Holes

Hole-y Moses! Holes is full… of Jews!

Beat the winter brrrs with this film, set in the desert in the middle of summer. Heck, we Jews are used to being in the desert— we were wandering around one for 40 years! Actually, Holes is also set in an inventor’s LA apartment… and the Wild West… and in the Old Country, too. We can’t say more or we will ruin the movie's many cool surprises…

As for Jewish actors, this film was Shia LeBeouf’s breakthrough movie. Since then, he has starred in the golf underdog movie The Greatest Game Ever Played; he was also in I, Robot, he was the lead penguin Surf's Up!, and now he's the star of the Transformers movies. In Holes, Shia is our hero, Stanley Yelnats IV, falsely accused of stealing a famous football player’s sneakers from a donation center. Oy! He is sentenced to a youth facility in the desert, where he will dig holes as punishment. Which is where we get the name of the movie... Holes.

One of Stanley's fellow inmates is Khleo Thomas, who plays Zero. Khleo's first name is pronounced “Cleo” and is made up of his first and middle real names, Khaleed Leon. You can catch him in Roll Bounce. Khleo was born in Anchorage, Alaska, which is even cooler when you consider that his mom is a Moroccan Jew.

Two men take care of the Zero and Stanley in the detention center. One is Tim Blake Nelson. He was Officer LeFlore in Meet the Fockers, and he has been in everything from Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report to Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (the directors of all these movies are Jewish, too). In Holes, Tim is a psychologist who’s on hand to help rehabilitate the so-called juvenile delinquents. He’s got his hands full, since these kids are wild. How wild? They create nicknames for themselves like Caveman, Squid, Armpit, and Barfbag. What a nice bunch!

Shia’s character has a dad, an absent-minded inventor, named Stanley Yelnats III. He is played by TV legend Henry Winkler, best known as Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli in the long-running (10 years!) show Happy Days, set in the 1950s. The Fonz was the coolest character in TV history up to that point, with his leather jacket and boots, slicked-back hair, and motorcycle. Hey, it was cool then! Lately, Henry has been in a lot of movies and TV shows; he was the principal in Scream, the coach in Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy, Dr. Barnes in Out of Practice, and even Norville in Clifford’s Puppy Days.

In a Holes flashback, one of the Wild West characters is played by Patricia Arquette. We can’t tell you too much more about her role or it would give away a big part of the movie… But we can tell you she was in Little Nicky with Adam Sandler and Flirting with Disaster with Ben Stiller. Anyway, she is the middle of the famous Arquette acting family, which also includes David (the youngest of five) and Rosanna (the oldest). Patricia was born right here in Chicago but grew up on a sort of kibbutz in Virginia.

AND… as if that wasn’t enough, Louis Sachar wrote the story. He also wrote Someday Angeline, Sixth Grade Secrets, There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom and the Wayside School books. The movie’s director, Andrew Davis, is Jewish too! His dad, Nathan, plays Henry’s dad, Shia’s grandpa… Stanley Yelnats II.

Bonus:

The name “Stanley Yelnats” is a palindrome (say: PAL-in-drome), a phrase that reads the same forwards or backwards, like the words “wow,” “noon,” “level,” and “racecar.” A famous Jewish palindrome is how the first man introduced himself to Eve: “Madam, I’m Adam!” Read it backward and see! How many palindromes do you know?