October 4: Walking on the Moon with Liev Schreiber

Actor Liev Schreiber, who has moved in recent years from independent film work to mainstream Hollywood movies, was born in San Francisco on this date in 1967. His Jewish mother, in his words, a “far-out Socialist Labor Party hippie bohemian freak who hung out with William Burroughs,” raised him in flight from his father and in very bohemian, funky, and eccentric circumstances. Schreiber was particularly excellent in the 1999 film, A Walk on the Moon, one of the most Jewishly-flavored movies produced since the hey-day of Yiddish film, in which he played the working-class Jewish husband of Pearl (Diane Lane), who is spending the summer with her mother-in-law and daughter at a Catskills bungalow colony. It is the summer of the Woodstock Festival; Pearl has a torrid affair and awakens to desire and its gratification; Schreiber’s character must contend with jealousy and the advent of “The Sixties.” Schreiber is also an acclaimed Shakespearean actor, Broadway actor, film director, and screenwriter. Late in 2008, he portrayed the anti-Nazi Jewish partisan, Zus Bielski, in the film Defiance. To see the trailer for A Walk on the Moon, look below.