🎬 HBO and an executive producer of Veep are turning the rise and fall of former Rep. George Santos into a movie. Santos, who lied about his career and background, including his Jewish heritage, was expelled from Congress last week. (Deadline)
📱 TikTok’s CEO is getting personally involved in efforts to address concerns that the app has fueled anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric since the start of the war, meeting in recent weeks with a number of prominent Jewish groups and leaders. (New York Times)
🕎 A Canadian city that decided not to display a menorah and nativity scene outside of its city hall in an attempt to “be neutral as far as religion is concerned” has reversed its decision after days of public outcry. (CBC)
🇦🇷 The first Jewish university in South America is set to open in Buenos Aires next year. The school will confer degrees in subjects including Jewish and religious studies, ethics and ancient manuscripts. (JTA)
📚 I’ll Be Home for Hanukkah is a book about a Jewish woman from a big city who finds herself living out a bizarre Hallmark Christmas-movie fantasy with a Jewish colleague when they get stuck in North Pole, Alaska, over the holiday. It’s one of the many Jewish romance novels discussed on a new podcast series. (JTA)
🕍 Hollywood rabbis say that in the two months since the war began, their congregants “are confronting new millennia-old questions about assimilation, antisemitism and the fraught notion of Jewish power itself.” (Hollywood Reporter)
Shiva calls ➤ Norman Lear, the sitcom king who gave TV a social conscience, died at 101. Our culture reporter writes that Lear imbued his work with a Jewish sense of tikkun olam … Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli public intellectual and columnist for Haaretz, died at 90.
