David Rabinowitz

Rabinowitz co-wrote, with childhood friend Charlie Wachtel, the screenplay for Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018), which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was raised in a Conservative Jewish family, attended Hebrew school at the East Brunswick Jewish Center, and is a descendant of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem; the writers deliberately foregrounded a Jewish detective in the film to sharpen its confrontation with antisemitism. His Jewish identity is thus well documented.