A.J. Goldmann is a writer based between Munich and Berlin. His articles about European and Jewish culture have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Guardian.
A.J. Goldmann
By A.J. Goldmann
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Culture Why Kurt Waldheim’s Election Still Matters
Ruth Beckermann is sick of people telling her that her films are timely. “It’s really boring,” says the Austrian director who has been digging into the dark corners on her country’s history since “The Paper Bridge,” which screened at the 1987 Berlin Film Festival. But with a far right political party leading Austria for the…
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Film & TV The IDF Made This Film 18 Years Ago — Why Hasn’t Anyone Seen It?
In 2000, the Israeli Defense Forces produced a major feature film that tackled one of the army’s most taboo subjects, the rising number of soldier suicides. The IDF Army Spokesperson’s Film Unit, headed by Michael Yohay, was given virtually unlimited access to the army’s resource: helicopters, tanks, hundreds of extras and permission to film at…
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Art Can Germany Teach Jews Anything About Israel?
Midway through the Jewish Museum Berlin’s exhibit “Welcome to Jerusalem,” a sprawling tour through the Holy City, one finds a particularly unsettling image. No, it isn’t an especially gruesome crucifixion, a battle scene of the Crusades or a photograph of carnage after a terrorist attack. The offending picture shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gripping…
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Culture Jewish Director Puts Richard Wagner On Trial — At His Own Festival
Scholars have long argued whether Richard Wagner left traces of his anti-Semitic convictions in his opera, for example, by encoding characters with stereotypically Jewish traits. When Barrie Kosky directed a “Ring Cycle” in Hannover between 2009 and 2011, the Australian director didn’t have a shred of doubt. For him, the duplicitous dwarf Mime (the cycle’s…
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Culture What Is Our Greatest Holocaust Film Director Doing In North Korea?
Over the course of his nearly fifty-year career as a filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann has traveled from the Middle East to the Nazi death camps. The 91-year-old documentary legend’s latest, “Napalm,” unexpectedly takes us to North Korea, where Lanzmann travelled in 1958 as part of the first Western delegation to be officially invited to the country…
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Culture Does This Movie Herald The Arrival Of A Yiddish Film Renaissance?
Between 1911 and 1950, there were hundreds — the exact number is the matter of some debate — of Yiddish films produced, mostly in Eastern Europe and America. It seems safe to say that over the past few years, there have been more Yiddish-language films than at any time since World War I. I give…
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Culture Berlinale Premieres Its First Yiddish Film and Revisits an Israeli Classic
A meditative documentary about Samuel Bickels, a polyglot costume drama about Karl Marx and a star-studded André Aciman adaptation are among the films to watch for at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, which kicked off on Thursday with the warmly received “Django,” a biopic about the legendary Gypsy Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. When the…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Akhnaten
In 1983, Philip Glass completed his “Portrait Trilogy” (“Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha”) with “Akhnaten,” a lyrical opera about the progenitor of one of the world’s oldest monotheistic systems of beliefs, Atenism. The U.S. premiere was sleekly minimal and decidedly arty. Three decades on, Glass sits atop the small pantheon of contemporary composers who enjoy…
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