I congratulate my Jewish Theological Seminary colleague, expert in university Talmud studies, Shamma Friedman, who has won a prize, the top Israeli prize for Talmudists.This is the prize that was made famous in the Yossi Cedar comedy film, "Footnote" whose premise was that the committee gave the prize by mistake to the father when they meant to give it to the son, both professors of Talmud, and mayhem ensued.
I hope that no mayhem will follow this award to Professor Friedman, and I am confident that it was not an error. His many contributions to Talmud study are described admiringly by Shai Secunda here (How Shamma Friedman, Winner of This Year’s Israel Prize, Revolutionized Talmud Study: Meet the American-born JTS professor who modernized an ancient pursuit) and by Yehuda Mirsky here (Talmud: The Back Story).
Mirsky says in part, "Friedman's massive scholarship yields a complex picture: a picture of hosts of talmudic sages consciously and ceaselessly reinterpreting earlier traditions in order to achieve coherent teachings to guide them in the present."
The main difficulty that I have with the Friedman work is its non-controversial "back story" scope - asking a lot about how we got the Talmud and how it is made up of layers of traditions.
I'm more interested in the contents of the Talmud - the values and ideas in the massive document and its role as a guide for religious, spiritual and intellectual life. Neither article tells me anything about what Friedman contributed to those areas of inquiry.
He was such a powerful acting persona, sure we'd like to claim him as a member of the tribe. But no James Gandolfini was not a Jew. Shockingly, he passed away at age 51. He was a superlative actor who made his biggest hit in the Sopranos on HBO, considered by many critics to be the greatest series of its kind of all time.
We had a short discussion with our son on Purim about whether the animated film "Wreck-It Ralph" had too much violence for the kids. Our son was worried that if the kids see violence on film that will cause them to act more violently towards each other. We argued that violence in film can be an outlet for the kids that may lessen their physical hitting of each other, as Kubrick put it, “a catharsis rather than a model."
It's a fair question. Is science fiction Jewish?
No actress Katie Holmes is not a Jew. She was a Catholic, then a Scientologist and now, again, a Catholic, as the Examiner reports: 
Quentin Tarantino's film, Inglorious Basterds, is a fantasy story - a comic book brought to the screen - about a a group of Jewish guerrilla U.S. soldiers in occupied France during World War II who seek revenge on the Nazis. 
We don't usually make random psychological posts. But in thinking just now about what is called bipolar disorder, we were bothered by how the mood condition is commonly described, to wit, "Bipolar disorder or bipolar affective disorder, historically known as manic–depressive disorder, is a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a category of mood disorders defined by the presence of one or more episodes of abnormally elevated energy levels, cognition, and mood with or without one or more depressive episodes (Wikipedia: 
No, the best-selling author Stieg Larsson was not a Jew.
and 
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was reviewed in the