Jerusalem is a city that likes to think of itself as the center of the world and as larger than life. Starting in 2013, it will be larger than life – and 3D – at movie theaters in 35 countries.
Swooping over the Old City, with bird’s eye views in eyepopping 3D projected onto a giant screen, JERUSALEM: IMAX 3D is not your typical documentary about Israel’s ancient capital. Read more »
Thanks to many street scenes, theaters and clubs, participants will be able to enjoy Jewish culture by all senses and move on to the colorful world of Warsaw’s bygone era, and admire its pre-war atmosphere.
Organized for the eight time by the Shalom Foundation, the Jewish Culture Festival Singer’s Warsaw reunites the most outstanding artists and producers of Jewish culture.
It enjoys a growing popularity among guests and artists, who for this occasion come from all over the world.
The Festival is dedicated to Isaac Bashevis Singer, the renowned Jewish writer of Polish origin, honored by the Nobel Prize in literature. Read more »
Serge Gainsbourg was, depending on whom you ask, a brilliant songwriter, a buffoon, an outrage, a Don Juan, or the definition of French cool. To French comic book artist Joann Sfar, growing up in a strait-laced observant family in the 1970s, Gainsbourg—born Lucien Ginsberg in 1928—was a hero. Sfar was enthralled by Gainsbourg’s outrageous antics on French television, his unabashed romps with knockouts like Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, and his reckless smoking and drinking, not to mention his talent as a singer and songwriter. All this from a skinny Jewish guy with protruding ears and a big nose. Read more. Listen to Audio »
Museum exhibits are often about visuals, but the first thing you notice when you walk into the Oregon Jewish Museum’s current show celebrating Mel Blanc’s life and career is his voice. That manic patter is familiar and unmistakable: It’s the voice of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird, Barney Rubble and Dino and so many other beloved cartoon characters. Blanc, in fact, voiced so many different characters—over 400—that Jack Benny once remarked, “There’s only five real people in Hollywood. Everyone else is Mel Blanc.” And all of Blanc’s characters, as the new exhibit deftly reveals, owe a part of their existence to his upbringing as a young Jewish boy in Portland, Ore., performing in the city’s vaudeville houses and mixing with its various ethnic populations.
Born in San Francisco in 1909 as Melvin Jerome Blank, he moved north with his family at the age of 6. His father owned several apparel businesses, and young Melvin spent his days running around south Portland, observing its residents, many of them Jews. Among the first people he befriended were the elderly Jewish couple who ran the local grocery; they spoke Yiddish, and the boy became fascinated with the strange dialect and its intonations. He learned to imitate it. It was, by his own admission, the first voice he ever performed. Read more »
There are three adjectives that are often used to describe Larry David, the star and creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which recently premiered its eighth season after two excruciating, Curb-less years. One is “bespectacled,” which is fair enough. Another is “bald,” a signifier David’s television alter-ego regards as a traditionally oppressed tribal identity (spitting in biblical fury when the assimilationists among this imagined fraternity of the hairless attempt to “pass” under the camouflage of a baseball cap or, God forbid, a toupee). Finally, and most ubiquitously, he is “neurotic.”
“Larry David plays himself as bald, bespectacled neurotic,” the New York Times wrote in a review of the new season. “Larry David plays a neurotic fussbudget named Larry David,” the Washington Post said in 2010. “He’s officially an LA neurotic,” the New York Post recently bemoaned. Far be it for me to argue with writers for such august publications. But having said that: I don’t think any of these people actually know what “neurotic” means, other than a word you swap in when you think it’s impolite to say “Jew.” Read more »
Richard Wagner, the most repugnant of musical nationalists, has become an unlikely poster child for culturally progressive Israelis. The recurring controversy over the public performance of work by the Nazi Party’s favorite composer erupted again in late July when the Israeli Chamber Orchestra, led by the Austrian conductor Roberto Paternostro, performed a much-publicized Wagner program at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, Wagner’s self-erected shrine and a pillar of the Nazi movement well before Hitler took power. (Paternostro received a standing ovation from the largely German audience, which understandably liked the idea of Jews playing Wagner.) Morbid ethnocentrism with overtones of nationalist extremism is acceptable to the Israeli left, it seems, as long as it isn’t Jewish.
