The Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor includes 14 pages of jokes on death, so when Buddy Hackett passed away in Malibu at age 79 last week, the chapel at Hillside Memorial in Culver City was packed with every comedy icon that hadn’t booked a Fourth of July gig out of town. Sid Caesar sat up front…
State of Siege [Users Manual] By Doron Goldenberg Gefen Publishing, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Several weeks ago, I gave a reading at a cafe in Jerusalem. One woman there — a friend of a friend — had dark, curly hair and wore a blue sweater. At least, I think it was blue, though…
Eitan Gorlin’s “The Holy Land,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at 2002’s Slamdance Film Festival, makes its New York debut. The film is set in 1999 and follows a rabbinical student in Israel whose teacher has instructed him to visit a prostitute in order to relieve his sexual curiosity. Mendy moves to Jerusalem, where…
Benjamin Ish-Shalom and Elazar Stern are the quintessential odd couple. Professor Ish-Shalom, dressed formally in a suit and tie with wire-rim glasses, sideburns and slightly disheveled hair, looks every bit the academic. The founder and rector of Beit Morasha of Jerusalem: The Academic Center for Jewish Studies and Leadership, Ish-Shalom speaks with the precision of…
The season for paradox has come when two become one yet remain distinctive when our little enclave overflows with reminiscences and happy wishes and we bask in familiar voices and all is friendliness. The complex self is now suspended for this is a day for a rondo a jig a romp ….whatever, a day for…
“Let the world know who writes the songs!” proclaimed Hal David, chairman and CEO of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, at the June 12 Induction Ceremony & Awards Presentation of the National Academy of Popular Music. “Often the songwriters’ genius goes unrecognized by the public,” said Martin Bandier, chairman and CEO of EMI Music and…
An article in last week’s Forward on the sentencing of Robert Goldstein for allegedly planning to bomb a mosque in Florida inadvertently misrepresented the target of a search by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The bureau found explosives in Goldstein’s townhouse, not in his lawyer’s home. Ralph P. Slone is the founder…
Reader Paul Malevitz of Los Angeles has a shayle about the word shayle. He writes:In the Yiddish spoken in the territories of the former USSR, northeastern Poland and most of Rumania, we pronounce the words for “meat and bones” as fleysh un/in beyner [“ey” being the linguistic notation for the vowel in a word like…
OMAHA, Neb. — Aaron Pollak looks back fondly on his childhood on the prairie. He recalls bicycling over Omaha’s rolling hills, walking on the Old Market’s cobblestone streets, playing at the JCC day camp and participating in the Jewish community. But there’s no beach in Omaha, no thriving nightlife. There aren’t any national parks nearby,…
Burberry raincoats, designer biscuits, health insurance and therapy just aren’t enough for some canines. Fidos and Fifis are now bounding — or being dragged? — up the evolutionary ladder. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s leading whom. So why stop at “member of the family” when there’s “member of the tribe”? Enter the “Bark Mitzvah.”…
It may mean bubkes to some, but oy, does it mean a lot to others. This week, a major force in the American dictionary establishment recognized two of the Yiddish language’s most common slang words. Merriam-Webster released the 11th edition of its dictionary on Tuesday, and many readers were delighted to find in it the…
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