Weekly Kibbitz
In ‘You People,’ Jonah Hill’s a Jewish
Guy Who Finds Love With a Farrakhan
Follower’s Daughter
Were Jews the “OG slaves”? Can
American slavery be compared to the
Holocaust? And who gets the last word
on Louis Farrakhan?
These questions have spurred very
serious debates over time — and now
will be getting a raunchier take in the
new Netfl ix comedy “You People” that
begins streaming on Jan. 27.

Starring Jewish funnyman Jonah
Hill, who also co-wrote the script with
“Black-ish” creator Kenya Barris, the
fi lm stars a visibly tattooed Hill as Ezra,
a young Jewish man who falls in love
with Amira, a Black woman played
by “Without Remorse” actress Lauren
London. In a new trailer for the movie that
opens with a scene shot at the Skirball
Cultural Center, a Jewish institution
in Los Angeles, Hill’s Jewish parents,
played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and
David Duchovny, seem to immediately
bless the union after some awkward
comments about hair and rappers.

It’s Amira’s parents, Akbar and
Fatima (played by Eddie Murphy and
Nia Long), who prove a tougher sell —
particularly once Akbar, who says he
identifi es as “Muslim,” tells them he
is a follower of Nation of Islam leader
Louis Farrakhan, whose antisemitism
is longstanding and well known. If
Murphy’s character is following in the
long tradition of adopting zany antics
to try to prevent a marriage, it’s not
clear in the trailer, where he tells Ezra’s
mother that his hat was a gift from
Farrakhan. “Are you familiar with the minister’s
work?” Murphy asks Louis-Dreyfus.

“I’m familiar with what he said about
the Jews!” she replies.

Other awkward moments abound
in the trailer, including a dinner-table
argument about comparing slavery
David Duchovny as Arnold, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Shelley, Jonah Hill (writer/
producer) as Ezra, Lauren London as Amira, Eddie Murphy as Akbar and Nia
Long as Fatima in the new Netfl ix comedy “You People”
to the Holocaust. (“Our people came
here with nothing like everybody
else,” says Louis-Dreyfus’s character,
to cringes.) It’s all in a day’s work for
Barris, whose series of sitcoms are
known for prompting uncomfortable
conversations about race and culture,
and who — in the recent aftermath of
antisemitism controversies involving
Kanye West, Kyrie Irving and Dave
Chappelle — has found quite the
moment for a “Guess Who’s Coming
to Dinner”-style comedy about Black-
Jewish relations.

An earlier trailer for “You People,”
featuring only Hill and Murphy, had
made no references to the fi lm’s
Jewish content. The new trailer’s
density of Jewish jokes is sure to fuel
an ongoing debate over the “Jewface”
controversy and whether it’s appropriate
for non-Jewish actors to be cast as
Jewish characters.

And while Hill himself is Jewish
(the star recently petitioned to
drop his legal last name, Feldstein,
because he has never used it
professionally), his on-screen parents
are not. But Duchovny and Louis-
Dreyfus do have Jewish fathers, as
does London.

— Andrew Lapin
The zoo in Cologne, Germany, has
gotten its fi rst check from the $26
million gift promised by the widow of
a Holocaust survivor who credited the
city’s residents for saving him during
the war.

Marlar and baby Moma,
born in 2017
4 JANUARY 12, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
Elizabeth Reichert willed the funds
to the Cologne Zoological Garden in
2017 in honor of her husband Arnulf,
who died in 1998. Both Reicherts were
born in Cologne and met during World
War II, when Elizabeth was part of the
local anti-Nazi resistance network and
Arnulf, a German Jew, was in hiding
with the network’s help.

“They only survived the war in
Germany thanks to the help of
courageous people from Cologne, who
off ered hiding places to the Jew Arnulf
Reichert,” the zoo said in a statement in
German last week.

Though they moved to Israel and,
after fi ve years, America after the
war, Arnulf and Elizabeth maintained
aff ection to the city for the rest of their
lives. “We were born in Cologne, and we
remember forever Cologne,” Reichert
said in 2017.

In the United States, they settled in
New Jersey, where the couple started
and ran a successful pet wholesale
business. They never had children.

Reichert chose the zoo out of all
institutions in Cologne because of her
and Arnulf’s love of animals.

“Arnulf wanted to give the money
someplace where it would do good,”
Elizabeth Reichert said in 2017 when
she announced the planned gift.

“When you think about leaving money,
memories play a major role.”
Reichert died in February 2021 at the
age of 96, and it was not until recently
that her estate was settled and funds
could be disbursed. The zoo reported
that it had received the fi rst payment
from the trust, of more than $700,000
dollars, and said it expected annual
disbursals to top $1 million in the future.

The gift, a zoo offi cial said in 2017,
was unusual in Germany where large
philanthropic gifts are rare and would
be used to improve the zoo for animals
and visitors alike.

The zoo said it is planning to name
its South American section after Arnulf
Reichert. Reichert had been giving a monthly
donation of more than $7,000 since
announcing the gift. But her giving
to the zoo goes all the way back to
1954, when she and Arnulf donated a
soft-shelled turtle they brought from
the Jordan River to Germany by boat
on a nine-day journey, feeding it cold
cuts of meat along the way.

Cologne’s zoo is not the fi rst
in Europe to be associated with
Holocaust survivors. Zookeepers in
Warsaw sheltered 300 Jews from the
Nazis inside the zoo, in a dramatic
story that was the subject of a novel
and then a 2017 movie adaptation
called “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” starring
Jessica Chastain.

— David I. Klein
'You People': Parrish Lewis/Netfl ix; Zoo: Michael Kramer via Wikimedia Commons
German Zoo Gets $26 Million From Widow of Animal-Loving Holocaust Survivor