Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Over the past half century or so, Israel has been associated in the public mind with lots of things, but movie-making has not been among them — at least not until recently. As the Forward observed this week, that’s about to change. Israel now harbors high hopes of becoming…
Jews across the world today will participate in the second-most-common spring ritual — lugging to work and parks brown-bag lunches filled with leftover turkey or brisket and some matzah. Last year at a local farm (a favorite spot for kids on spring break), a group of friends in Los Angeles set up a kind of…
During the Seder, some Jews have the custom of going around the table and imagining themselves as Hebrew slaves in Egypt during the Exodus. They describe their respective slave jobs — bricklayer, house slave, mortar mixer — and how they feel about their impending freedom. The game illuminates the Seder’s insistence that had God not…
Beshalach — When He Had Let the People Go Exodus 13:17–17:16 At the sea, after the danger of drowning has passed, after Israel has been saved and six hundred of Pharaoh’s elite charioteers has drowned in the sea, the scripture sums up the essence of the ancient faith in this fashion: “And the people feared…
Avrum Burg draws a number of distinctions in his analysis of parashat Bo. The core of his argument is that “Every struggle for freedom is a struggle to seize the mastery of time” and coordinate with this, and that “command of time is the essence of freedom.” A subsidiary argument contrasts in a similarly binary…
Bo – Go In Exodus 10:1–13:16 This week the story of the Exodus reaches its climax. The last plagues come down on Pharaoh and his house. The gates of Egypt are thrown open wide and “my people go.” Thus the Middle Eastern drama of days gone by, whose echoes still spark the imaginations and shape…
There must be something in the water. A week after The Shmooze noticed a minor surge in Noah’s ark-themed construction, it turns out that one of Hollywood’s biggest directors is floating a movie about the Biblical tale. Darren Aronofsky, an Oscar nominee earlier this year for “Black Swan,” wants to make a big-budget blockbuster about…
András Mezei (1930-2008) was a major Jewish-Hungarian poet who left behind a retrospective exploration of the Holocaust for our time. There are many voices speaking to us of terror, folly, greed, cruelty and absurdity, but Mezei’s poetry makes them sound like our own voices. His testimony has been published in England, in my translation, as…
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