On this edition, we explore the lives of today’s Jewish Hollywood stars, the American Jewish icon that is the delicatessen, and Sephardic culture.

First up, Newhouse welcomes the author of Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish, Abigail Pogrebin, to the studio, to discuss the legacy that MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, the subject of Louis B. Mayer: King of Hollywood, left on today’s Jewish Hollywood celebrities.

Watch a clip from the interview:

Having interviewed everyone from Natalie Portman to Dustin Hoffman to Sarah Jessica Parker about what it’s like being Jewish in Hollywood, Pogrebin sees a generational shift in how “out” Jewish actors can be about their Judaism. While young starlet Natalie Portman, for example, has been very vocal about her Jewish and Israeli pride, Sarah Jessica Parker felt the need to downplay her Jewish heritage so as not to be typecast early in her career, Pogrebin reveals.

In her explorations of Jewish celebrities, Pogrebin found that on the whole they’re not a very religiously-observant bunch, but she also found that Jewish ritual could pop up in surprising places — like when Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” (Pogrebin’s former employer), who has been estranged from Jewish observance his entire adult life, admitted that he still says the Shema prayer before going to bed every night.

Finally, Pogrebin shares a revelation of her own. Newhouse asks Pogrebin whether interviewing all these Jews had any effect on her own relationship to Judaism, and finds out that, indeed, it made Pogrebin explore her own roots and become more observant — choosing to become a bat mitzvah at the age of 40!

Then, it’s out of the studio and onto the streets of New York City to explore the Jewish deli scene and the film Divine Food: 100 Years in the Kosher Delicatessen Trade.

Whereas the taste-tempting documentary features the midwest-based Oscherwitz family, TJC Movie Talk has access to the world’s most most famous New York-based kosher and kosher-style delis — Katz’s, the Carnegie Deli, Ben’s and the Second Avenue Deli — to find out what makes corned beef, pastrami and a kosher pickle so special.
Watch the segment “Try the Pastrami, It’s Divine” above.

Finally, it’s back to the studio where Newhouse examines the film Trees Cry For Rain with the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue’s Rabbi Marc D. Angel, who explains what makes the Sephardic tradition so unique.

Watch a clip from the interview:

Newhouse, who is also of Sephardic heritage, commiserates with Rabbi Angel about Ashkenazic Jews’ prevalent ignorance of Sephardic customs, like assuming that all Jews eat gefilte fish when Sephardim are much more likely to enjoy bourekas. Rabbi Angel reveals that, in fact, when he arrived as a student at Yeshiva University, he didn’t know what gefilte fish was, echoing the experience of Trees Cry For Rain protagonist Rachel Bortnick, who experienced culture shock upon arriving at American university, and finding a predominantly Ashkenazic Jewish community, after growing up speaking Ladino in Turkey.

While there’s much said about Yiddish being a dying language, Newhouse points out that Ladino — Judeo-Spanish — is the real tragedy. While Yiddish is still spoken in hasidic communities, almost no one speaks Ladino anymore.

Rabbi Angel agrees, admitting that some aspects of Sephardic tradition and culture are dying, and explaining that that is what led him to write his book, Foundations of Sephardic Spirituality: The Inner Life of Jews of the Ottoman Empire. Because even if certain traditions are no longer practiced, remembering them and the unique Sephardic Jewish outlook on life that is based on those old traditions, is important for both contemporary Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews.