Photo: Larson Harley A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. As the musicians began playing the first strains of Sergei Prokofiev’s classic children’s symphony, “Peter and the Wolf,” on the stage of the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan on March 15, the hundreds of children in the large, awe-inspiring sanctuary stopped their…
Joel and Ethan Coen, the American filmmaker brothers, will be the first co-presidents of the jury for this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the organizers said on Tuesday. The Coen brothers, who made “Fargo,” “Barton Fink” and “No Country for Old Men,” replace Australian filmmaker Jane Campion, who was last year’s president. The jury will choose…
A film festival in Vietnam will mark 20 years of diplomatic relations with Israel. The five-day festival organized by Israel’s embassy opens Saturday at the National Cinema Centre in Hanoi, moving on Nov. 6 to the BHD Star Cineplex ICON68 in Ho Chi Minh City, the embassy announced on its Facebook page earlier this week….
Eric Clapton headlined the fifth annual Life Festival in Oswiecim, Poland late this month. Yes, you read that right. Eric Clapton just played Auschwitz. Well, kind of. The Oswiecim Life Festival started in 2010, and was created by Darek Maciborek, a radio DJ, who wanted to change the negative associations brought up by his hometown….
Amid fresh warnings of anti-Semitism in Hungary, some 100,000 Jews from across Europe are expected to attend Budapest’s largest-ever Jewish Summer Festival. The week-long cultural festival, which opened Saturday, is being hosted for the 16th year running by the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, or MAZSIHISZ, and co-organized by the Israeli Jewish Congress. “Part of…
In the sultry darkness of a summer night, a tall, skinny figure with close-cropped hair and a purple T-shirt threaded through a beer garden during Krakow’s Jewish Culture Festival, the annual nine-day extravaganza of performance, exhibition, debate and intensive interaction that for a quarter of a century now has been a catalyst of Krakow’s Jewish…
Heading north to Montreal this summer? If you’re not, you should be. Aside from being the three months out of the year when the city doesn’t look like a snow globe, summertime is festival time in Montreal. From June until mid-September, the newly laid-out Place des Festivals is aglow with lights, sounds, crowds, music and…
Apparently Auschwitz, symbol of the Final Solution and gravesite to over two million Jews, is now a hot concert venue. Last weekend marked the third annual Life Festival Oświęcim 2013, which seeks “to build peaceful relations beyond cultural and state borders where there is no place for anti-Semitism, racism, and other forms of xenophobia,” according…
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