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, I know — seems like just yesterday, right?) Though difficult to sit through these days, even without the segments where Al Jolson appears in blackface, “The Jazz Singer” nevertheless continues…
Israeli director-writer Hagai Levi is the creative force behind such major international successes as “In Treatment” and “The Affair.” His latest project, currently airing on HBO, is a five-part reimagining of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” the seminal 1973 Swedish miniseries about the slow but inexorable disintegration of a marriage. Levi’s version is intense,…
I grew up in a house with a framed cocktail napkin signed by Jerry Seinfeld and every episode of his sitcom taped on VHS. All this is to say that I have a long history of welcoming the man into my home and am pretty familiar with the layout of the “Seinfeld” apartment. That said,…
Some people enter the world with a spasm of life, commanding attention as they jerk their way into existence. Kinda like how Kramer bursts into a room, only probably with more medical equipment and less studio audience applause. On Wednesday, a baby boy made one such entrance — at least if his name, like Moses…
(JTA) — In the woods of northern Ukraine, construction workers have built an island in time: a shtetl. That’s the Yiddish word for the type of old-fashioned Jewish towns that existed throughout Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. This new shtetl, comprising 18 buildings on more than an acre of land near the lakeside town of…
After ordering tongue sandwiches and “an assortment of pickles” at a Miami deli, the terminally ill Meyer Lansky asks his handpicked biographer why he wants to write his story. “I don’t think it’s about one man,” says David Stone, the author of a well-received book on John F. Kennedy and a newly single father of…
Nearly 28 years ago Conan O’Brien filmed himself walking to his first day of work. Along the way, his doorman, hopscotching children and a horse and buggy driver, reminded him he was under “a lot of pressure” and threatened that “he better be good.” O’Brien, an accomplished writer for “SNL” and the “The Simpsons,” but…
When Caroline Link reread “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit,” decades after she first read it for school, she underlined a passage where Swiss boys throw gravel at the young Jewish protagonist. She couldn’t wait to direct that scene. It’s a curious, if not quite startling moment in the chapter book, a 1971 semi-autobiographical novel of…
Far too often, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is used to justify an attitude he never held: complacency. Whenever there is a civil rights anniversary or friction in white Jewish and Black relations, Heschel, a leading rabbinical luminary in the mid-century, is the go-to stand-in for the entire Jewish community. His march through Selma with Martin…
Editor’s Note: Paul Newman would have celebrated his 96th birthday today. To commemorate that date, we’re taking another look at this essay about the Anton Chekhov film he directed on the stage of a Yiddish theater. Paul Newman directed a pioneering, independent film shot at a Yiddish theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and you’ve…
“An Officer and a Spy,” Roman Polanski’s 2019 movie about the Dreyfus Affair, is spare, modern and steeped in controversy. If it weren’t for the horses and high boots, you’d forget you’re watching the past. If it weren’t for the fact that Polanski directed it, you would have seen it by now. The movie does…
