This first night of Hanukkah, which took place on the night of Christmas Day, December 25, Gwyneth Paltrow shared her love for Hanukkah traditions in a warm and light-filled Hanukkah video filmed with Jewish actress and activist Noa Tishby.
In the past year, Tishby has become a household name in some Jewish circles for her relentless Jewish and Israeli activism. In Israel, I grew up watching her in shows like the melodrama “Ramat Aviv Gimel,” listening to her musical project Nona and hearing her dub Meg in the Hebrew version of the Disney classic “Hercules.” Tishby has an over decade-long career in Hollywood, starring in shows like “Star Trek,” “Charmed,” “Nip/Tuck,” “NCIS” and “Big Love.” She has also helped bring Israeli shows like “In Treatment” to the U.S. and was the executive producer of the Peabody-winning American version of the therapy drama. For over a decade, she’s also been deeply engaged in pro-Israel activism, writing books like “Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth.”
And this Hanukkah, she’s sharing a candle-lighting with a special Jewish celebrity each night, starting with Goop founder and Oscar-winning actress and producer Gwyneth Paltrow. Paltrow’s father, producer and director Bruce Paltrow, is Jewish, and her mother, actor Blake Danner, is Christian.
“When I approached Gwyneth with this campaign, she was thrilled and deeply moved to join, and I knew we had something truly special,” Tishby told the Hollywood Reporter about the “Iron Man” and “Shakespeare In Love” star.
In the video, Paltrow reminisces about going to her paternal grandparents on Long Island and the tactile memory of unwrapping Hanukkah gelt (peeling that foil off the chocolate coins can be a struggle for some kids, and adults, for sure!). Paltrow shares that her favorite Jewish food is latkes, and she’s a big proponent of squeezing out all the juice from your potatoes (I personally like leaving some of that starchy liquid in to make them more creamy inside, a trick I learned from food maven Shannon Sarna).
Gwyneth, who is married to Jewish “Glee” and “Posse” co-creator Brad Falchuk (who directed her in the pretty Jewish “The Politician”), shares that she and her children light the Hanukkah candles every night during the holiday and that they have a sweet tradition of all hugging afterward and bringing in the light. Paltrow reveals that she gives her kids presents every night (“I’m a spoiler, what can I say, I overdo it!” she admits) and that she has her not-so-young-anymore children (Apple, 20, and Moses, 18, her kids with ex-husband Chris Martin of Coldplay) sit on the floor and close their eyes while she places the presents in their hands. She talks about how her grandparents struggled to accept her parents’ interfaith marriage at first, but that growing up, she felt “so fortunate” because she “got to grow up with these two very different worlds and very different faiths.”
“I always felt an incredible pull to my Jewish family,” she adds. “I still do. Just the traditions and the warmth and the unconditional love, and the food, and the yelling, and the family and community… I’m so close to everybody on that side of my family. We’re all kind of interwoven and so important to each other and just show up for each other again and again and again.”
Paltrow, who in 2022 funded a historical signboard at her Jewish ancestors’ cemetery in Poland, and whose brother Jake Paltrow’s latest movie is about the Adolph Eichmann trial, said that she discovered they come from 17 generations of rabbis. When Tishby jokingly calls her “rebbetzin” (Yiddish moniker for the wife of a rabbi), Paltrow corrects her with “Rebbetzin Paltrowitz,” referring to her father’s family name before they changed it to Paltrow. Paltrow then perfectly recites the Hebrew blessing over the candles.
For the second day of Hanukkah, Tishby practiced the Jewish ritual with another Jewish movie and TV star, Mila Kunis, who had a very different Jewish journey than Paltrow’s.
“I always knew I was Jewish, but I was told to never talk about it,” Kunis shares with Tishby in the video. “I think because I was in a country that didn’t allow for religion,” she adds. Kunis was born in Ukraine and moved to the U.S. with her family at age 8. The mother of two says she was raised culturally Jewish — for her, Judaism was a culture, it was about things like guilt, food and superstition. It was about her grandmother peppering her speech with Yiddish. Yet, when she had kids, they started identifying with the religious aspect of Judaism, too. She started celebrating Shabbat and Jewish holidays.
In fact, she said that the person who gave her a new appreciation of her Jewish faith and who made her fall in love with Jewish religion is her husband and former “That ’70s Show” co-star Ashton Kutcher, who Tishby says “is not Jewish, but is very Jewish.” When both Tishby and Kunis can’t figure out the direction to light the menorah, Kunis calls her husband, who tells them the correct way to do it. (FYI, put them into the menorah from right to left, and light the candles with the shamash from left to right.)
“When in doubt about Judaism, call Ashton Kutcher, I guess,” Tishby says, which isn’t helpful advice for most of us, but is still delightful to know. Kunis recites the Hebrew prayer over the candles and wishes everyone a “chag sameach,” Hebrew for “happy holiday.”
Watching these beloved actresses lighting the Hanukkah candles certainly makes this holiday more joyous.
