Host Mark Oppenheimer and Tablet staffers Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leibovitz discuss this year’s European Maccabiah Games—a Jewish Olympics of sorts—which are being held this week in Berlin at the stadium Hitler built for the 1936 Olympics. They also sound off on Mike Huckabee’s ill-advised Holocaust analogy, and an investigation into academic rigor at New York City’s Orthodox yeshivas. Celebrity ghostwriter Hilary Liftin discusses her new novel, Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper, a tell-all written by a fictional Hollywood starlet swept away by an older Hollywood heartthrob involved in a strange cult. She doesn’t name names. Unorthodox’s gentile of the week is Simon Doonan--Barneys’ creative ambassador, writer, and man-about-town. He describes his lifelong affinity for the Jewish people, his Jewish wedding to celebrity ceramicist Jonathan Adler, and schools the hosts with his Yiddishisms. For more about Simon Doonan, check out his website
http://www.simondoonan.com/. Hilary Liftin’s novel Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper is available here
http://hilaryliftin.com/. Learn more about Unorthodox at
www.tabletmag.com/tag/unorthodox, and sign up for our weekly newsletter at
http://eepurl.com/bsZlGr. Let us know what you think of the podcast by emailing
Unorthodox@tabletmag.com.