Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen by Donald Brittain & by Don Owen, National Film Board of Canada
1,000 strip for Dead Sea nude shoot
Ynetnews | by Keren Natanzon
A group of 1,000 Israelis especially selected to take part in Spencer Tunick's first mass nude shoot at the Dead Sea, arrived by buses overnight at the famous landmark on Saturday.
The chosen location was not revealed until the moment of arrival so as to prevent religious officials or curious bystanders from disturbing the photo shoot.
The group of Israelis, consisting of both men and women ages 18 to 77, gathered on the beach around 1 am, awaiting the photo session to begin with the sunrise. When the sun finally came up, Tunick instructed a 1,000 Israelis to enter the salty water, as he photographed them floating in the Dead Sea.
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The Tribal Update interviews General Tantawi and brings you to the deck of a Turkish warship
Weekly update from LatmaTV - Israel's most trusted news source
Tunick's Dead Sea shoot to be thwarted?
by Danny Adeno Abebe
After the Alps, the Sydney Opera House, the Vienna soccer stadium and other famous landmarks, the lowest place on earth will be hosting its first mass nude photo shoot this Saturday – if all goes as planned.
More than 3,000 Israelis have asked to take part in Spencer Tunick's Dead Sea shoot. But the 1,000 who have been selected may be in for a disappointment.
Read more at Ynet »
Q&A: Scott Ian
Tablet Magazine
by David Samuels
Scott Ian was a 14-year-old kid from Bayside, Queens, when he saw his first KISS show at Madison Square Garden. Now 47, and living in California with his wife Pearl Aday, who is Meat Loaf’s daughter, the rhythm guitarist and primary lyricist for the heavy metal band Anthrax is an energetic little man with an outlandishly long and pointy billy-goat beard that immediately marks him as a stage performer of some kind, or a refugee from a reality show or a circus.
A proud freak and knowing fan, a talented performer, a songwriter and businessman who has sold over 10 million albums of his music worldwide, Ian is a funny mix of brainless extrovert and outer-borough sharpie. Born Scott Ian Rosenfeld, he at first denied that being Jewish meant anything in particular to him growing up. As he tried to solve the riddle of why a Jew from Queens would be attracted to the music of meth addicts and assembly-line workers, he revealed a streak of ethnic pride that helped him explain why the Jew and the metal-head in him are actually the same person.
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The Turkish dumbbell and the sorrows of the evicted
Weekly update from LatmaTV - Israel's most trusted news source
Orphaned Land: Heavy metal envoys to Muslim world
JPost
by Ben Hartman
Israel’s sole remaining “ambassadors” to the Turkish Republic have long hair, tattoos and legions of fans across the Muslim world.
While heavy metal music probably can’t repair shattered Turkish-Israeli ties, Israeli metal band Orphaned Land is confident leaders in Ankara and Jerusalem can learn a lot from their fan base, which includes Israelis, Iranians, Syrians and other metal fans from across the Arab and Muslim world.
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The Revered and Reviled Bernard Lewis
MOMENT MAGAZINE
by Daphna Berman
Bernard Lewis has just moved to a small apartment in the manicured suburbs on Philadelphia’s Main Line. At 95, it was time for the man the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing calls the “most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East” to leave Princeton—his home for more than 35 years—for a senior living facility known for attracting retired academics.
“I’m getting old, I’m no longer sure about dates,” he tells me in his polished British accent, though this moment of self-deprecation is hardly convincing: Our conversation reflects his uncanny ability to recollect dates, time lines and facts—both from his lifetime and several centuries before. As we talk, Lewis recalls the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 as easily as the Turkish elections of 1950. He also regales me with stories, though it is impossible to predict which millennium they will date to. One minute, it’s the Marx Brothers skits he shared with the Shah of Iran in the days before the revolution, the next, an eighth century Arabian joke about a sinful woman praying to Allah for mercy before she dies. And he speaks with eloquence, his ideas organized into complete paragraphs.
