Currently Browsing: Vincent Brook 6 articles
All About Eva
In this exclusive extract from his new book, All About Eva: A Holocaust-Related Memoir, with a Hollywood Twist, Vincent Brook reminisces about his German Jewish parents’ experiences in Nazi Germany and their early years as refugees in Los Angeles, where Vincent’s mother, Eva, had an extramarital affair with famed Polish Jewish actor Alexander Granach. When […]
Up Schitt’s Creek
Schitt’s Creek may not be The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, says Vince Brook, but It Is Marvellous and Very, Very Jewish! Let’s start with Eugene and Dan Levy, co-creators of the hugely popular, Emmy-monopolizing CBC sitcom Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020). This actual Jewish father and son team also co-star in the series as the fictionally Jewish Johnny […]
Citizen Mankiewicz’s Hyper-Jewishness
Vincent Brook reviews David Fincher’s biopic Mank. Commenting on the cast of Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), film historian Patricia Erens observed, ‘The rolling credits probably contain the largest list of Jewish names in film history, apart from the Yiddish cinema of the 1930s’. David Fincher’s Mank (2020), about Herman ‘Mank’ Mankiewicz’s writing contribution to Citizen Kane, may not compete with Allen’s film in the number of Jewish actors (Mank himself is played by […]
Jew vs. Jew
Vincent Brook offers another perspective on The Trial of the Chicago 7. Jewish writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s reputation as one of America’s most unflinchingly leftist filmmakers/television creators was secure well before The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), as was his penchant for interweaving his work with Jewish themes and characters. With his period docudrama about […]
Is She or Isn’t She . . . Jewish?: ‘The Queen’s Gambit’
Vincent Brook reviews new Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit. SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains major reveals! We all know about Bobby Fischer, the paranoid, self-hating Jewish chess wiz featured in two American movies (Meeting Bobby Fischer, 1993; Pawn Sacrifice, 2015). Fischer became U.S. champion at fourteen and, marred by his antisemitic rantings, defeated the […]
A Jew Wave—and Proud of It!
Vincent Brook celebrates the wave of Jewish films that sparked and characterized New Hollywood of the late sixties and early seventies. That Jews ‘invented’ Hollywood is old news and was long before Neal Gabler’s classic 1989 text An Empire of Their Own made it kosher to say so. We Heebs had been running the major […]