Hollywood actor to be honored for promoting Yiddish

Arutz Sheva ^ | 30/11/19 | Cnaan Liphshiz

[Eleutheria5]

Seth Rogen, a Jewish-American Hollywood actor and filmmaker who is studying Yiddish for a role, will be honored by a group devoted to promoting that language.

The Workmen’s Circle, a group whose mission is to strengthen Jewish identity based on social justice and Yiddish language, will honor Rogen, 37, in a ceremony Monday in Manhattan, the New Jersey Jewish News reported Wednesday.

“It’s something that’s always been just a very big part of my life,” the actor said of his Jewish identity in an interview with NJJN. “The first jokes I ever wrote were about it; it was a very inherent part of who I was.”

Rogen is studying Yiddish for his role in “American Pickle,” a film based on a short story by Simon Rich, in which the main character, Herschel Greenbaum, a Yiddish-speaker who immigrated in 1918 to the United States, emerges fully preserved from a pickle barrel a century later, to meet his great-grandson in Brooklyn.

Rogen, 37, and his father, Mark, who worked for the organization in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, will receive the Generation to Generation Activism award during the ceremony.

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[Eleutheria5]

The movie Fiddler on the Roof was my first direct contact with my Jewish roots, age 11. Chaim Topol played the role perfectly, imho. And now, an Orthodox Chabad Chassid myself, I appreciate it even more. It’s not 100% accurate, but Topol gives it a great deal of authenticity, a child of the ‘30s growing up in the British Mandate. I wrote a very good (imho) essay with him as Tevye as my starting point. I recommend Salah Shabati as another example of his work, this time as a Sephardic immigrant from Morocco with many similarities to Tevye.

[Eleutheria5]

I’m without TV, and have no idea. This is the first I heard there was such a thing as NCIS, or that Ziva was in it.