REEL LIFE: In a banner year for documentaries, yet another gem emerges –– ‘Dziga and His Brothers,’ by Yevgeni Tsymbal, center. Other films include, from left to right, ‘Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust,’ ‘Alila’ and ‘Kafka Goes to the Movies.’ This year’s New York Jewish Film Festival features a variety of…
JERUSALEM — Israel’s right wing is gearing up for a confrontation with the government in the coming days, in the wake of Prime Minister Sharon’s decision this week to start removing so-called illegal Jewish settlement outposts in the West Bank. Sharon announced on Sunday that he had decided to remove four outposts, out of an…
Every night Mr. Schwartzman opens his Lazarus eyes and looks around at the dead eyeballs, broken fingers and mouths stuffed with screams. His five dead children ride a carousel round the inside of his cracked dreams, each a continent, a resume filed at Auschwitz. For piano lessons, I write his letters to a dead older…
Jacqueline Donado, managing editor of the New York-based Spanish-language newspaper El Diario La Prensa, has seen many Spanish papers pop up in the city. “There are monthly, biweekly, weeklies, dailies,” Donado said. “There are Mom and Pop newspapers…. [There are] papers that are going by nationality; there is one for taxi drivers, one for elevator…
A New York Times article last month about the Jewish community of Istanbul contained a description of its oldest synagogue, the Ahrida, which was untouched by the recent bombings. The synagogue’s “main feature,” the Times observed, “is its teva, or pulpit, which is shaped like an ark. Some people say it was built to commemorate…
He has hung out with Dizzy Gillespie, played piano with the Rolling Stones, written three books, hosted national radio and television shows, co-run a jazz record label, produced albums by top jazz and pop performers and composed a Grammy-nominated film score. But what’s tickling Ben Sidran’s ivories these days is the Ben Minkoff Volunteer Service…
The melody was exactly the same. And the scene couldn’t have been much more familiar: Families sat at tables set with napkins, cups and menorahs. Some adults fiddled with matches as the rest of those gathered enthusiastically recited the first blessing. But it was not a blessing they were singing — well, not if a…
Politics by Other Means: The secret of our success, goes an old CIA proverb, is the secret of our success. The essence of the adage, to judge by recent public criticism of the intelligence community, has been lost on the agency’s fellow spooks over at the Defense Department. For much of the last year, the…
Al Grand is not unknown to readers of Der Vinkl. On numerous occasions, we have carried his Yiddish translations of the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, aka the Savoyards. Recently, he sent us the following fascinating story about a Bing Crosby conference he attended last year. “Panelist Irving Saposnik,” he wrote, “read a paper titled…
WJC Meets With Envoy The World Jewish Congress has met at the State Department with America’s newly confirmed special envoy for Holocaust issues to request that funds from Holocaust restitution agreements be used to fight antisemitism. In the meeting with the envoy, Ambassador Ed O’Donnell, the WJC’s governing board’s chairman, Israel Singer, said he asked…
“When I was at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts,” recalled Kirk Douglas at the November 24 American Legacy Foundation dinner at Cipriani 42nd St., “I met Lauren Bacall. She was a beautiful 16-year-old…. I was a poor boy. I had no raincoat…. Her uncle gave me an overcoat that I wore for two years….
