Saul Austerlitz
By Saul Austerlitz
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News From the Stage to the Page: Old-school Shtick
For Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson, creators of the hit play “Jewtopia,” the path to becoming published authors was murky at best. As they note, “We barely read books!” Nonetheless, their lack of familiarity with the reading process hardly kept the actors from penning a book of their own (a spin-off of their play), titled…
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Culture Border Crossing and Cross-dressing
In Tomer Heymann’s new documentary, “Paper Dolls,” opening September 6 at New York’s Film Forum, viewers are introduced to a group of transvestite Filipino workers in Tel Aviv, who perform in a cross-dressing group called the Paper Dolls. But the real cross-dresser here may be Heymann, who garbs his film in one set of clothing,…
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Culture Screening Chantal Akerman
For certain film buffs, Chantal Akerman is famous as the director of one of the screen’s most legendary endurance tests. Akerman’s masterpiece, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), as the precise title might indicate, is a remarkably focused three-and-a-half-hour study of the mundane routine of a Brussels housewife — the ultimate realist…
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Culture Lower East Side Story
Up from Orchard Street Eleanor Widmer Bantam, 400 pages, $23. * * *| Orchard Street: The name alone conjures images from the collective memory, snapshots of street peddlers, of rat-infested tenements, of aged scholars pacing the streets, their sidelocks rhythmically clapping against their ears. For readers of Jewish literature, the Lower East Side brings to…
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Culture Shattering a Peaceful Facade
The Attack By Yasmina Khadra Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 272 pages, $18.95. * * *| The comparisons are inevitable, so let’s get the ball rolling: Yasmina Khadra’s new novel, “The Attack,” is a successor of sorts to the 2005 art house hit, “Paradise Now.” Like Hany Abu-Assad’s mournful, despairing film, “The Attack” is an iconoclastic Muslim…
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Culture La Petite Jerusalem
Religious practice, especially of the Jewish kind, is often an iffy matter on screen. As dramatized in such recent films as “A Stranger Among Us” and “A Price Above Rubies,” Orthodox Judaism is rendered tantalizingly foreign. When the modern world intrudes in these films, as it inevitably does, the result is a clash of matter…
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Culture Iron-fisted in Politics, Velvet-gloved in Fiction
The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa Vladimir Jabotinsky, translated from the Russian by Michael R. Katz Cornell University Press, 203 pages, $17.95. * * *| The tradition of the statesman-writer is one with a long history — particularly in Britain, where Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill (winner of the 1953 Nobel…
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Culture SPIELBERG’S PREDECESSORS
“Munich” is not the first film to take on the subject of anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish terrorism. Here’s a selection of notable past works on the subject: “VISIONS OF EIGHT” (1973) — The official film of the Munich Olympics, directed by a slew of international directors, including Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa and Arthur Penn. Surprisingly, only…
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