Weekly Round-Up: From Anne Frank to Louis Armstrong

Every week I come across Jewish news stories that are interesting but ultimately don't make it into a full-fledged blog post. This always bothered me, but then this morning I thought: why not do a weekly round-up? Many of the blogs I read create these posts, wherein they highlight news stories from the week. Let me know what you think about this new addition to the Judaism blog.

• PBS will soon air a new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, which portrays her as a boy-crazy teen. "Anne was pretty obsessed with boys, prickly and difficult with her mother, quite manipulative, mad about clothes and very interested in her looks," says Deborah Moggach, who wrote the TV production. [via New York Post]
• Rav Ovadia Yosef, former Chief Sephardic Rabbi and current spiritual leader of Israel's Shas political party, called women who wear prayer shawls to daven at the Western Wall "stupid" and "deviants." He was speaking of Women of the Wall, a group of Jewish women who believe women should be able to read from the Torah.  [via The Forward]
• Rabbi Alysa Stanton has assumed her role as head rabbi at Bayt Shalom. She is history's first female African-American rabbi. [via The Forward]
• A jury convicted Sholom Rubashkin, the former owner of an Iowa kosher slaughterhouse, of 86 out of 91 financial fraud charges. His sentence could be over 1,250 years. [via JTA]
• The EveryOne Group has asked the Israeli government to buy the house where Adolf Hitler was born in order to prevent the house from falling into the hands of extremists. [via Jerusalem Post]
• Time magazine reports in its Nov. 16 issue that R. Crumb's recent illustration of Genesis, which came out on Oct. 19, has become a best-seller: No. 1 on the New York Times graphic books list and No. 2 on Amazon.com's Christian books list. You can see images from the comic on the Forward's website by clicking here.
  
• Famed Jazz musician Louis Armstrong was inspired by a Jewish peddler family he worked for as a boy in New Orleans, according to a new article in Commentary. Their warmth made him a lifelong philo-Semite who wore a Star of David around his neck. [via Tablet]