Profile: Ellen Michaels

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1347

Here's the album cover:

Thanks to Mark from New York for alerting us!

Profile: Shylock

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1346

Suggestions by Liza from Woodside, NY, and Tony from London. Also, a lot of suggestions to profile Al Pacino BECAUSE he played Shylock.

Profile: Mikhail Tal

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1345

Boris Gelfand, Jew, recently lost in the title match for the World Chess Championship in a tiebreaker... denying him a profile. So here's Tal instead.

Suggestion by Eyal from Israel.

Profile: Brian George

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1344

"Jerry Seinfeld is a bad man. A very, very bad man."

Suggestions by Shelley from Basking Ridge, NJ and Will from Virginia.

Profile: Rachel Ticotin

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1342

Rachel was married to David Caruso in the 80s...

Profile: Flavius Josephus

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1343

Here's a good Josephus simulator.

Thanks to Norman from Toronto for the terrific suggestion!

Profile: Matthew Weiner

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1341

Yakov is gonna get into profile numerology soon enough, so how about this:

Don Draper, profile #441

Jon Hamm, profile #641

Matthew Weiner, profile #1341

Coincidence.

Settling the Score: Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus... Profile #6! At the time we wrote Not a Jew, but gave him a 1 I point, just in case. Well, there is now a conclusion that he was Jewish!

Recently, a number of Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing.^[1]

So what does one make of this report that claims Columbus is the son of a Polish king???

Profile: Nora Ephron

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1340

Ephron, of course, was married to Carl Bernstein.

Profile: Hannibal

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1339

The Oedpial thing is not true... Promise!

Yet another excellent suggestion by Joe from Scranton.

Profile: Rumpelstiltskin

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1338

This profile led be to dig up the story to read to the three-year-old. As far as Grimm Brothers go, it's actually not that bad. Except the last sentence, when Rumpelstiltskin tears himself in half. Sorry for the spoiler.

Thanks to Tamy from Argentina for the terrific suggestion!

Jews in the News: NY Times asks, JONJ?

In a recent article, the NY Times asked the question whether Willy Loman, the titular character in Arthur Miller's "Death of the Salesman", was Jewish.

These are the sort of questions that defy provable answers. Miller himself changed his view of Willy over the decades, evolving from a fierce defense of his indeterminate identity to a perception of him as an untethered Jew. Literary critics, especially Jewish ones, have long argued the point among themselves. Leslie Fiedler dismissed Willy as the “crypto-Jewish” product of Miller’s “pseudo-universalizing,” while Julius Novick maintained that the Loman family’s “separation from the roots ... is what makes them so vulnerable to the false values that undo them.”

Profile: Eddy Hamel

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1337

For more about Hamel, read this. It's... beyond sad.

Profile: Charles Laufer

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1336

Charles Laufer was suggested by... absolutely no one. I guess our readers don't read Tiger Beat magazine?

Profile: Max Brooks

http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=1335

We already discussed Max's Jewishness in his mother's profile.