Mohammad Bakri, the famed Israeli-born Palestinian actor and filmmaker, is, like many Israelis in the age of coronavirus, stranded abroad. Bakri is in Tunisia, where he was shooting his newest film when the pandemic hit. Tentatively titled Leila Toghader Rouha (Leila abandons her soul,) the film tells the story of a young Syrian girl forced…
No handshakes. No Italian abbracci (hugs) and certainly no French bises (kisses on the cheek). Be sure to keep your distance from others. As the novel coronavirus continues ravaging the planet, actor George Takei, who rose to fame playing Sulu on “Star Trek,” has an idea for an acceptable greeting that won’t spread the deadly…
Anti-war messages, as much electric guitar riffs, are a common theme of rock musicals from “Hair” to “American Idiot.” It’s no surprise that Israel has a peacenik rock opera, too, but you may find yourself bewildered by what it has to say. Keren Yedaya’s “Red Fields” (2019), which opens the New York Sephardic Film Festival…
The obituaries of Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas uniformly recount some of Douglas’s — and Hollywood’s — greatest films: “Spartacus,” “Paths Of Glory,” “Out Of the Past,” “Ace In the Hole,” “Lust For Life. Yet, when I think of a quintessential Kirk Douglas film it is not of any of those, but his now largely forgotten…
We meet the killer as he’s cleaning tombstones. While he scrapes and sponges, his radio broadcasts Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s historic Rose Garden speech announcing the signing of the first Oslo Accord. When his work is done, he leaves to join protests against the peace plan in Tel Aviv. It’s 1993. In two years, this…
A radical Zionist Chicago newspaperman, a Belfast-born translator and a literary adapter par excellence. These were the first Jews who won Oscars at the inaugural Academy Awards in 1929. The three men — writers Ben Hecht and Benjamin Glazer and director Lewis Milestone — were connected by more than heritage. Working in the still-new world…
Editor’s note: Today is Neil Diamond’s 79th birthday. To mark the occasion, we’re revisiting this essay about the part the singer-songwriter played in one of Jewish cinema’s most peculiar moments. On October 6th 1927, the original film production of “The Jazz Singer” made its world premiere at the Warners’ Theatre in midtown Manhattan. (I know,…
Editor’s Note: A.A. Milne, the creator of the “Winnie-the-Pooh” stories was born on this day in 1882. To commemorate his birthday, we look back at the Jewish elements in his work. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories have delighted youngsters for over 90 years, as have their numerous spinoffs as TV shows, cartoons, holiday specials, movies and,…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The first episode of the third season of the hit Israeli drama “Fauda” was viewed by Israelis about 1 million times in the 48 hours after it first aired. The Israeli drama, in Hebrew and Arabic, received a 12.6 percent share of viewers during its debut on Thursday night, according to a…
In honor of Kirk Douglas’s 103rd birthday, we reprint this tribute to the movie legend who was born Issur Danielovich to immigrant parents. Kirk Douglas, who turns 100 on December 9, is both a movie legend and a Hollywood anomaly: a star divided. Most stars lodge in our collective consciousness. Douglas, while a first-magnitude star,…
“Motherless Brooklyn” is the “La La Land” of noir, a work of exacting, exhausting competence that tries to summon the spirit of midcentury Hollywood films by recreating them shot for shot and trope for trope. Some things you’ll find in it: raincoated sleuths silhouetted by streetlights; garish neon mirrored in murky puddles; a pinstriped powerbroker…
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