Columnist Nate Bloom , an Oaklander, can be reached at [email protected].

Oscar’s Jewish thespians

Here is a little Jewish background on the performers nominated for Oscars this year. The Oscars are on ABC on March 5.

Joaquin Phoenix is up for best actor for “Walk the Line,” the Johnny Cash biopic. Contrary to some reports, Phoenix’s Jewish mother didn’t grow up in an Orthodox home; her parents were not observant by the time she was born.

Phoenix grew up in a vagabond family, with little formal education. Like his late brother, River, he was a child actor. My very strong sense is that Phoenix’s ties to “Jewishness” are minimal.

Likewise, Jake Gyllenhaal, nominated for best supporting actor for “Brokeback Mountain,” has a Jewish mother — screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal (her first husband was famous Jewish historian Eric Foner). Gyllenhaal grew up in an intellectual secular home where social liberalism substituted for religion, and he had a secular bar mitzvah at 13.

Rachel Weisz, up for best supporting actress for “The Constant Gardener,” has an honors degree from the University of Cambridge and is nobody’s fool. Weisz’s Jewish father fled Hungary for Britain in the 1930s. While her mother is sometimes described as Jewish, the actress told a reporter I know that only her father is Jewish. Her mother is a Catholic by birth and left Nazi-occupied Austria for Britain in 1939.

The actress (who is engaged to Jewish director Darren Aronofsky) “unloaded” in 2002 to an English Jewish journalist. Weisz spoke about how she was advised to change her last name to make it in Hollywood — that Jewish film execs prefer Aryan-looking types for acting jobs and see Jewish women like her as wives.

‘Lost’ Hebrew

I get asked whether there are any Jews in the cast of the ABC hit show “Lost.” The only one I’m sure of is actress Mira Furlan, who has co-starred sporadically as Rosseau, the half-mad French scientist. Furlan appeared in the Feb. 15 episode and will appear in the next episode, airing Wednesday, March 1.

Furlan, a Croatian Jew, was so respected in her homeland that she was once known as the “Meryl Streep of Yugoslavia.” But she had to flee the ruinous civil war that engulfed the former Yugoslavia (she received death threats for refusing to align with one side or the other, and her husband is a Serb). She has returned to Croatia a couple of times since the fighting ended, but considers herself an American.