Michael Bennett Cohn
By Michael Bennett Cohn
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Film & TV Why Steven Spielberg’s Promised Land Is Stuck In The 1980s
Steven Spielberg has said that he got into filmmaking mainly to defuse anti-semitism; to earn the respect and admiration that he couldn’t get as an isolated child. His quintessential success, “E.T.” (1982), is the story of his own childhood reconstructed, where the sensitive and cerebral daydreamer is vindicated by an otherworldly power. Anyone who says…
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Culture Why Westworld Is a 21st Century Golem Story
Adam, the first man, was, like Shakespeare’s MacDuff, not of woman born. But neither was he, from his mother’s womb, untimely ripped. He was created from dust, making him (according to the Talmud) the first golem. Probably not true, but significant. An origin story. Many golem stories followed. In the most famous ones, the golem…
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Film & TV This Movie Masterpiece Will Make You Rethink the Ten Commandments
In the spring of 1998, it seemed as if the meandering, directionless years of my life were over, and I was about to arrive in the promised land. I had been accepted to film school. USC sent me a list of films that I was to watch before classes started in the fall. Many were…
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Film & TV Why The New ‘Ben Hur’ Is the Least Successful Adaptation Of All
“Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ” was the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, beating out “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” There were a million copies printed of the 1913 edition, an American record at the time. It would stay on the top of the charts (just under the Christian bible) until “Gone With The Wind”…
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Culture Uri Geller and the Case of the Anti-Semitic Pokemon
Israeli impresario Uri Geller has claimed that extraterrestrials gave him the power to bend spoons with his mind. He also runs a humanitarian organization called International Friends of Magen David Adom (Red Star Of David). Sometime around 2000, kids started approaching Geller and asking him to autograph certain Pokemon cards. Apparently, there was a widespread…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Pokemon Go
Rav Ashi, the first editor of the Babylonian Talmud, once dreamed that he was having a conversation with Manasseh, a King of Judah who had died about a thousand years earlier. Ashi asked: “Since thou art so wise, why didst thou worship idols?” Manasseh replied, “Wert thou there, thou wouldst have caught up the skirt…
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Opinion Would Talmudic Rabbis Approve of Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Money?
During the Democratic presidential debate on the night of February 4, Hillary Clinton said to Bernie Sanders: “If you have something to say, say it.” She was referring to Sanders’s repeated indication that Clinton has compromised herself by taking money from Wall Street. Sanders did not answer directly, but he wasn’t dodging. He understood that…
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Culture How I Found Myself Living Out a 1980s Video Game
In 1984, my time was mostly divided among school, preparing for my bar mitzvah and playing Castle Wolfenstein on my family’s Apple II+. Castle Wolfenstein was a game about a prisoner escaping from a Nazi bunker. The bunker is labyrinthine, with multiple levels. I knew every inch of it. Everywhere there were guards, but they…
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