Nadene Goldfoot
"Based on Leon Uris' novel, this historical epic provides a dramatic backstory to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, in the aftermath of World War II. Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman), a passionate member of the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah, attempts to transport 600 Jewish refugees on a dangerous voyage from Cyprus to Palestine on a ship named the Exodus. He faces obstruction from British forces, who will not grant the ship passage to its destination." This is based on truth. It happened enough times. The British let in Arabs on land reserved for the Jews, but kept out the Jews!
Some of our famous Jewish stars have taken a dim view of their heritage. Paul Newman was one. He even joined a Unitarian Church in Westport, Connecticut, where he lived. The sore point is that only a hundred yards away from Temple Israel. Why didn't he attend this Reform Jewish group? Was he hiding the fact that his father was Jewish of Cleveland, Ohio? He was the main character in Exodus in 1960! The fact is that since his mother was a Christian and evidently didn't convert to Judaism, Paul probably wasn't raised Jewish. Today, lots of people whose mothers were not Jewish do identify as being Jewish. Many do not, just as many people today deny all religions. After high school he served in the navy until 1946. After graduating from Kenyon College, Newman spent a year at the Yale Drama School and then went to , where he attended the Actors Studio.
Hedy Lamarr: Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (née Lichtwitz) and Emil Kiesler. Her father, Emil, was born to a Galician-Jewish family in Lemberg in the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was, in the 1920s, deputy director of Wiener Bankverein, and in the end of his life a director at the united Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time. What fears struck her to resort to converting to Christianity and raising her daughter as such?
Fanny Brice was known to be Jewish just by the part she played as Baby Snooks. Fania Borach (October 29, 1891 – May 29, 1951), known professionally as Fanny Brice or Fannie Brice, was an American comedienne, illustrated song model, singer, and theater and film actress who made many stage, radio, and film appearances. She is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show. Fania Borach was born in Manhattan, New York City, United States, the third child of Rose (née Stern; 1867–1941), a Jewish Hungarian woman who immigrated to the US at age 10, and Alsatian (part of France) immigrant Charles Borach. The Borachs were saloon owners and had four children: Phillip, born in 1887; Carrie, born in 1889; Fania, born in 1891; and Louis, born in 1893. Under the name Lew Brice, her younger brother also became an entertainer and was the first husband of actress Mae Clarke.
Dinah Shore, famous singer, was born as Frances "Fanny" Rose Shore and was born on February 29, 1916, to Russian-Jewish immigrant shopkeepers, Anna (née Stein) and Solomon Shore, in Winchester, Tennessee. She died on February 24, 1994. This great singer had a typical Hollywood life. She married outside her faith and was buried that way, too, by cremation. Few people knew of her Jewish parents or her heritage.
Barbara Streisand was born on April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York City to Diana Ida (née Rosen; 1908–2002) and Emanuel Streisand. Her mother had been a soprano in her youth and considered a career in music, but later became a school secretary. Her father was a high-school teacher at the same school, where they first met. Streisand's family is Jewish. Her paternal grandparents emigrated from Galicia (modern-day Poland and Ukraine) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and her maternal grandparents from the Russian Empire, where her grandfather had been a cantor.
Barbara Walters was host of the NB-TV "Tonight Show" gave the audience a faint public recognition of her Jewish background. When she was on her own "Today" show, she may not have given an inkling of it. Barbara Jill Walters was born in Boston on September 25, 1929, the daughter of Dena (née Seletsky) and Lou Walters (born Louis Abraham Warmwater); her parents were children of Russian Jewish emigrants. Her paternal grandfather, Abraham Isaac Waremwasser, was born in the Polish city of Łódź and emigrated to England where he changed his surname to Warmwater. Walters' father was born in London in 1898 and moved to New York City with his father and two brothers on August 28, 1909. Lots of Jews upon entering America anglicized their surnames. Walters is a good example. The reasoning is the anti-Semitism they had met and the need to fit in. Below are Jessica Walter and Barry Newman.
Colombo's Peter Falk, Amy Prentiss's Jessica Walter in When the Chief of Detectives suddenly dies, the police officer with the most seniority (who happens to be a woman) becomes the new Chief, which doesn't go down well with all of the men of the Department. and Petrocellis Barry Newman-the attorney taking on a case in 1974-75 TV are all Jewish.
Tony Curtis was born Bernie Schwartz and was from the Bronx, portrayed a Jewish gangster, Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, at the Fifth Avenue Hospital corner of East 105th Street in Manhattan, New York City, the first of three boys born to Helen (née Klein) and Emanuel Schwartz. His parents were Hungarian-Jewish emigrants from Hungary: his father was born in Ópályi, near Mátészalka, and his mother was a native of Nagymihály (now Michalovce, Slovakia); she later said she arrived in the U.S. from Válykó (now Vaľkovo, Slovakia).He spoke only Hungarian until the age of six, delaying his schooling. His father was a tailor and the family lived in the back of the shop.