Daniel Barenboim
Every so often a prominent musician makes a point of sneaking Wagner into a public concert in Israel. Zubin Mehta, the Indian-born conductor of the Israel Philharmonic, played a Wagner excerpt as an encore to a 1981 concert; Daniel Barenboim, conducting a German ensemble, did it again at the 2001 Jerusalem Festival. And in each case public opprobrium put Wagner’s scores back on the shelf. At the Bayreuth concert, some of the Israeli musicians explained that they never would perform Wagner in Israel but felt free to do so elsewhere. Performance of Wagner’s music is unofficially—but effectively—banned in Israel. But should it be? Mark Twain quipped that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. By the same token, banning Wagner’s music is a better idea than it sounds. Suppressing the performance of important musical works is not a small matter, though, and deserves careful thought rather than emotional reflex. Read more »
I sit alone but free, courtesy of Israeli tourism, and what a seat it is! I'm ensconced at the base of Mount Masada, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the Israeli Opera company is dramatically producing Giuseppe Verdi's famous Aida, the Italian maestro's masterpiece amongst his 28 written operas.
In 2010, their 25th anniversary, the Israeli Opera inaugurated this spectacular outdoor festival, and it has secured Israel a place on the map of world opera festivals alongside the likes of Italy, France, Switzerland and Finland. Read more »
If you remember Yiddish and not anti-gay - a set of zero - enjoy
'Policeman' Is Not Your Typical Israeli Movie | indieWIRE
Developed by first-time director Lapid at a Cannes Film Festival residency, the script for “Policeman” contains a persistently muted, disquieting tone that the director could expand upon in subsequent efforts. While somewhat problematically fragmented, “Policeman” is loaded with insight into the nuances of Israeli society. Read more »
The innovative animated film Walt
with Bashir was nominated for an
Oscar for best foreign film.
Joseph Cedar's latest award-winning Israeli film Footnote sheds light on an industry that portrays a vibrant, conflicted, modern society to worldwide audiences.
Joseph Cedar's Footnote won the best screenplay award at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
The Cannes Film Festival 2011 award to Joseph Cedar's Hearat Shulayim (Footnote) for best screenplay was the latest indication that Israeli cinema has become a world force, with Israel enjoying "a remarkable film renaissance," according to the Los Angeles Times.
Cedar's personal achievements are impressive. His first two movies, Time of Favor and Campfire, were domestic box-office hits. His third, Beaufort, a gut-wrenching war film about the last days of Israel's military presence in southern Lebanon, was an international phenomenon. Beaufort won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and became the first Israeli film in a generation to be nominated for a best foreign-language film Oscar.
Footnote, which is distributed in the United States by Sony, tells the story of a father and son, both scholars of the Talmud, locked in academic rivalry.
Cedar, who immigrated to Israel from New York with his parents when he was six, has often drawn on his personal religious observance to imbue his movies with authentic Jewish storylines. He told reporters in Cannes that he was struck by the human dramas bubbling behind the rarefied research of Talmudic scholars at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Now, only a dwindling number of their descendants remain, but they're intent on saving the Jewish culture that flourished for decades. In Entre Rios province, the center of Argentina's rural Jewish communities, there are still gauchos, Hebrew lessons and sacred scrolls to be found.
Jaime Jruz is among those who consider keeping the old traditions alive a debt owed to those who first settled the region. He roams his ranch on horseback, rounding up cattle and keeping track of his goats. His farm, on the outskirts of Carmel, goes back more than a century.
It was bought on a payment plan by his grandfather, who had arrived in Argentina aboard the Bismarck, a ship carrying Jews seeking a new life in the New World. Now 65, Jruz says he has lost a step or two and is one of the last Jewish gauchos around.
Many of his friends have given up the backbreaking work, and his three daughters, like most young Argentine Jews, live in the cities. But Jruz says the past and the work his ancestors put into the farms of Entre Rios weigh heavily on him. Read more »
The appointment of Levine, who at 83 is one of the oldest poet laureates, was announced Wednesday by Librarian of Congress James Billington.
