Phew! It turns out you can oppose the so-called Ground Zero mosque and can keep your Justin Bieber poster. After a boycott of several days, the singer is back in the good graces of Andy Sullivan, an activist who launched the anti-Bieber campaign based on pro-mosque comments the 16-year-old allegedly made in an interview with…
The Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv is showing Andy Warhol’s Jewish portraits. Folk legend Pete Seeger supports a financial, but not an artistic boycott of Israel. “Hitler and the Germans,” an exhibit at Berlin’s German Historical Museum, is a huge hit. Also a huge hit in Germany: Israeli bands. Leonard Bernstein’s late…
Watching an actor burst into tears during a monologue, Hamlet marvels at how the performer inhabits the scene so deeply — if only he could evoke such dramatic feelings in real life, Hamlet reasons, he might save his kingdom. Thus inspired, Shakespeare’s hero rewrites the script of a play that dramatizes what’s wrong with his…
With Mideast peace talks right around the corner, the last thing Israel wants is the extension of an economic and cultural boycott — especially one carried out, in part, by its own citizens. In a signed letter sent to four major theater companies last week, over 50 Israeli actors and playwrights protested a decision to…
Crossposted from Haaretz The Melbourne International Film Festival is a marquee event on the cultural calendar of Australia, in what some would call the world’s most livable and multicultural city. Once again, it was struck by controversy with independent film makers threatening legal action if their own movie was not revoked from the set-list. The…
Earlier this spring Gorillaz, a British “virtual” rock sensation headed by Blur front-man Damon Albarn, canceled a show at Tel Aviv’s Pic.nic festival, along with British dance punk outfit Klaxons and American alt-rock pioneers The Pixies. Albarn never explicitly stated the reason for the cancellation, but it was widely speculated that the decision was linked…
The septuagenarian Israeli novelist and poetry translator Esther Orner would hardly seem threatening to anyone. Yet Orner, who has translated Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Shabtai into French, has become the center of a frantic dispute in France. The University of Provence, based in Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles, has just canceled a March 2011 colloquium, “Writing Today…
I sent Boychik off to his summer program in Israel with an extra $100 in his pocket and instructions to bring me back as much Ahava hand cream as that will buy. Ahava is my favorite — smells nice, absorbs quickly and does what it’s supposed to — but it’s too pricey here in the…
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