‘City’ girls on film

The much anticipated “Sex and the City” movie opens Friday, May 30. Most of the plot has been kept secret, but the trailers reveal that Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Mr. Big (Chris Noth) are finally going to marry, but their wedding doesn’t go off without hitches. Supporting Carrie is her gay WASP friend Stanford Blatch, played by straight Jewish actor Willie Garson. Meanwhile, Jew-by-choice Charlotte (Kristen Davis) and her Jewish hubby Harry (Evan Handler) are happy and have a cute Chinese adopted daughter — and now Charlotte might be pregnant. Miranda’s (Cynthia Nixon) husband has been unfaithful, and Samantha (Kim Catrall) is struggling to remain faithful to her actor beau.

Parker, 43, has been married to actor Matthew Broderick, 46, since 1997 and they have one child. Parker’s late father was Jewish as was Broderick’s late mother. Neither was raised in any faith and they consider themselves non-practicing, “cultural Jews.” (One of Parker’s sisters, however, became an Orthodox Jew.) Parker gave her only in-depth interview about her Jewish background to her friend, author Abigail Pogrebin. You can read the entire 2004 interview on the ABC news Web site. Just enter “Abigail Pogrebin” in the search engine and it’ll come up. By the way, Nixon recently told People magazine that she is raising her two sons in the Jewish faith of their father, English professor Danny Mozes. In 2003, Nixon left Mozes for a woman whom she’s still with.

Kosher cheesecake

Spring has sprung, the sap is rising and Maxim magazine (Playboy without nudity) is out with its annual Hot 100 list of “the most beautiful girls in the world.” Sure, it’s kind of cheesy to view cheesecake photos — but almost everybody does it, and I suspect that almost as many women as men check out the Maxim Web site to see who’s on the list.

The Hebrew hotties on this year’s list are all actresses. Here they are, followed by their Maxim ranking number: Mila Kunis (81), Amanda Bynes (46), Lake Bell (32), Rachel Bilson (28), Ashley Tisdale (10), Sarah Michelle Gellar (5) and Scarlett Johansson (2).

Tisdale’s surprisingly high ranking was probably helped by a recent nose job; she said she got it for “health reasons.” Tisdale, Bynes and Johansson have Jewish mothers, while Bell and Bilson have Jewish fathers. Kunis and Gellar have two Jewish parents.

Musical notes

Speaking of Johansson, she is just out with a CD of Tom Waits songs called “Anywhere I Lay My Head.” Critics haven’t been very kind, with most saying her not-too-strong voice is overwhelmed by the CD’s production.

On the other hand, Neil Diamond, the Jewish Elvis, is topping the charts with his new CD, “Home Before Dark,” a moving album of personal songs, sans glitz, produced by mega-talented Rick Rubin. In a recent interview with a Scottish newspaper, Diamond, 66, recalled his bar mitzvah, which he counts as his first “gig”:

“[My bar mitzvah] counts [as a gig]. But you don’t do it as a singer. It’s really a recitation of a prayer,” Diamond said. “I put my whole being into doing that song. Physically I moved the way I saw the elders of the synagogue move. You bow every time you say the word “Adonai” — which means God in Hebrew — and I didn’t know that. I saw them bowing as they went along so I bowed up and down for the whole song, the whole speech. But I looked forward to it and it was fun and I wasn’t nervous particularly. I’d say it was my first public performance.”

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