Having dressed up as a Chasid in "Yentl," Barbra Streisand is now contemplating marking a film about a real-life rabbi, Shmuel Boteach, the leader of the Jewish students’ society at Oxford University.
The singer-actress with a social conscience is apparently intrigued by the friendship between the young American Lubavitch rabbi and a black American Christian, Corey Booker.
As a visiting Rhodes Scholar, Booker became co-president in 1993 of the Oxford based L’Chaim society. The society, which draws many well-known guests, is open to all denominations.
The L’Chaim society was forced to part company with the official Lubavitch movement last year because Boteach was seen as too non-conformist. The group had planned to co-sponsor a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose stance on territorial compromise is opposed by the Lubavitch movement.
Streisand met with Boteach and Booker earlier this month at her Manhattan home to discuss the possibility of her production company filming their story.
The contact came through "a mutual friend who knew they were interested in doing a story on black-Jewish relations," Booker said.
Boteach described Streisand as "one of the nicest and most humble people I’ve met, and proud of her Jewish identity." He added that if the film is made, "I want to be played by Tom Cruise or Arnold Schwarzenneger."
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
