Maggie Gyllenhaal stars

arts & entertainment

as Nessa Stein, the lead

character in The Honorable

Woman

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Sundance airs a miniseries — torn from Mideast headlines —
with a post-9/11 sensibility.

Greg Salisbury

Philadelphia Jewish Exponent

I

t's the kind of free publicity you either
dream of or have nightmares about:
The premiere of an eight-part minise-
ries dealing with the ever-shifting terrain
and loyalties of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict debuted on the Sundance Channel
on July 31 — vying for screen time with
the most recent outbreak of war in Gaza,
rocket attacks on Israel and anti-Semitic
displays from around the world.
Hugo Bfick, the writer/producer/director
of The Honorable Woman, says he wasn't
surprised by the conflation of real and fic-
tional events. He says he was aware of the
possibility of a third war in the area since
2009 when he was researching in Hebron
18 months ago.
"You know that it's never going away

ew s

— it's a cycle, although one could never
expect the prescience of the timing"
Set mostly in a post-9/11 world steeped
in espionage, dueling historical inter-
pretations and constantly morphing
relationships that firmly establish Blick, a
49-year-old Briton, as a worthy successor
to John Le Carre, the series compresses the
enormity of decades of conflict into one
woman's family.
Nessa Stein — played with protean skill
by Maggie Gyllenhaal — an Israeli-born
citizen of England who has just been
appointed to the House of Lords, also runs
the munitions company founded by her
father. A devout Zionist, he supplied arms
to Israel until he was murdered in front of
a young Nessa and her brother, Ephra.
As she tries to realize her dream of
providing high-speed data access to both
Israel and the Palestinian territories, her

I Nate Bloom
111 ■ Special to the Jewish News

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New TV Shows

The new fall TV season soon will be in
full swing. Here, we preview a couple
of the new offerings with Jewish stars.
Debra Messing,
46, had a huge hit
as the co-star of Will
& Grace, but she is
coming off the can-
cellation of the musi-
cal series Smash,
which faded in the
Messing
ratings after a big
start. Her new series,
The Mysteries of Laura, debuts at 8
p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 24.
Messing stars as Laura Diamond,
a brilliant NYPD homicide detective
who balances her Columbo day job

60

September 11 • 2014

JN

with a crazy family life that includes
two unruly twin boys and a soon-to-be
ex-husband – also a cop – who just
can't seem to sign the divorce papers.
Somehow she makes it all work with
the help of her sexy and understand-
ing partner (Josh Lucas).
Debuting at 9 p.m. Wednesday,
Sept.17, on FOX is Red Band Society.
Set in the children's ward of a Los
Angeles hospital (and narrated by
a kid who's in a coma), Red Band
Society is a coming-of-age drama that
follows a Breakfast
Club-esque group of
patients as they face
such life-changing
(and life-threatening)
challenges as cancer
and heart defects.
Playing one of the
Levin
youngish patients

past begins to catch up with her in a slow-
burning conflagration that attracts MI-6,
the CIA and the Palestinian terrorists who
captured her and her Palestinian friend/
translator, Atika, eight years ago.
The premise of The Honorable Woman is
so au courant that it prominently features
many of the same players and locales that
have been splayed across front pages and
home pages reporting on the current war.
But the genesis of Slicks vision first
manifested itself more than three decades
ago, with the attempted assassination
of Israel's ambassador to the United
Kingdom, Shlomo Argov — an incident
that left Argov permanently paralyzed and
that led directly to the first Lebanon War
in 1982.
Blick says the impact of that horrific
event has stayed with him since he first
found out about it as a child.

is Zoe Levin, 20. She was born and
raised in suburban Chicago in a reli-
gious Jewish family.
Also in Red Band, playing one
of the hospital's doctors, is Dave
Annable (Brothers and Sisters), 34.

Vulcan Jewish Wedding
Most Star Trek fans have seen the

original 1967 episode in which Spock
is compelled by Vulcan physiology to
return to Vulcan, his home planet, and
wed a Vulcan woman named T-Pring
to whom he was
betrothed as a child.
Sadly, Arlene
Martel, an exotically
beautiful Jewish
actress from the
Bronx who played
Spock's reluctant
Martel, 1967
fiancee, died on Aug.

"I was in the area as a boy, and I
remember it — I was very aware at that
time of the PLO activity:' Argov was tar-
geted by followers of Abu Nidal, who had
rejected the PLO by that point as not being
sufficiently proactive in anti-Israel terror-
ism.
The 1982 attack left Blick with a lifelong
fascination in how the personal and the
geopolitical can be inexorably linked. A
note of incredulity can be heard in his
voice as he talks about how the assassina-
tion attempt, which took place in front of
London's Dorchester Hotel, reverberated
around the world.
"Acts of violence, when you're close to
them, and they're not anticipated, they
can have a strong influence — look at how
a couple of meters of a London sidewalk
became part of an intractable conflict:'
Although he wasn't raised Jewish, Blick
has a Jewish father, which, he says, deep-
ened his interest in Israeli affairs.
"I should say I have a greater interest
and affirmation" in what happens to Israel,
"and how difficult it is for Israel to be sur-
rounded by combatants on its border, but
I recognize the pressing need of the other
side as well."
That need to acknowledge the needs of
both Israelis and Palestinians asserts itself
in an evenhanded way throughout the
series.
Blick's belief in the interconnected
nature of an event's impact on both micro
and macro levels provides the thematic
structure of The Honorable Woman, and
the luxury of filming what amounts to an
eight-hour movie allows him to explore
the psychological and emotional effects of
those who have been exposed to violence
both physical and intangible, real and
implied.
The resultant pacing may take some

Honorable Woman on page 62

12 at age 78.
Martel, who was long married to
soap-opera star Jerry Douglas, now
81, never found a breakthrough big
role. Still, her Trek role is known to
millions.
It was the episode that introduced
the split finger Vulcan greeting, an
ancient Kohanim sign suggested by
Leonard Nimoy, now 80, who played
Spock. As viewers recall, T-Pring
rejected Spock and forced Spock to
fight Captain Kirk (William Shatner,
now 80), for her hand.
Presiding over the whole ceremony
(and fight rules) was T-Pau, an ancient
and powerful Vulcan woman played
by Celia Lovsky. She was not Jewish,
but she stood by her Jewish husband,
actor Peter Lorre, as the Nazis took
over their native Austria and later
settled with him in America.

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