Bea Arthur playing in Maude; born Bernice Frankel was born on May 13, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York City, to Rebecca (née Pressner, born in Austria) and Philip Frankel (born in Poland). Arthur was raised in a Jewish home with her older sister Gertrude and younger sister Marian (1926–2014).
Dustin Hoffman, Dustin Lee Hoffman was born on August 8, 1937, in Los Angeles, California, the younger of two sons of Harry Hoffman (1908–1987) and Lillian (née Gold; 1909–1982). His father worked as a prop supervisor (set decorator) at Columbia Pictures before becoming a furniture salesman.
Hoffman was named after stage and silent screen actor Dustin Farnum. He has an elder brother Ronald, who is a lawyer and economist. Hoffman is Jewish, from an Ashkenazi Jewish family of immigrants from Kyiv, Ukraine (then a part of the Russian Empire), and Iași, Romania. The family's surname was spelled Гойхман (Goikhman) in the Russian Empire.
His upbringing was nonreligious, and he has said, "I don't have any memory of celebrating holidays growing up that were Jewish", and that he had "realized" he was Jewish at around the age of 10.
Red Buttons:, Red Buttons was born Aaron Chwatt on February 5, 1919, in Manhattan, New York City, to Jewish immigrants Sophie (née Baker) and Michael Chwatt. At 16 years old, Chwatt got a job as an entertaining bellhop at Ryan's Tavern in City Island, the Bronx, New York City. The combination of his red hair and the large, shiny buttons on the bellhop uniforms inspired orchestra leader Charles "Dinty" Moore to call him "Red Buttons", the name under which he would later perform. Buttons was an early member of the Synagogue for the Performing Arts, and at the time Rabbi Jerome Cutler was the rabbi. Buttons died of complications from cardiovascular disease on July 13, 2006, at age 87 at his home in Century City, Los Angeles. He had been ill for a while and was with family members when he died. His ashes were given to his family after cremation. Evidently he hadn't learned that cremation was not the Jewish
way, at least not for the past 3,500 years.
Richard "Dick"Samuel Benjamin, Benjamin was born in New York City, the son of Samuel Roger Benjamin (1910–1997), a garment industry worker. Benjamin's uncle was vaudeville comedian Joe Browning. His family was Jewish. Richard Benjamin was born Richard Samuel Benjamin, on May 22, 1938, in New York City, to Samuel Roger Benjamin, a businessman who worked in the garment industry. He attended the High School of Performing Arts and graduated from Northwestern University, where he was involved in many plays and studied in the Northwestern theater school. While there, he met Paula Prentiss, whom he married in 1961. He played in "Goodbye, Columbus", among many.
George Segal (George Segal was born on February 13, 1934 in New York City, New York, to Fannie Blanche (Bodkin) and George Segal Sr., a malt and hop agent. All of his grandparents were Russian Jewish.) immigrants, After a stint in the military, he made his bones as a stage actor before being cast in his first meaty film role in.Ship of Fools (1965) and King Rat (1965), he co-starred in the classic drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).
Walter Matthau:
Matthau was born Walter John Matthow on October 1, 1920, in New York City's Lower East Side. He had two brothers, one older and one younger. His mother, Rose (née Berolsky or Beransky), was a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant who worked in a garment sweatshop, and his father, Milton Matuschansky, was a Ukrainian-Jewish peddler and electrician, from Kyiv, Ukraine. They married in New York in 1917. As part of a lifelong love of practical jokes, Matthau created the rumors that his middle name was Foghorn and his last name was originally Matuschanskayasky (under which he is credited for a cameo role in the film Earthquake). As a young boy, Matthau attended a Jewish non-profit sleepaway camp, Tranquillity Camp, where he first began acting in the shows the camp would stage on Saturday nights. He also attended Surprise Lake Camp. His high school was Seward Park High School. He worked for a short time as a concession stand cashier in the Yiddish Theatre District.
Mike Wallace on TV: Wallace, whose family's surname was originally Wallik, was born on May 9, 1918, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He identified as a Jew and claimed it was his ethnicity (instead of religion) throughout his life. His father was a grocer and insurance broker. He even played a Jewish character. He was the host of CBS-TV's 60 Minutes and narrated a story about Syrian Jewry showing they were well off when the fact was the small and terrorized Jews were treated by barbarians. It was slanted reporting and the American Jewish Congress reacted with fury over it.
