Lena Dunham and Taylor Swift may seem like an unlikely pairing, but just think about it: they’ve both made successful careers out of thinly-veiled portrayals of their love lives, Swift in her 1,000,000 songs about being wronged by men and Dunham by flashing her pseudo-fictionalized life (and naked body) all over HBO. So it sort of makes sense that these ladies would get along. A few years back, Dunham had this to say about Swift: “I feel like she and I are artistic kindred spirits. She may not know …More

Last night saw the end of the second season of HBO's pop cultural juggernaut, “Girls,” and what an end it was. It's been a confusing, emotional, often hard-to-watch season, and the finale was just as strange. But it did get some much-needed help from one Judd Apatow. As you probably know, thanks to the pervasiveness of “Girls” in just about every aspect of Internet culture, Apatow is the show's executive producer. He snapped Lena Dunham up after seeing her debut feature, “Tiny …More

Playboy recently released an article on Lena Dunham, thus finally proving that people really do read the magazine just for the articles. Or, at least, that heterosexual women do. In the magazine’s “20 Questions with Lena Dunham,” the 26-year-old star, writer, and director of HBO’s “Girls” opens up about her views on feminism, sex, and newfound fame. If Playboy seems like an odd venue for a pro-feminist outpouring, it should come as no surprise that this is the exact location …More

Sarah Jessica Parker is convinced her show "Sex and the City" paved the way for "Girls," insisting Lena Dunham's series would not have been possible without its glossy, fashion-obsessed predecessor. The actress, who starred in six seasons and two spin-off movies of the hit show, is a big fan of "Girls," but is convinced her work as a producer behind the scenes has helped emerging female writers and directors like Dunham. She tells Net-A-Porter magazine, "HBO was very encouraging of the beyond-camera role I …More

"Girls" creator and star Lena Dunham has opened up about her battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety. Diagnosed with OCD as a young girl, Dunham became obsessed with the number eight. She tells Rolling Stone magazine, "I'd count eight times... I'd look on both sides of me eight times, I'd make sure nobody was following me down the street, I touched different parts of my bed before I went to sleep, I'd imagine a murder, and I'd imagine that murder eight times." Dunham now takes anti-anxiety …More

Lena Dunham definitely has a voice. She’s just not sure whom it speaks for. Dunham is on the cover of this week’s Rolling Stone, and true to her character Hannah Horvath on “Girls,” Dunham appears somewhat scantily clothed. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise for fans of the HBO series. But what Dunham says in the article may be: she doesn’t think of herself as flag-bearer for her generation. "It's funny to me that I'm writing a show that people consider to be the …More

Lena Dunham is getting ready to usher in the second season of her HBO series “Girls” on Sunday and no one, not even Howard Stern, is throwing a wrench into the happiness of the 26-year-old actor/producer/director. Earlier this week, Stern unloaded some nasty observations about Dunham and “Girls,” a show about a group of 20-something ladies living in Brooklyn trying to make their way through life. On his radio show, Stern called Dunham a “little fat chick.” But the hits kept …More

A Hungarian politician is denounced after referring to Jews as a "national security risk." [WJC] Meanwhile, Hungarian Jews ask Russia to return looted scrolls. [Reuters] A look at Jewish history in Aleppo, Syria. [Forward] Ethiopia's last Jews prepare for the Promised Land. [AFP] A big fuss is being kicked up over the fact there are no Jewish candidates in the the New York mayoral race. [NYT] Gelt without guilt: ethically produced chocolate treats for Hanukkah. [Tablet] A list of famous exhumations to …More

Adding to her long list of accomplishments, “Girls” writer and actress Lena Dunham is set to put out her first book. In a publishing deal reportedly worth $1 million, Dunham has written a modern version of the 1962 advice book, “Sex and the Single Girl,” penned by Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, that promotes women becoming financially independent and experiencing relationships without marriage. The New York Post’s Page Six reports that the novel will be titled “Not …More

AbbaNibi Team, AbbaNibi.com - Israel/Jewish Entertainment and Culture Newswire Shiri Appleby told US Weekly this week that she was in shock when her chief beau of two years, Jon Shook, 31, proposed during their July trip to Ventotene, Italy. “One second you’re having lunch, the next you have a ring on your finger!” says the actress, 33, who will have an arc on HBO’s ‘Girls.’ It happened so fast, she made Shook, owner of LA’s Animal, do it twice! “I was like, …More

Slovakia’s Jewish community wants state authorities to keep Laszlo Csatary under house arrest in Hungary and stand trial in Slovakia. [The Washington Post] Jews in Denver reach out to the Aurora shooting victims. [The Jewish Week] Australian Jewish leaders will have a moment of silence for the 11 Israelis murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics in their own country. [The Jewish Journal] Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and Pastor John Hagee tackle Jewish-Christian relations. [The Jewish Week] Sharon Duke Estroff shares …More

Actor Adam Driver refuses to watch his hit TV show Girls, saying he can only focus on his “mistakes” when he tunes in. Driver has become one of the HBO comedy’s break-out characters, playing Lena Dunham‘s often-infuriating douchebag boyfriend, but he insists he is his own worst critic when he sees himself onscreen. He tells Rolling Stone, “I watched the pilot a couple months after we shot it and I learned my lesson. Watching it, I kept noticing things I wanted to change; I just saw …More