
A.J. Goldmann

By A.J. Goldmann
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Culture Converting to Verdi
The village of Oberammergau might be the least Jewish place on earth. Nestling at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, the town is synonymous with the Passion play that residents have been putting on since 1637, a theatrical and religious spectacle that for much of history transmitted anti-Jewish prejudice, inciting pogroms and other violent acts…
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Film & TV Your Guide to This Year’s Jerusalem Film Festival
Founded in 1984, the Jerusalem Film Festival is a baby compared to its European counterparts Venice (1932), Cannes (1946), and Berlin (1951). Israel’s second-oldest film festival after Haifa (founded a year earlier) and the fourth oldest in the Middle East after Cairo (1976) and Damascus (1979), the JFF has become increasingly robust, exciting and ambitious…
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Film & TV A Year for Women as Natalie Portman and Amy Winehouse Debut at Cannes
It’s official. After 67 years of presenting the best of testosterone-driven cinema from the world over, the Cannes Film Festival made the discovery that women too can direct. At least, that’s what I take it the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis meant when she irritatingly dubbed this the “Year of la Femme,” in reference to…
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Film & TV A Grim New Woody Allen Film Debuts at Cannes
After the earnest entreaties of Emmanuelle Bercot’s “Standing Tall,” the French social drama about at-risk youth that opened the festival, and the dystopian provocations of Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Lobster,” the mood at Cannes changed palpably when Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man” unspooled out-of-competition, injecting some adrenalin and existential angst (not to mention star power) into a…
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Film & TV A Jewish ‘Ulysses’ at the Cannes Film Festival
It’s the 68th installment of the world’s most glamorous film festival, and thousands of filmmakers, actors, movie execs, journalists, tourists and adoring fans have descended on this small, surprisingly unremarkable town along the French Riviera, a town whose name is synonymous with cinema. Last Wednesday, the International Jury headed by the American directing duo The…
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Opinion Walking While Jewish in Berlin
In late February, I spent an entire day walking the streets of Berlin, wearing a yarmulke, while a videographer filmed me in secret with a GoPro camera taped to a flap in his rucksack. We were trying to replicate for the British tabloid the Daily Mail the now-famous experiment undertaken in Paris by the Israeli…
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Culture A Nacht at the Opera in Berlin
On a freezing January evening, a large crowd gathered to watch as three stolpersteine were hammered into the sidewalk outside the Komische Oper Berlin. These brass stones commemorate victims — mostly, but not all, Jewish — of Nazi persecution. The plaques laid in front of the opera commemorated Jews who were involved there before the…
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Culture Stunning New Louvre of Jewish Museums Opens in Warsaw
In August 1942, as Jews were being deported from the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish artist Gela Seksztajn wrote her last will and testament. “I donate my work to the Jewish Museum to be founded in the future to restore pre-war Jewish cultural life and to study the terrible tragedy of the Jewish community in Poland…
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