(Jewish Group) Jew in the City Launches Hollywood Bureau for Jewish Representation

[Behind the Aegis]

Jew in the City Launches Hollywood Bureau for Jewish Representation: ‘We Want to Be Seen as Individuals’

Through her organization Jew in the City (JITC), Allison Josephs has been advocating for accurate representations of the Jewish community in the media since 2007. She’s now opening an official Hollywood bureau to elevate JITC’s efforts, something Josephs said she would have done earlier, but she had no idea such a thing even existed until last year.

“We had been using social media, op-eds and relationships with reporters,” Josephs said, until she learned about other minority Hollywood bureaus created by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), NAACP and the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE). The bureau celebrated its launch on Monday, and Josephs said the scope of its efforts will go beyond just Orthodox stories, although those are often the “most egregious.”

“We started off really with the idea that this would be about Orthodox depictions, so we could get a seat at the table when our stories are being told,” said Josephs, who is an Orthodox Jew herself. “As we started talking about this, all of these non-Orthodox Hollywood writers and producers started contacting us secretly and saying, ‘We’re also not happy with our depictions. We’re also not happy how fellow Jews are depicting us, how some non-Jews are depicting us.’”

Currently, the bureau is still in its early stages, with no official Hollywood office or full-time staff yet. Josephs said JITC is currently in the process of organizing an official academic study to track Jewish representation, meeting with network executives at NBC and CBS and has plans to form writers labs and establish a network of creatives who will further the cause.

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