JustASC

This week in the New Jersey Jewish News:

• Leaders of interfaith dialogue call a newly revised Good Friday prayer “a step backward” for Jewish-Catholic relations.
• Four teens plead guilty to destroying gravestones at a Jewish cemetery in New Brunswick.
• Timesman Nicholas Kristof keynotes a conference on Darfur at Kean University.
• Ron Kaplan profiles Rob Edelman, a film scholar who writes about Jewish stereotypes in sports films:

“In a lot of the stereotypical [movie] portrayals, you might have a Jewish athlete, but he’s not really athletic,” said Edelman. “If he gets injured and can’t play in the important game, what does he care? It’s only athletics. So he’ll sit on the sideline and laugh and joke while the real hero, the real athlete comes in and takes his place and wins the game. Of course, any athlete who’s been training, if you get injured right before the big game, you’re going to be angry, disappointed. But if these characters are Jewish, they don’t take it very seriously.

“There was a 1930s film titled Hot Curves where you have a character named Goldberg who was playing for a professional team, and he was a jokester. You see him in spring training; balls are being hit to him and he’s ducking instead of catching the ball. Jewish characters are not supposed to be physical.”