An interesting story about ORLANDO BLOOM and Melinda Kerr and Claire Bloom and Phlip Roth

Jewish newspaper celebrity columnist Nate Bloom turned this BLOOMS IN THE NEWS blog on to these stories below. 

Nate has a column on Jewish celebrities, broadly defined, that appears in a number of Jewish newspapers and websites


Re this webpage and our references to Claire Bloom and Orlando Bloom at ''Bloomsday in Dublin''. NATE BLOOM writes:

Claire Bloom is very much a Jewish Bloom---but ........Orlando Bloom --well, he's a story--- his mother isn't Jewish--and his legal father was a guy named Harry Bloom, a prominent South African lawyer and anti-apartheied activist who fled South Africa during a nasty crackdown in the '60s--settled in the UK--married Orlando's much younger mother---and much later---when he was not well at all===encouraged his wife to get pregnant by a family friend--Harry died when Orlando was quite young and Orlando found out the story around age 12 or so. I don't know 100%- but I believe both his biological parents aren't Jewish--and he has no Bloom blood. That's the story---but you are more qualified than me to be the arbiter of who is a Bloom. [ED NOTE: In fact, this blogger is hardly qualified to be an arbiter of how is a Bloom or not, since BLOOM is not my real family name via my grandfather who came over from Russia long ago and had such a long Russian name that the Ellis Island cllerk said. "Sir, your name is now BLOOM. welcome to AMerica"

and here we are!

NATE ADDS: re Claire Bloom:
Years ago, I saw an interesting line in an article about Bloom---this is very close----"She found it quite amusing that when she first started acting she was often referred to as a 'perfect English rose' in press articles. Amusing because both sets of her grandparents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants."