Is Adam Sandler’s next movie going to be about parking cars? Russian Jewish oligarch Roman Abramovich needs an entire island to house his art collection. Read an exerpt of Alfred Kazin’s journals, to be published this spring by Yale University Press. Michael Chabon has been elected director of The MacDowell Colony. How enigmatic Israeli music…
A new book fails to exonerate Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. What accounts for the enduring fame of Walter Benjamin? And why isn’t Moses Mendelssohn similarly remembered? Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” has won the prize for best film at the European Film Awards, while Samuel Maoz’s “Lebanon” took home two other awards. Read new fiction…
John Semley goes behind the scenes of “Barney’s Version.” I profile musician, filmmaker, photographer and folk revivalist John Cohen. Glenn C. Altschuler reviews a new book about Harry Gold, a “disciplined, smart, lonely, pathetic and oddly appealing” Soviet spy. Benjamin Ivry takes a fresh look at the polarizing French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Philologos elucidates the…
Casting has begun for an Israeli version of Sex and the City. The latest issue of Jewish Quarterly features articles on Charlie Chaplin, Bob Dylan, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and Prostitution in Yiddish Song. At ZEEK, Louis Greenspan re-discovers Jewish philosopher Salomon Maimon. The New York Times discovers KlezKamp. Ingrid Pitt, a British horror movie…
Stephen Hazan Arnoff reviews two new books on Bob Dylan. Joshua Furst goes to see the current revival of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” Philologos tries out Cockney rhyming slang. Benjamin Ivry watches the films of documentarian and social critic Frederick Wiseman. Gerald Sorin examines a collection of new American Jewish fiction. Devra Ferst looks…
The L.A. Times explores Jordan’s premiere destination for banned books. The Wire creator David Simon talks about his father Bernard Simon, a “professional Jew” and the public relations director of B’nai B’rith for more than 20 years. New York’s Kehila Kedosha Janina is the last Greek synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. Philip Glass is writing…
Leigh Kamping-Carder tells the story of the Mexican Suitcase, a collection of photographs from the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour that got lost in Mexico for almost 70 years. Ilan Stavans wonders why we can’t escape from Harry Houdini. Shoshana Olidort reviews Avi Steinberg’s “Running the Books: The Adventures…
Omar Souleyman is a singer from Hasakah, Syria, who plays a techno-ish version of dabke, an Arabic folk music usually heard at weddings. He performs in a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh, dark glasses, and a moustache. Not the most likely artist to take the American hipster-indie music scene by storm, you say? Think again. Now on…
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