(JTA) — She speaks only Japanese and is not entirely sure what country she’s in, but 18-year-old Haruna Matsui is happy to stand in the rain for an hour with two friends to see the home of a person she has never met yet nonetheless considers her soul mate. “We visited Paris and Brussels, so I…
Ralph Bakshi’s Best Jewish Moments from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo. I was on the phone with Ralph Bakshi when he told me who killed John F. Kennedy. Long story short: It was the mob. “With Johnson’s OK, I guess,” Bakshi said. “That’s my take on it. The fact that Kennedy got shot in the…
The first trailer is out for Ari Folman’s new film, “The Congress” (see here for background), and though I hate to say it, it’s a little disappointing. I’ve been looking forward to this movie for ages, mainly because it seems like the perfect creative pairing. Folman, in his 2008 film “Waltz With Bashir,” used groundbreaking…
Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror, is a somber one. Families and friends visit the graves of deceased loved ones, sad music plays all day on the radio, and special programming replaces regularly scheduled television shows. It doesn’t seem like the kind of day to be animated. But Beit…
In March 2012, teenage fashion writer Tavi Gevinson gave a TED talk bemoaning the lack of strong female characters in pop culture. “Strong,” she said, doesn’t mean “two dimensional super-women who maybe have one quality that’s played up a lot.” Rather, she argued, we need “strong characters who happen to be female.” In a recent…
With stadium seating and the scent of fresh popcorn in the air, the November 21 screening of “A Jewish Girl in Shanghai” could have taken place in any shopping mall cinema in the world. But there was nothing ordinary about the film itself, which is China’s first homegrown Jewish movie, and an animated one at…
Uri Fink, who 30 years ago created Israel’s first superhero, in the form of Sabraman, has a theory about why comic book superheroes have caught on only in America. “It’s naive just thinking people will go out and fight the bad guys out of the goodness of their hearts,” he told the Forward. “It’s Americans’…
When the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, he was asked whether he thought of himself as an American or a Russian writer. “I am Jewish — a Russian poet and an English essayist,” he replied. Born into a Jewish family in Leningrad in 1940, he was exiled…
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