roberts, framed the presence of antisemitic rhetoric as a side effect of free speech.
Goldfeder rejected that idea in his letter.
“Free speech protects the right to speak. It does not compel anyone to provide a megaphone for a Nazi,” he wrote. “Those of us who lead or advise efforts to combat antisemitism have a responsibility to draw that line clearly. If we fail to do so, and if we equivocate when hatred dresses itself in the language of populism, we betray both our mission and our values.”
Goldfeder is not the first Jewish voice on the right to break ties with the Heritage Foundation, a key architect of conservative policy, over Roberts’ comments. Rep. Randy Fine, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress, announced at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention in Las Vegas over the weekend that he would no longer allow Heritage staffers into his Capitol Hill offices and called on his colleagues to do the same.
Roberts’ video and the backlash has spurred open discord within an organization known for its unified conservative voice. The Free Press reported on Sunday that multiple people affiliated with Heritage had denounced the video on social media, and that Roberts’ chief of staff, seen as responsible for it, had been moved to another position.
Roberts responded to the backlash — and to goading by Fuentes — in a second social media statement late Friday that explicitly denounced Fuentes, citing specific comments in which Fuentes downplayed the Holocaust and called for the death penalty against Jews.
It did not mention Carlson, who is closer to the Republican Party’s mainstream and was the subject of protest at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention.
Rep. Randy Fine addresses the Republican Jewish Coalition’s national conference in Las Vegas, Nov. 1, 2025. (Joseph Strauss)
“Nick Fuentes’s antisemitism is not complicated, ironic, or misunderstood. It is explicit, dangerous, and demands our unified opposition as conservatives. Fuentes knows exactly what he is doing. He is fomenting Jew hatred, and his incitements are not only immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence,” Roberts wrote.
“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place,” he added. “Join us—not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail.”
The new statement earned praise from Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which has long criticized Fuentes and Carlson as elevating antisemitism on the right. The ADL, founded to fight on behalf of Jews facing discrimination a century ago, had criticized the Carlson interview and amplified news reports critical of Roberts’ video.
“Credit to @KevinRobertsTX for stepping forward today and issuing a clear, cogent takedown of the toxic antisemitism and venomous racism expressed by Fuentes,” Greenblatt tweeted. “It was clarifying and crucial to hear firsthand that @heritaghas zero tolerance for this kind of poison.”
For his part, Goldfeder said he believed Heritage was feeling pressure from the antisemitism task force, which is chaired by Jewish and Christian Zionist figures. He also left the door open to a return.
“I want to personally thank the leaders of the task force, many of whom have already spoken up and about the need for Heritage to course-correct before it is too late,” Goldfeder wrote in his resignation letter. “I hope that Heritage will listen and, someday, reclaim the clarity that once defined its best moments. And I look forward to working together again as soon as that day comes.”
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Remains of Omer Neutra, Israeli-American hostage killed on Oct. 7, are returned to Israel
(JTA) — Hamas has returned remains belonging to Omer Neutra, an Israeli-American who was killed while serving in the Israeli army on Oct. 7, 2023, to Israel.
Neutra was one of two Israeli-American soldiers killed that day, along with Itay Chen, whose bodies were still being held by Hamas in Gaza weeks after the start of a ceasefire under which the group was required to release all hostages. Twenty living hostages were released at the ceasefire’s start, but Hamas has released deceased hostages intermittently and with snafus that have tested the truce.
On Sunday, Hamas transferred remains that it said came from three deceased hostages, which if confirmed would reduce the number of Israeli hostages in Gaza to eight. Neutra was the first to be positively identified.
“With heavy hearts and a deep sense of relief — we share the news that, Captain Omer Neutra Z”L has finally been returned for burial in the land of Israel,” his family said in a statement.
Neutra, who was 21 when he was killed, was the son of Israeli parents who grew up on Long Island, where he attended Jewish day school and camp. Following graduation, he moved to Israel and enlisted in the military. He was serving as a tank commander on Oct. 7.
For more than a year, his parents labored under the possibility that he was alive. Orna and Ronen Neutra became prominent faces of the movement to free the hostages, speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2024 as well as at a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition and numerous other forums. They also spoke directly with both U.S. presidents during their son’s captivity, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, in an effort to free their son and the other hostages.
After the Israeli army announced in December 2024 that it had concluded that Neutra had been killed on Oct. 7, his school and Jewish community on Long Island held a memorial service for him, while his town of Plainview named both a street and park for him. But family members continued to lobby for the remaining hostages, to return those who remained alive and give those whose loved ones had been killed the closure they desperately sought.
“They will now be able to bury Omer with the dignity he deserves,” the family’s statement said. “Omer has returned to the land he loved and served. His parents’ and brother’s courage and resolve have touched the hearts of countless people around the world.”
The post Remains of Omer Neutra, Israeli-American hostage killed on Oct. 7, are returned to Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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A century before Mamdani, this Jewish socialist mayoral candidate divided NYC Jews
A socialist immigrant running for mayor on an anti-war, pro–working class platform divides New York’s Jews over whether his campaign, and potential victory, might stoke antisemitism.
