Danielle Berrin

Fangs but no fangs

Jewish screenwriter pens ‘kosher’ vampires for ‘Twilight’

Melissa Rosenberg, the screenwriter of “The Twilight Saga,” is 6 feet tall with straight blonde hair, a pale complexion and a long, slim nose. Not exactly the most ethnic mien imaginable.

“I don’t look particularly Jewish,” she says sheepishly. “But I have a very Jewish name.”

Her name — Rosenberg — has been strangely, if not surprisingly, advantageous to her career. Back in the 1990s, when she was first looking for an agent, one interested agency made an incorrect assumption about her that proved fortunate. “They said, ‘We just made a deal for your mother,’ and I was thinking, ‘You guys are good. [My mother] has been dead 10 years.’ Then I realized they thought I was Joan Rivers’ daughter, who at the time was Melissa Rosenberg.”