Streisand goes home again
The PBS series “Great Performances” will air the concert film “Barbra Streisand: Back to Brooklyn” at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 29. In October 2012, Streisand kicked off a world tour in her native Brooklyn, her first concert there since becoming a star in the early 1960s. (The tour also included stops in San Jose and Tel Aviv.)
Streisand, 71, sang most of her big hits. Her songs were framed by video montages of her Brooklyn childhood and early career, along with images of the high school and yeshiva she attended. Streisand pleased locals by reworking a few lyrics, like rhyming “Brooklyn Docks” with “Lox.” Encore broadcasts will air through Dec. 4.
Bayer’s bar mitzvah boy
Vanessa Bayer, 32, joined “Saturday Night Live” four years ago and has emerged as a standout cast member with dead-on impressions of Miley Cyrus and Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as funny characters she has created, like Jacob the bar mitzvah boy. She recently spoke to Rolling Stone about Jacob’s origins:
“The [Cleveland suburb] I grew up in was at least 50 percent Jewish, so every weekend in the seventh grade, we went to bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s kind of based on that. A lot of my brother’s friends who have seen it think that the gestures I make are based on my brother, which is pretty funny and might be true. When I started doing standup in college, I just started doing that character. My first year on the show, one of the writers wrote me into a sketch where I played a bar mitzvah boy and I got to do it, which was so cool … but the whole thing started in my standup. I felt like I had seen that boy so much, and it’s so fun to play that little awkward boy who likes to tell dad-style jokes.”
Lincoln (and Obama) in the news
Earlier this month, conservative news outlets were ablaze with the news that President Obama had left out the words “under God” when he recited the Gettysburg Address for documentary maker Ken Burns. Some retracted their harsh words when they learned that the president, at Burns’ request, had recited the first draft of the address, which did not include the words “under God.”
Videos of prominent people reciting the address on Burns’ www.learntheaddress.org include all of the living U.S. presidents and a “minyan” of sorts: CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, 65; Civil War–era historian Eric Foner, 70; former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, 43; “Meet the Press” host David Gregory, 43; Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, 64; Peter J. Rubinstein, 79, the senior rabbi at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue; Jerry Seinfeld, 59; Steven Spielberg, 66; Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), 47; and NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg, 69. (Holzer’s very informative short essay, “Lincoln and the Jews,” can be found at www.tinyurl.com/kvbfpr3.)
Levine is sexiest
People magazine has named rock musician and “The Voice” coach Adam Levine, 34, its sexiest man alive for 2013. Levine identifies as Jewish but has been secular as an adult. He told a U.K. Jewish paper that he was raised with only a little Jewish religious observance and, in light of that, he declined his father’s offer of a bar mitzvah ceremony. He said he felt it was a serious ritual requiring a spiritual commitment for which he was not prepared. He thought it wrong that many of his peers had bar mitzvahs because they wanted a party and gifts.
Columnist Nate Bloom , an Oaklander, can be reached at [email protected].