Michelle Chamuel, 27, finished second in this season’s “The Voice,” which ended June 18. She was one of the three finalists in the competition on NBC. Even though she didn’t win, I think it’s very likely that Chamuel will go on to a high-profile, successful career. She has a great voice and an engaging stage presence. A cousin of Chamuel’s who lives in San Francisco contacted me after reading this column. She informed me that Chamuel’s father, Jacques, an engineer, and her mother, Joalie, a doctor, both are Egyptian-born Jews who moved to the States in the early ’60s. Virtually all of Egypt’s 80,000 Jews were forced to flee Egypt between 1948 and 1967.
In Egypt, I was told, Michelle’s parents were members of the Karaite Jewish community. Karaites are now quite a small wing of Judaism, but at one time their numbers were much larger. They embrace the Torah but reject the oral law and the Talmud. The only Karaite synagogue in the United States with its own dedicated facility is Congregation B’nai Israel in Daly City.
Not ‘Young Frankenstein’
“World War Z,” which opens on Friday, June 21, is based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Max Brooks, 41. The book was praised for raising the intellectual level of the zombie genre. Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks, 86, and the late Anne Bancroft. Max’s wife, Michelle Kholos Brooks, 45, is a former NPR producer who is now a playwright and novelist.
Brad Pitt stars in the movie as Gerry Lane, a former U.N. investigator who travels around the world trying to figure out how a plague of zombies arose and what can be done to stop them. Israel is an important stop — the Israeli government was the first to take the zombie threat seriously, evacuating the Palestinian territories and moving quickly to admit into Israel proper any uninfected Jew or Palestinian.
While in Jerusalem and elsewhere, Pitt’s character is guarded by a crack Israeli security guard played by Israeli actress Danielle Kertesz, 24. As the Times of Israel website reported, Kertesz was “plucked from relative obscurity” to play the role. She told Israeli TV that she liked Brad, Angelina and their kids very much. “[They were] normal kids who asked their dad things like, ‘How many zombies did you kill today?’ ”
Lefevre fever
Odds are you have seen Rachelle Lefevre, 34, in more than one role. The pretty red-headed actress played the evil vampire Victoria Sutherland in the first two “Twilight” films, and she played Paul Giamatti’s first wife in the 2010 movie “Barney’s Version,” based on the novel by the late Mordecai Richler. She’s been in several short-lived TV shows and has done a lot of guest roles.
Her latest film, “White House Down,” opens June 28. Channing Tatum stars as a Capitol policeman who wants to be a member of the president’s Secret Service detail. As he is taking his little girl on a White House tour, a paramilitary group launches an attack, and Tatum’s character gets a chance to show how tough he is. Lefevre plays Tatum’s ex-wife. Their daughter is played by Joey King, 13.
Lefevre also co-stars in the new, six-part CBS miniseries “Under the Dome,” which starts Monday, June 24 at 10 p.m. The sci-fi thriller is based on a Stephen King novel and is produced by Steven Spielberg, 66.
Lefevre, who was born and raised in Montreal, sang in Yiddish in “Fugitive Pieces,” a 2007 film about Holocaust survivors. In 2011, she told Venice magazine: “I’m Jewish and I lost my great-grandfather, who was shot down in a pogrom, and I lost great-grandparents in the Holocaust. When ‘Fugitive Pieces’ came along, it was just one of those things where I read it and I thought, ‘I have to be in this’ … My stepfather is a rabbi; I’m not a religious Jew, but I’m certainly well informed.”
Columnist Nate Bloom, an Oaklander, can be reached at [email protected].