Levine, of Fresno, Calif., is the author of 20 collections of poems, including “The Simple Truth,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.
“Philip Levine is one of America’s great narrative poets,” Billington said. “His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling ‘The Simple Truth’—about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.” Read more »
Yiddish isn’t dead; if anything, it’s undead. Think about it: Is there anything more unkillable, vaguely erotic, ridiculous, and toothy than the language of the Ashkenazim? In fact, a book published this spring—Sara Libby Robinson’s Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors Before World War I (Academic Studies, March)—argues that Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the single most recognizable undead gentleman in history, was, as Allan Nadler phrases it, a reflection of “widespread anxieties about the dangers posed by the flood (and the blood) of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Great Britain.” Read more »
“I come from a picture family,” Schaefer (Nancy Olson) tells Joe Gillis (William Holden). “Naturally, they took it for granted I was to become a great star. So I had 10 years of dramatic lessons, diction, dancing. Then the studio made a test. Well, they didn’t like my nose — it slanted this way a little. I went to a doctor and had it fixed. They made more tests, and they were crazy about my nose — only they didn’t like my acting.”
Though it’s never overtly stated, the obvious implication is that Betty Schaefer is Jewish. If you’ve ever wanted to understand the ambivalence Hollywood has felt toward Jewish women, there it is in glorious black and white. Read more »
In the first episode of Russian Dolls, a new Lifetime reality show set in Brooklyn and billed as a cross between Jersey Shore and the Real Housewives franchise, a 23-year-old bleached-blonde named Diana Kosov spends a lot of time fretting about her new boyfriend, Paul, who drives a Maserati and lavishes her with flowers and teddy bears but who is unfit to bring home to her parents. The problem? “He’s Spanish, and I’m Russian,” Kosov explains. “In this community, if I date someone who’s not Russian, it’s a big deal.” Later, her mother, Anna, shows up to prove the point. “I would like you marrying Russian guy,” she tells her daughter, as they practice making borscht. “We have same kultur. It’s very important, you understand?
The astute viewer will notice that, in both of these interludes, Kosov is wearing a large Star of David pendant that dangles above her dramatically pushed-up cleavage. In a phone interview this week, she said the message she heard was clear: “I’m looking for a Russian Jewish guy.” But, on the show, the word Jewish never enters the dialogue—not in an aside to the camera, not with Kosov’s mother, and not, eventually, with Paul, who gets the heave-ho over a plate of tuna tartare. “My parents, they came to America for a reason,” Kosov says, earnestly. “To look for Russians?” Paul retorts. “Yeah,” Kosov replies, without elaboration. Read more »
What can you say about a country that has 15 film schools and only four medical schools? Does it suggest Israel’s abiding love for cinematic distraction over the concerns of life and limb—or does it suggest something simpler and more reflexive, a preference for proliferation for its own sake, not all that different from the overwhelming variety of yogurts that are available in Israeli supermarkets? Perhaps the smaller the land, the more important the illusion of choice.
And what can you say about a country that has steadfastly refused to learn the rudiments of PR, both for political and cultural purposes? That invites journalists over, expenses paid, for a much-touted cultural event and then pretty much leaves them to their own devices once they arrive? That insists, say, on misspelling my last name as Mirkin rather than Merkin despite many emails over many months attesting to the correct spelling? Is it a form of arrogance or a kind of autism? Read more »
Israel and Korea may not share a common tongue, but it was the international language of film that shone through at the Israeli Film Reception on Wednesday, held in cooperation with the 15th Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival.
Two Israeli films showcased at PiFan were celebrated at the event: “Rabies,” a horror written and directed by Navot Papushado and Aharon Keshales, and “Guest,” a dark restaurant-set satire by Roy Krispel. Read more »
It's been a years-long process for the Museum on the Seam, which is one of the few art museums in Israel that aggressively tries to convince Arab and Muslim artists to show in its galleries. Read more »