(Leonard Nimoy: Leonard Simon Nimoy was born on March 26, 1931, in an Irish section of West End of Boston, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrants from Iziaslav, Ukraine. His parents left Iziaslav separately, his father first walking over the border into Poland while his mother and grandmother were smuggled out of the Soviet Union in a horse-drawn wagon by hiding under bales of hay. They reunited after arriving in the United States. His mother, Dora (née Spinner; 1904–1987), was a homemaker, and his father, Max Nimoy (1901–1987), owned a barbershop in the Mattapan section of Boston. He had an elder brother, Melvin. He also had a cousin, Jeff Nimoy, a writer and actor.
William Shattner: Shatner was born on March 22, 1931, in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to a Conservative Jewish household. His parents were Ann (née Garmaise) and Joseph Shatner, a clothing manufacturer. He is the middle child of three siblings: he has an older sister, Joy Rutenberg (1928–) and a younger sister, Farla Cohen (1940–). His patrilineal family name was Schattner—it was his grandfather, Wolf Schattner, who anglicized it. All four of Shatner's grandparents were Jewish immigrants: they came from settlements that are currently in Ukraine and Lithuania, but which were then under the rule of Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire. of Startrek)
Robert Clary: Born in 1926 in Paris, France, Clary was the youngest of 14 children, 10 of whom died in the Holocaust. His parents, Baila and Moishe Widerman, were Polish Jewish immigrants. At age 12, he began a career singing professionally on a French radio station and also studied art in Paris. In 1942, because he was Jewish, he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Ottmuth, in Upper Silesia (now Otmęt, Poland). He was tattooed with the identification "A5714" on his left forearm. He was later sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.He is best known for his role as Corporal Louis LeBeau on the television sitcom Hogan's Heroes (1965–1971). He also had recurring roles on the soap operas Days of Our Lives (1972–1987), and The Bold and the Beautiful (1990–1992).
Ed Ames and entire Ames Brothers' clan, Ed Ames (born Edmund Dantes Urick; July 9, 1927), who also recorded as Eddie Ames, is an American singer and actor. Ames was born in Malden, Massachusetts, United States, to Jewish parents Sarah (Zaslavskaya) and David Urick (aka Eurich), who had emigrated from Ukraine. He was the youngest of nine children, five boys and four girls. Ames grew up in a poor household. He attended the Boston Latin School and was educated in classical and opera music, as well as literature. While still in high school, the brothers formed a quartet and often won competitions around the Boston area. Three of the brothers later formed the Amory Brothers quartet and went to New York City, where they were hired by bandleader Art Mooney. Playwright Abe Burrows helped the brothers along the way, suggesting the siblings change their group's name to the Ames Brothers.
Jeff Chandler (my hero),Jeff Chandler (born Ira Grossel; Yiddish: יראַ גראָססעל; December 15, 1918 – June 17, 1961) was an American actor, film producer, and singer, best remembered for playing Cochise in Broken Arrow (1950), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Chandler was born Ira Grossel to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, the only child of Anna (née Herman) and Phillip Grossel. He was raised by his mother after his parents separated when he was a child. Film historian David Shipman wrote this analysis of Chandler's image: Jeff Chandler looked as though he had been dreamed up by one of those artists who specialise in male physique studies, or a mite further up the artistic scale, he might have been plucked bodily from some modern mural on a biblical subject. For that he had the requisite Jewishness (of which he was very proud) – and he was not quite real. Above all, he was impossibly handsome. He would never have been lost in a crowd, with that big, square, sculpted 20th century face and his prematurely grey wavy hair. If the movies had not found him the advertising agencies would have done – and in fact, whenever you saw a still of him you looked at his wrist-watch or pipe before realising that he wasn't promoting something. In the coloured stills and on posters his studio always showed his hair as blue, heightening the unreality. His real name was Ira Grossel and his film-name was exactly right.
Kirk Douglas:Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch; December 9, 1916 – February 5, 2020) was an American actor and filmmaker; Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch (Belarusian: Іссур Даніелавіч, Russian: Иссур Даниелович, Yiddish: איסור דאַניעלאָוויטש) in Amsterdam, New York, on December 9, 1916, the son of Bryna "Bertha" (née Sanglel) and Herschel "Harry" Danielovitch. His parents were immigrants from Chavusy, Mogilev Governorate, in the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus), and the family spoke Yiddish at home. Douglas was the fourth child of seven children and the only son born to his parents. His sisters were: Pesha “Bessie”, Kaleh “Katherine”, Tamara “Mary”, Siffra “Frieda”, Haska “Ida”, and Rachel “Ruth”. Douglas embraced his Jewish heritage in his later years, after a near-fatal helicopter crash at the age of 74.His father's brother, who had immigrated earlier, used the surname Demsky, which Douglas's family adopted in the United States. Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky and legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the United States Navy during World War II.
