Trivia, Humor & Satire

Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic party presidential nomination received a huge boost with his big win in the South Carolina primary. Biden has a long history of support for Israel. At the 2013 AIPAC conference, Joe Biden spoke of his love for Israel and described the moment years earlier when he first realized that Israel mattered to him. As a child in 1948, he sat at his dinner table listening to his father speak about the debate over the establishment of a Jewish state, and it greatly impacted him. How did he describe what his father told him? [Mark D. Zimmerman]

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and his Israeli wife (singer and model Daniella Pick) just welcomed their first child. The couple have a home in the affluent Tel Aviv neighborhood of Ramat Aviv Gimel, and Tarantino, who plans to learn Hebrew, says that Israel is now his home. Tarantino recently won the Golden Globe award for Best Screenplay for the film Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and in his speech, he addressed his wife who was at home awaiting the birth of their child, saying, “todah, geveret,” meaning, “thank you, ma’am.” How did Tarantino and his wife spend Christmas/Chanukkah at their Israeli home this past December? [Mark D. Zimmerman]

Kirk Douglas died recently at the age of 103. Douglas, whose real name was Issur Danielovitch, made his film debut in 1946, and went on to perform and star in dozens of movies, in addition to writing, directing, and producing. He was nominated for and received numerous awards, including Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, Kennedy Center Honors, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award. After Douglas’s bar mitzvah, his synagogue offered to sponsor him to become a rabbi, but he declined, already knowing that he wanted to be an actor. Judaism was only a minimal part of his adult life until he was in a near-fatal helicopter crash, about which he later said “I came to believe that I was spared because I had never come to grips with what it means to be Jewish.” He did, however, make one reference to his religious observance during his acting career. What did he say?[Mark D. Zimmerman]