The great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, chose cinema as his primary medium almost by default. A former dock worker who is now affectionately referred to as the “father of African cinema,” Sembene had already published several successful novels when he decided, at the age of 40,…
Counterfactual speculation about the Third Reich is at an all-time high. In recent weeks, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has claimed that German Jews could have resisted the Nazis more effectively if they had enjoyed access to guns. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that Adolf Hitler never would have ordered the murder of…
Everyone should be able to agree on Sderot. Leftists, rightists, Jews, non-Jews. A small settlement of folks — unwanted by the countries they’d lived in for centuries, and thrown together in an inhospitable land within internationally accepted boundaries by the will of the central government — have combined to make a vibrant community whose musical…
If you’ve never felt deep depression or anxiety, “I Smile Back” is like a safari of despair. To your left, you will see a woman falling apart on the bathroom floor, to your right, a son suffering from anxiety, a family falling apart. Behind and ahead are daddy issues, drug addiction. Reckless and joyless sex…
Name-dropping alert! Fifteen years ago I was introduced to Phil Rosenthal by the legendary comedy writer/producer Norman Lear. I was a huge fan of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” which Phil created and executive produced for nine years and for which he won two Emmys, and he said he was a huge fan of my first book,…
Last week, the news came over the transom, hitting writers’ heads like a 3,000-pound sack of envy: Comedian Amy Schumer will be receiving $9 million for a volume of her memoirs. Even more disturbing was the fact that she’d already returned $1 million, an amount that 10 writers combined won’t earn in two lifetimes, to…
“How are you, Marty?” Jerry Lewis asked, sizing up his former director Martin Scorsese. “You’re not as tall as I thought you were.” His last words were clipped by a roomful of laughter, and the 89-year-old comedian, on hand for the Museum of the Moving Image and Comedy Hall of Fame discussion series “Iconic Characters…
When I met Chantal Akerman, the famed film director whose alleged suicide was reported on October 6, I told her I was going to steal her shit. I didn’t blurt it out exactly like that, but having just seen her film “D’est” projected on a big beautiful screen at Cornell Cinema in 1995, I was…
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, a daughter of Holocaust survivors known for her experimental films that closely examined women’s lives, has died in Paris. She was 65. French media reported that Akerman committed suicide. The date and cause are not yet known, according to the New York Times. Her parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, and her…
Jeffrey Tambor used to be that actor you saw everywhere but couldn’t place. No longer. In January, he won a Golden Globe in the Best Actor in a TV Series category, for his performance as Maura Pfefferman, a Jewish father of three who comes out as transgender, in Amazon’s “Transparent.” In September he took home…
On a spring day in 1956, Rabbi Robert E. Goldburg paid a visit to Marilyn Monroe’s New York City apartment. Before the 30-year-old actress tied the knot with playwright Arthur Miller that summer, she wanted to convert to Judaism. In a neatly typed letter set inside a display case at the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit…
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