3/5/14

Is Idina Menzel Jewish? Is Adele Dazeem Jewish?

Yes, Idina Menzel is a Jew. Yes, Adele Dazeem would be a Jew if she existed. That is the mangled name given to Idina Menzel by John Travolta at the Academy Awards in 2014. No, John Travolta is not a Jew.

To get a mangled Travoltafied version of your name, go to this website. Mine came out "Theo Zamirez". I kinda like that name.

Wikipedia reports on the early life of the actual Idina Menzel:
Menzel was born in Queens, New York. Her mother, Helene, is a therapist, and her father, Stuart Mentzel, worked as a pajama salesman. She has a younger sister, Cara. Her family is Jewish; her grandparents emigrated from Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Her family lived in New Jersey (East Brunswick, Somerset and Marlboro) from when she was in kindergarten to third grade, but she considers herself raised in Syosset, New York.

When Menzel was 15 years old, her parents divorced and she began working as a wedding and bar mitzvah singer, a job which she continued throughout her time at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Menzel herself, however didn't have a Bat Mitzvah after she quit Hebrew school as a girl. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Drama at New York University prior to being cast in Jonathan Larson's rock musical Rent. She changed the spelling of her surname to Menzel to better reflect the pronunciation the Mentzel family had adopted in America. She was friends with actor Adam Pascal before they worked together in Rent.
Hat tip to our musical good friend who says all of this is amazingly hilarious :-)

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