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More than just bricks in a wall: What the entire Kotel looked like
Israel Hayom | by Nadav Shragai
These past few months have witnessed the completion of a historic work undertaken in the City of David: the uncovering of the lowest point of the Western Wall’s foundational structure. The discovery, which has been hidden deep underground for thousands of years, was made possible by the uncovering of a Herodian-era drainage canal by archaeologists. Now the Western Wall’s entire architectonic picture is nearly complete, and it will be unveiled publicly in the next few weeks.
The tens of thousands of Jews who streamed toward the Western Wall two nights ago to ask for divine forgiveness could not have known that just south of them, deep underground, a real archaeological drama was unfolding. Two thousand years after King Herod’s builders laid the foundations for the Western Wall on the Temple Mount, Israeli archaeologists have managed to reach these foundations and expose them anew.
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Anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the Jews Who Read Him
By Benjamin Ivry
Fifty years after his death on July 1, 1961, French modernist author and ferocious anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline is still causing controversy. Last January, an attempt by France’s Ministry of Culture to “celebrate” Céline on this anniversary ran aground after noted Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld pointed out that Céline was not merely the author of such recognized landmarks of modern fiction as 1932’s “Journey to the End of the Night” and 1936’s “Death on the Installment Plan,” but also of three lengthy anti-Semitic tracts, published before and during World War II, that were, as author Pierre Assouline notes, “authentic calls to murder” Jews.
Novelist Catherine Clément resigned from France’s High Commission for National Commemorations to protest Céline’s official celebration, a nationwide uproar ensued and Céline’s name was eventually dropped from the list of cultural figures honored in 2011.
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Yiddishkeit
Tablet Magazine
by Neal Gabler
Perhaps the greatest difficulty in trying to describe “Yiddishkeit” to an English-speaking audience, as this book attempts to do, is that there is really no English equivalent for the word. “Yiddish culture” comes close, but Yiddishkeit is so large, expansive, and woolly a concept that culture may be too narrow to do it full justice. “Jewish sensibility” comes closer still because it internalizes the notion of Yiddish, places it in the head as well as on the stage and the page, but sensibility is itself a rather loose and elusive idea and within Yiddishkeit there are several sensibilities that, while closely connected, are still not congruent. In effect, Yiddishkeit isn’t a thing or even a set of things, an idea or a set of ideas, which may explain why a book about Yiddishkeit is itself so sprawling, kaleidoscopic, disjointed, eclectic, and just plain messy. You really can’t define Yiddishkeit neatly in words or pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.
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In the Picture
Tablet Magazine
Bruce Jay Friedman has been writing across genres and media for more than half a century. Literary types remember Stern, his 1962 breakout book, referred to by one critic as “the first Freudian novel.” Movie buffs know him as the screenwriter of blockbusters like Splash and Stir Crazy. The film The Heartbreak Kid was based on his short story “A Change of Plan.” And then there were his several plays, including the popular 1970 Steambath.
Read more. Listen to Audio »
Roman Holiday
Tablet Magazine
by Joan Nathan
Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I spent a wonderful summer in Chieti, a city in the Abruzzi region of central Italy, leading a group of high-school students. I lived with a local family, the patriarch of which we called Signor Franchi. Every day we sat down for an enormous lunch. When the pasta came out—a big bowl of it, before the main course—a hush would fall over the room. We would wait for Signor Franchi to take the first bite. He would taste it, checking to make sure it was perfectly cooked, al dente. It almost always was. Then he would shoot a smile at his wife, and we would all dig in.
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Coming to a theater near you... Jerusalem in 3D
JPost
by Melanie Lidman
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.
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Jerusalem | Filmed in Imax 3D from JerusalemGiantScreen on Vimeo.
For one week, Warsaw will turn into a world capital of Jewish culture | EJP
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 Is Hero of Joann Sfar’s Film Tablet Magazine
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 »
The Voice | by Katie Schneider | Tablet Magazine
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 »
Unrepentant | by Rachel Shukert | Tablet Magazine
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 »
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