Jackie Tohn is a multi-hyphenate. She’s an actress, comedian, writer, singer-songwriter and show creator. She’s also Jewish and has portrayed a handful of interesting, complex Jewish characters. (Including one on the very hot and rabbinical Netflix show “Nobody Wants This.”)
Here are 18 things to know about her.
1. Jackie was born on Aug. 25, 1980 on Long Island to a Jewish family.
2. She’s a Virgo!
3. She was an adorable kid and we have the photographic evidence:
4. Jackie is descended from Holocaust survivors. Unfortunately, Jackie’s great-grandparents and great Aunt Pessel weren’t so lucky.
“Aunt Pessel was the only child in my grandma’s family who was killed by the Nazis. My great-grandparents and my great-aunt Pessel did not leave Poland in the late ’30s, and they were all killed,” she told Hey Alma. “The rest of the kids in the family ran anywhere they could, and somehow survived. Many of them [survived] concentration camps, staying one step ahead of the Nazis.”
More on that later…
5. Jackie started acting professionally as a child. Her first credited role was in “The Nanny.”
“I auditioned to play a mini Fran in the mid to late ’90s on ‘The Nanny.’ I sent my tape in from New York, and I was like [Fran Drescher voice] ‘Mr. Sheffield…’ I was very little. I was 12,” she told Hey Alma in 2019.
She ended up playing a character named Tiffany Koenig and then later, a young Fran Fine.
6. As a child, she attended Jewish summer camp at Camp Lokanda in upstate New York.
7. “I’m so proud to be a Jew. I just feel it so deep in my guts,” Jackie wrote on Instagram in 2022. “Our resilience as a people is staggering. They keep coming for us — always have and by the looks of it, always will. Jews make up less than 0.2% of the population. Less than point two. And yet, we thrive.”
8. She attended the University of Delaware for a semester, but then moved to LA with her mom and agent. Actress Jessica Biel was her first friend in the city and she soon moved in with her family in Calabasas.
9. Jackie had roles in numerous iconic shows of the ’90s and early 2000s like “The Sopranos,” “Veronica Mars” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
10. Jackie appeared on season eight of “American Idol” and made it to the top 36!
Years later, when the Jewish Journal asked what her biography would be called, Jackie responded “The Curves in Oceanside is buzzing!” Explaining, “When I was on ‘American Idol,’ the show was at its height — even getting eliminated fairly early, I was in 30 million homes a week. And my mother said, ‘The Curves [women’s gym] in Oceanside was buzzing.‘”
11. Jackie played her hero Gilda Radner in the movie “A Futile and Stupid Gesture.”
“I had a VHS tape of Gilda’s greatest hits, and I played it on the TV/VCR in my bedroom [growing up],” Jackie told the Jewish Journal in 2017. “I was intimately familiar with her work, so when the audition came in, my head popped off and I put it back on.”
12. Jackie played Jewish party girl and wrestler Melanie Rosen aka “Melrose” on the hit Netflix show “GLOW.”
In the third season, her character leads a Passover seder where she shares that her Aunt Pessel (sound familar?) was murdered in Treblinka during the Holocaust. The writers wrote this into the script based on a real-life conversation Jackie had with co-star Ellen Wong about their shared generational trauma. (Wong’s family survived in the Cambodian genocide.)
13. She described the reaction to the scene as “overwhelming.”
When she spoke to Hey Alma in 2019, she shared, “My mom’s cousin Bracha — whose mother is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in the world, let alone in our family — texted me yesterday. She said, ‘Good morning Jackie, we are so proud of you. In the name of all the Levental offspring, thank you… We Jews were not eliminated and we second generation are blooming and multiplying. Look at your cousin in Canada; they have seven great-grandchildren and another on the way. L’chaim.’”
14. On a lighter note, shall we look at some Melrose fashion? Let’s do it.
We need this whole outfit to be honest:
And this one too:
15. She created the children’s show “Do, Re & Mi” in 2021 and starred in it as well!
16. In “Nobody Wants This,” the Netflix show starring Adam Brody as a hot rabbi, Jackie plays his sister-in-law Esther. Per the Netflix description of her character, “Esther doesn’t suffer fools.”
17. Please enjoy this sneak-peek production still from the show:
18. Jackie will be in the upcoming movie “Floaters,” about a Jewish summer camp. She plays a “struggling musician who accepts a last-resort job from her overachiever best friend mentoring misfit campers at their childhood Jewish summer camp.” She will star opposite Sarah Podemski and Aya Cash.
“IF YOU STAY READY YOU AIN’T GOT TO GET READY,” she wrote of the project on Instagram.
