In the movie ‘Kicking Out Shoshana,’ a popular athlete pretends to be gay. The result is both funny and surprisingly meaningful.
By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine
It’s
been an eventful summer for Beitar Jerusalem. In June, after several
young Israelis brutally murdered an Arab teenager in retaliation for the
kidnapping and killing of three Jewish youths, police sources suggested
that the killers were members of La Familia, a small group of several
thousand fans of the iconic Israeli soccer club who are known for their
extreme right-wing views and their love of violence. Shortly thereafter,
when Israeli soldiers entered Gaza and peaceniks in Tel Aviv and
elsewhere took to the streets to demonstrate for peace, La Familia’s
minions, some wearing their favorite club’s jerseys, were caught on
camera confronting the demonstrators with their fists. And then, just as
Beitar seemed to be irredeemably affiliated with the actions of its
most vile followers, came Kicking Out Shoshana.The movie, a comedy released late last month, tells the story of Ami Shoshan, a star player for Bnei Jerusalem. The team is a thinly veiled version of Beitar, and Shoshan is a thinly veiled take on the prototypical Israeli baller, all machismo and chest hair and rogue charm. That charm gets him in the good graces of Mirit, played by the future Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot. But Mirit is a big-time gangster’s girl, and her boyfriend, armed and unamused, gives Shoshan a choice: Suffer a very painful removal of a key part of his anatomy, or convene a press conference and tell the entire world he is gay.
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When
Wayne Steinman and his partner Sal Lacullo brought four-month-old Hope
with them to High Holy Day services at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah
in New York's Greenwich Village, they opened the floodgates to
parenthood for New York City's gay and lesbian community. In 1987, as
part of the first gay couple to openly adopt a baby in the city,
Steinman recalled the reaction of friends in the congregation that day.
"It was a 'Wow!'" he said. No one really thought about having
grandchildren before," he said.
Although
I’m not a mother nor a daughter myself, I enjoyed Jordana Horn’s recent
review of “The Jewish Daughter Diaries” in her post, “Do Jewish Moms
Smother Their Kids With Too Much Love?” While some of the book’s
authors’ have their gripes with overbearing, meddlesome mothers, I’d
like to repeat Horn’s statement that you can never love a child too
much.