Tony Martin: Alvin Morris (December 25, 1913 – July 27, 2012), known professionally as Tony Martin, was an American actor and popular singer in the 50s. Alvin Morris was born on December 25, 1913, in San Francisco, the son of Hattie (née Smith) and Edward Clarence Morris. His family was Jewish, and all of his grandparents had emigrated from Eastern Europe. He was raised in Oakland, California.At the age of ten, he received a saxophone as a gift from his grandmother. He went to Oakland High School and St Mary's College.
Suzanne Pleshette: Pleshette was born on January 31, 1937, in Brooklyn Heights, New York to Geraldine (née Kaplan) and Eugene Pleshette. Her parents were Jewish, the children of emigrants from Russia and Austria-Hungary. Her mother was a dancer and artist who performed under the stage name Geraldine Rivers. Her father was a stage manager of the Paramount Theater in Manhattan and of the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn, and later, a network executive.
Neil Sedaka: is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. Since his music career began in 1957, he has sold millions of records worldwide and has written or co-written over 500 songs for himself and other artists, collaborating mostly with lyricists Howard "Howie" Greenfield and Phil Cody. Sedaka was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Mordechai "Mac" Sedaka, was a taxi driver of Sephardi Jewish descent from Turkey. Sedaka's paternal grandparents came to the United States from Istanbul in 1910. Sedaka's mother, Eleanor (née Appel), was an Ashkenazi Jew of Polish and Russian descent. He grew up in Brighton Beach. His father's cousin, Rachel Gorman (née Cohen), daughter of Isaac Cohen and Calo Cohen (née Sedaca or Sedaka), was married to Morris Gorman (né Garmezano; paternal uncle to singer Eydie Gormé). Gormé's mother was of Lebanese Jewish descent.
Jan Murray: Murray was born in the Bronx borough of New York City to Jewish parents. His interest in comedy began during his childhood, when he would often act out comedy routines he had seen at the local theatre for his bedridden mother.
Soupy Sales (nee Milton Sills)Milton Supman was born in Franklinton, North Carolina, to Irving Supman and Sadie Berman. His father, a Jewish dry goods merchant, emigrated from Hungary in 1894. His was the only Jewish family in town; Sales joked that local Ku Klux Klan members bought the sheets used for their robes from his father's store. Sales got his nickname from his family. His older brothers had been nicknamed "Ham Bone" and "Chicken Bone". Milton was dubbed "Soup Bone", which was later shortened to "Soupy". When he became a disc jockey, he began using the stage name Soupy Hines. After he became established, it was decided that "Hines" was too close to the Heinz soup company, so he chose Sales, in part after vaudeville comedian Chic Sale.
Larry Storch: Lawrence Samuel Storch was born in New York City, the son of Alfred Storch, a cabdriver and broker and his wife, Sally Kupperman Storch, a telephone operator, jewelry store owner and rooming house operator on January 8, 1923. The Washington Post reported that he was born in The Bronx. The New York Times reported that he was born in Manhattan. The Wall Street Journal reported that he was born on the Upper West Side, His parents were observant Jews.
Howard Cossell:Sportscaster reporter: Cosell was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina to accountant Isidore Cohen and his wife Nellie (Rosenthal) Cohen; his parents were Jewish. He had an elder brother, Hilton (1914–1992). The grandson of a rabbi, he was raised in Brooklyn, New York City. The name of Cosell's grandfather was changed when he entered the United States; Howard Cosell said he changed his name from "Cohen" to "Cosell" while a law student as a way to honor his father and grandfather by reverting to a version of his family's original Polish name. And I'm not even finished listing. Pretty good for a people where Jews make up 0.02% of the world population or about 2% of the American population. This gives one a picture of what has happened to many Jewish families.
Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan (legally Robert Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter. Often regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture during a career spanning more than 60 years. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" (1963) and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (1964) became anthems for the civil rights and antiwar movements. His lyrics during this period incorporated a range of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture. Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew: שבתאי זיסל בן אברהם Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham) in St. Mary's Hospital on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Range west of Lake Superior. Dylan's paternal grandparents, Anna Kirghiz and Zigman Zimmerman, emigrated from Odesa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to the United States, following the pogroms against Jews of 1905. His maternal grandparents, Florence and Ben Stone, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in the United States in 1902. In his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan wrote that his paternal grandmother's family was originally from the Kağızman district of Kars Province in northeastern Turkey. Dylan's father Abram Zimmerman and his mother Beatrice "Beatty" Stone were part of a small, close-knit Jewish community, mostly conservative Jews. Louie Kemp, friend since childhood, wrote a book about him called DYLAN AND ME.
Resource:
Jewish Digest, December 1975, How Jewish are Jewish Movie and TV Stars? p. 56-61
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/paul-newman
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