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Friday December 7, 2007

Celebrities

by nate bloom

Small-screen notes

ABC’s megahit “Dancing With the Stars” just ended its third season. Very recently, some Jewish details about two of the participants came to my attention. One is from the Bay Area. Professional dancer and all-around hunky guy Alec Mazo, who was paired with the winner of the show’s first season, is of Russian Jewish background. Mazo, a U.C. Berkeley graduate, runs a dance studio in San Francisco and has lived in the city for the past 15 years.

Pro dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy, 27, another good-looking guy from the former Soviet Union, was paired this season with ex-Spice Girl Melanie Brown. The couple finished second.

Chmerkovskiy expressed a wish to visit Israel to explore his heritage and told a fan via his Web site, “My mother is Christian and my father is Jewish (we are a confused family), so my brother and I got the best of both worlds. However, we live a life closer to that of a Jewish family.”

Beautiful actress Elizabeth Berkley, 35, has landed a plum recurring role as the ex-wife of series star David Caruso on the hit CBS series “CSI: Miami.” Her first episode will probably air 10 p.m. Monday, Dec. 10, but the writers’ strike may alter the schedule. In 2003, Berkley married Greg Lauren, the handsome nephew of designer Ralph Lauren, in a lavish Jewish wedding. Uncle Ralph created her wedding dress — the first one he ever designed.

Talmudic touring

The Los Angeles Jewish Federation invited a group of Hollywood producers and directors to tour Israel, and they stopped at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem for a bit of Talmud study late last month. Participants included Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), director Brad Silberling (“Lemony Snicket”) and Amy Pascal, co-chair of Sony Pictures. Every visitor got a Pardes student as a study partner.

Pardes Director Rabbi Daniel Landes, who led the learning, said, “The Hollywood group was attuned to both the dramatic and comedic elements of rabbinic stories. It was gratifying to see the dynamic interaction of the seasoned Pardes students with the creative energy brought by the new group. They had a ball.”

Chanukah listening

XM Radio, the subscription radio service, will offer a full menu of Chanukah programs through Dec. 16. It’s a terrific lineup featuring a variety of Chanukah and Jewish music, from classical to klezmer. Other content includes interviews with Broadway stars, comedy specials, and shows just for kids. Special guest hosts and performers include a lot of Jewish celebs. My friend Scott Benarde, author of “Stars of David: Rock ’n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories,” will have a daily program about famous Jewish rock ’n’ rollers — including a couple who are the children of Holocaust survivors. He’ll tell their back stories, play a lot of music and talk about the artists’ Jewish connections.

Subscribers can listen on XM Channel 108. You can also listen via the Internet, even if you are not a subscriber. Go to www.xmradio.com/hanukkah and sign up for a free trial that allows you to listen to all XM programming through Dec. 16. Enter the promotional code, dreidel. There’s a detailed schedule of all shows on the site.

Columnist Nate Bloom , an Oaklander, can be reached at middleoftheroad1@aol.com.

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