the seen
Compiled from JTA reports
A large group of Jewish celebrities participate in “Recipe for Change: Standing Up to Antisemitism.”
Idina Menzel, Ilana Glazer, Rachel Bloom and
Several Others Participate in Antisemitism Show
It’s fun and exciting when our favorite celebrities
regale us with the minutiae of their lives. What color
were the balloon arches at Jenny Slate’s bat mitz-
vah? How does Morgan Spector react to being the
object of the internet’s thirst?
But when our favorite celebrities speak out on
issues that matter, that’s a special kind of heartening.

In “Recipe for Change: Standing Up to
Antisemitism,” a YouTube special released last
Thursday produced by The SpringHill Co., a
whole cohort of Jewish celebrities are doing just
that. Featuring (seriously, prepare yourself for this
star-studded list) Idina Menzel, Ilana Glazer, Rachel
Bloom, Skylar Astin, Michael Twitty, Hannah
Einbinder, Alex Edelman, Tommy Dorfman, Josh
Peck, Hari Nef, Michael Zegen and more, “Recipe
for Change” brings together this group to discuss
the current global rise of antisemitism.

In the special, the celebs are divided into three
Shabbat dinners and are each given a scroll. As
they dine on delicious looking Black and Middle
Eastern-inspired Jewish food, they open their
scrolls to discuss the tough questions they pose
like, “Have you ever experienced antisemitism?”
and “Could the Holocaust happen again?”
For “Mrs. Maisel” actor Michael Zegen, the latter
question prompted memories of intergenerational
trauma. “My grandparents on my mother’s side
were Holocaust survivors,” he remembered. “My
4 APRIL 21, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
grandfather essentially lost his whole family. His
father was shot on the way to the trains because
he had a club foot and couldn’t keep up. So they
shot him.”
But the dinner conversations aren’t about only
antisemitism. Rather, some of the scrolls focus on
Jewish joy, asking, “What makes you proud to be
Jewish?” and, “Tell me you’re Jewish without telling
me you’re Jewish.” Other scrolls prompt discus-
sions about Jewish identity, like whether Jews of
European descent are white.

In a moment of perfectly blended humor and
a confession of Jewish assimilation, Idina Menzel
revealed, “I have to come clean, so my real spell-
ing of my name is M-E-N-T-Z-E-L. Which everyone
would say ‘Ment-zel’ and I had a lot of self-hatred
about that for some reason. And then [I] wanted this
cool sounding [name], so I took the ‘t’ out, which
didn’t help anybody say it right.”
“Recipe for Change” also succeeds in its rad-
ical inclusivity. Instead of just focusing on what
Jewishness and antisemitism mean to cisgender,
straight, Ashkenazi Jewish men, the special very
purposefully makes room for the voices of Black
Jews, Mizrahi Jews, LGBTQ+ Jews and Jewish
women. What results are conversations that are as
thoughtful and poignant as they are full of laughter
and Jewish pride.

— Evelyn Frick
Jewish actor
Liev Schreiber
will play Anne
Frank’s father
Otto in a new
Disney+ limited
series, the lat-
est dramatiza-
tion of the Frank
family’s harrow-
ing life in hiding
from the Nazis.

The eight-epi- Liev Schreiber at the screening
sode miniseries, of Wes Anderson’s “Isle of
Dogs,” on March 20, 2018.

“A Small Light,”
is being produced by the National Geographic
Channel, which is owned by Disney. It will
follow Miep Gies, Otto’s non-Jewish Dutch
employee, who along with her husband Jan
hid the Frank family in her secret annex for two
years to evade the Nazi authorities. Following
the family’s discovery and deportation to the
concentration camps, Gies also discovered
and preserved Anne’s diary for Otto, the fami-
ly’s sole survivor, to publish after the war.

Gies is often referred to as the Frank family’s
“protector” — the series title comes from a
quote attributed to her late in life.

Bel Powley, who like Schreiber has a Jewish
mother, will star as Gies, who died in 2010 at
the age of 100. Powley’s breakout role was as
the star of a very diff erent “Diary”: “The Diary
of a Teenage Girl,” a sexually frank coming-of-
age drama from 2015. British actor Joe Cole,
who appeared in the Netfl ix drama series
“Peaky Binders,” will play Jan.

Schreiber, who played a growly Hollywood
fi xer on the long-running Showtime series “Ray
Donovan,” has appeared in Holocaust proj-
ects before. He co-starred in the 2008 thriller
“Defi ance,” about three Jewish brothers who
formed a guerrilla group to fi ght the Nazis, and
he had a supporting role as a boxer in the 1999
concentration camp drama “Jakob the Liar.”
“A Small Light” is set to begin shooting this
summer in Amsterdam and Prague. It is far
from the only Anne Frank project in recent
years: “My Best Friend Anne Frank,” a Dutch
fi lm about Hannah Goslar, another fi gure in the
Franks’ orbit, premiered on Netfl ix earlier this
year, and a controversial new animated adap-
tation of Frank’s diary premiered last year at
the Cannes Film Festival from Israeli director
Ari Folman.

— Andrew Lapin
“Recipe for Change”: Courtesy of SpringHill Company via JTA; Liev Schreiber 20190320 by Sachyn Mital is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 (creati vecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)
Liev Schreiber Will Play
Anne Frank’s Father in
New Disney+ Series