The year isn’t 2025, and the man isn’t Zohran Mamdani. It’s 1917, and Jewish labor lawyer Morris Hillquit is running on the Socialist Party ticket.
While Hillquit fell well short of winning, he received more than 100,000 votes, or about 22% — over four times the Socialist tally four years earlier. He ran again in 1932, receiving about 12 percent of the vote.
Who was Hillquit, and how did his mayoral moment parallel the political currents shaping Mamdani’s rise today?
The economic parallels
Many aspects of Hillquit’s 1917 and 1932 mayoral platforms bear a striking resemblance to Mamdani’s today, according to Shelton Stromquist, emeritus professor of history at the University of Iowa and author of Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism.
Hillquit called for public ownership of the city’s transportation, and for the construction of affordable housing to replace substandard living arrangements. He also promised to bring down food prices, pledging to “put the milk profiteers out of business” by buying milk directly from farmers and selling it at cost.
Mamdani’s campaign has echoed many of those ideas, centering on affordability with proposals to make buses “fast and free,” freeze rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments, and create city-owned grocery stores.
And just as Mamdani has positioned his campaign as fighting big-money influence, Hillquit’s campaigns took on a populist tone.
“Too long have the people of New York been misruled for the benefit of bankers, franchise magnates, realty speculators, landlords, and other capitalists,” read a pamphlet distributed by the Socialist Party endorsing Morris Hillquit for mayor in 1932.
Both campaigns also drew on immigrant pride, according to Stromquist. Mamdani was born in Uganda; Hillquit in modern-day Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1869. Hillquit’s family immigrated to the U.S. in 1896, settling in a Lower East Side tenement. He dropped out of school to help support them, working in garment factories and later helping to start the United Hebrew Trades, a garment workers’ union.
Like Mamdani, “Hillquit’s campaign was singular in many ways, but at the same time, it was very much a part of a broader movement that had been growing and spreading,” Stromquist said.
Mamdani, for his part, cites Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — a fellow democratic socialist — as an inspiration. Sanders endorsed Mamdani and featured him on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, events that often draw tens of thousands of people and highlight other rising democratic socialists, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A recent poll shows socialism is more appealing to college students than capitalism.
Municipal socialism was also gaining traction in the early 20th century. In 1910, Jewish politician and journalist Victor Berger became the first socialist elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing a Milwaukee district. In 1913, socialists won a majority on Hamilton, Ohio’s city council and elected the mayor.
And while Hillquit lost the 1917 mayoral race, socialists still made gains in New York City that year: 10 state assemblymen, seven city aldermen, and one municipal judge were elected on the Socialist Party ticket. Of those 18 elected, 16 were Jewish.
A campaign that divided Jews
Mamdani’s positions on Israel have roiled Jews across the country, and he’s often had to defend himself against allegations of antisemitism for: refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada;” reiterating support for Palestinians in his statement on the Gaza ceasefire; vowing to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York; and saying he doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. He’s simultaneously built a coalition of Jews who support him.
During the 1917 mayoral election, opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I overshadowed economic concerns for many voters, according to Stromquist.
Hillquit, a pacifist, was a principal co-author of the Socialist Party’s resolution opposing U.S. entry into World War I, and he made peace a central plank of his campaign.
His stance drew fierce backlash. Opponents labeled him “a traitor and an agent of the Kaiser,” and the attacks quickly grew personal. A 1917 editorial in this publication, the Yiddish Forverts, noted that Hillquit’s “bitterest enemies wish to see him drown in the Rutger Street fountain, or hanged off a sloop on the East Side.”
Hillquit’s position split the Jewish community. Some feared antiwar sentiment would make Jews appear unpatriotic and fuel antisemitism, according to Gil Ribak, associate professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona and author of the paper “For Peace, Not Socialism”: The 1917 Mayoralty Campaign in New York City and Immigrant Jews in a Global Perspective.”
One newspaper editor wrote to his readers as “a Jew to Jews,” asking them if they wanted “to give a chance for our neighbors to say that we are not loyal enough to America?”
Even Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis weighed in, telling his colleagues at a private meeting of Zionist leadership in 1917, “I cannot help feeling myself that the pacifistic attitude of some Jews is a danger to all Jews, and some form of a pogrom would not be at all unlikely.”
Others dismissed such concerns as fearmongering and rejected the idea that Jews had to vote a certain way to prevent antisemitism. As Forward founding editor Abraham Cahan argued in this publication, “Well, if we are destined, heaven forbid, to have the antisemitic bear come at us, then let’s not give our vote to a corrupt gang.”
Ultimately, the attacks on Hillquit did not deter Jewish voters. Though he fell well short of winning office, according to Ribak, turnout for Hillquit was especially strong in Jewish neighborhoods with the socialist candidate winning more than 60 percent of the Jewish vote in some areas of the Lower East Side.
Chana Pollack contributed research. Jacob Kornbluh contributed writing.
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