Jewish Life Stories: Jim Abrahams, the filmmaker who co-piloted ‘Airplane!’ into comedy history, dies at 80

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Jim Abrahams, 80, who co-piloted “Airplane!” into movie history

Growing up in Milwaukee in the 1950s, Jim Abrahams and brothers Jerry Zucker and David Zucker attended the same synagogue, high school and later college, where they enjoyed a reputation as class clowns. Their horseplay paid off: As the filmmaking trio known as ZAZ, they created some of the most iconic comedy films of the 1970s and ’80s, including “Kentucky Fried Movie,” “The Naked Gun” and, most memorably, the blockbuster disaster movie spoof “Airplane!”

Their anything-for-a-laugh approach had roots in vaudeville, the Catskills and MAD magazine, although Abrahams wasn’t convinced it was particularly Jewish. “The heart of our humor is that you’re better off not taking a lot of things seriously,” he told JTA earlier this year. “I don’t think that’s a particularly unique Jewish point-of-view.”

Abrahams also created the Charlie Foundation for Ketogenic Therapies, which supported treatment for a type of epilepsy that had afflicted his son.

Abrahams died on Nov. 26 at his home in Santa Monica, California. He was 80.

Yona Betzalel Brief, 23, Israeli-American soldier who defended Kibbutz Kfar Aza

Staff Sergeant Yona Betzalel Brief, 23, an IDF combat medic whose parents immigrated to Israel from California, died last month at Sheba Hospital of wounds he sustained on Oct. 7, 2023, the army announced Nov. 26.

During the Hamas attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Brief and his team fought and killed “dozens of terrorists and saved dozens of civilians,” former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement. Brief was seriously wounded in the battle, and the company commander and a third team member were killed.

Brief was a graduate of the Lapid Yeshiva High School in Modiin and the Ma’ale Efrayim pre-army preparatory program.

He is survived by his parents, Hazel and David, and five siblings. “My sweet Yona, from your ICU room, messages of hope, faith and love for our precious country washed over our battered and exhausted nation,” his mother said at his funeral. “Yes, you, my love, became the focus of doing things to make this world better, to make our country just a bit better.”

Shalom Nagar, 88, the man who hanged Adolf Eichmann

Israel has carried out the death penalty just once, when Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was sentenced in 1962 to death by hanging. “We placed the rope on his head. I pressed [a handle] and he fell downward,” Shalom Nagar, the guard who carried out the execution, later told an interviewer.

Nagar was born in Yemen: No Ashkenazi guards were allowed to enter the prison wing where the architect of the slaughter of Eastern European Jews was held. He kept his role in the execution of Eichmann a secret for years, and said he suffered from post-traumatic stress and nightmares following the hanging.

Nagar, who later became a kosher butcher, died Nov. 26 at the age of 88. “We’re in this world as tenants,” he said in the 2010 documentary “The Hangman.” “The only thing we take with us is our good deeds.”

Marshall Brickman, 85, who co-wrote hits with Woody Allen 

Marshall Brickman, a folk musician turned screenwriter who co-wrote three of Woody Allen’s most celebrated films, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 85.

Brickman cut his teeth as head writer for “The Tonight Show” starring Johnny Carson before teaming up with Allen to write “Sleeper,” “Manhattan” and “Annie Hall,” which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1977.

The son of what he described as “left-wing, middle-class Jewish” parents, Brickman grew up in a musical home in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and joined the Greenwich Village folk scene. He also wrote a treatment for what became “The Muppet Show” and co-wrote the book for the hit Broadway musical “Jersey Boys.”

Alice Brock, 83, the Alice in “Alice’s Restaurant”

“Running a restaurant isn’t really satisfying,” wrote Alice Brock. “In fact, next to running a hospital emergency ward, I think this is the worst thing you can do.”

But her time running a restaurant gave Brock a measure of pop immortality: Her eatery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, inspired Arlo Guthrie’s classic 1960s anti-war song and movie “Alice’s Restaurant,” a rambling tale that begins on Thanksgiving at the deconsecrated church that Brock called home and ends with Guthrie avoiding the military draft.

Alice May Pelkey was born in Brooklyn to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, and identified as Jewish. In addition to running restaurants, she was a painter and author of several books for adults and children, including a memoir, “My Life as a Restaurant.”

She died Nov. 21 in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She was 83.

Manfred Ohrenstein, 99, liberal N.Y. politician who fled Nazi Germany as a youth

As Democratic Leader of the New York State Senate, Manfred Ohrenstein, who fled Nazi Germany as a teenager in 1938, frequently led efforts to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. “Two generations have already grown up since the end of World War II, with no recollection of the Nazi mass murder of six million Jews and five million others,” he told JTA in 1982, announcing funding for a memorial exhibit at the New York State Museum in Albany.

Ohrenstein, who represented Manhattan for 34 years, “successfully championed progressive legislation that safeguarded rent controls, legalized abortion and repealed the death penalty.” He died on Nov. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.