Michael Bronski
By Michael Bronski
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News Death and Disaster in Georgia
And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank By Steve Oney Pantheon Books, 742 pages, $35. * * *| On August 16, 1915, Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman from the North who had been living and working in Atlanta, was snatched from a jail cell by 25…
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News What It Feels Like for a Boy
Sadness mixed with an audible sigh of relief in the reviews of Woody Allen’s latest film, “Anything Else.” While most critics agreed that this new romantic comedy — featuring “American Pie” star Jason Biggs in the traditional Woody Allen role — was nowhere near as disastrous as “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” or “Hollywood…
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News Jungle Fever, Minus the Heat
One of the great ironies of cultural criticism is that bad movies can illuminate important ideas or historical trends. Indeed, bad movies may even be better at doing this than good movies because good movies are more likely to seduce us into their world, leaving us less imaginative room outside of themselves in which to…
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News Too Much or Not Enough? Examining Jewishness on the Small Screen
The Jews of Prime Time By David Zurawik Brandeis University Press (Published by University Presses of New England), 256 pages, $29.95. * * *| Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom By Vincent Brook Rutgers University Press, 240 pages, $60. * * *| Was “Seinfeld” too Jewish or not Jewish enough for…
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News Remembering Gregory Peck, and a Not So Gentlemanly Agreement
The death of Gregory Peck on June 12 sparked extensive media commentary on how his film performances epitomized the best, most accepting, aspects of American culture. While almost all of the appreciations began by praising his Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch, a Southern lawyer defending an African-American man accused of raping a white woman in…
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News ‘Capturing the Friedmans’: A Shakespearean Tragedy on Long Island
It is difficult to imagine a documentary more emotionally excruciating than “Capturing the Friedmans.” Frederick Wiseman’s celebrated films “Titticut Follies” and “High School” may deftly and painfully expose the systemic negligence of social institutions, and a masterpiece such as Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” scorches hearts yet elevates us with its respect for history and truth. But…
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News Hidden: A Holocaust Documentary That Resists Easy Answers
There are many amazing aspects about Aviva Slesin’s “Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII,” a documentary that details the lives and memories of adults survivors who, as Jewish children, were taken in by gentile families during the years of the Holocaust. But perhaps most amazing are the things it is not. It…
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News Editor Roshan Tuned Radar as Long Island Teen
It’s an intriguing position,” mused Maer Roshan, “being a member of three distinct minority groups in the United States at this moment.” Roshan, the 36-year-old publisher and editor of Radar — one of the most eagerly anticipated new magazines to hit the newsstands in years — is talking about being Jewish, Iranian and gay. “Maybe…
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