This year’s New York Film Festival will mark a major moment for Jewish film. The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which hosts the 56-year old festival, announced the festival’s main slate lineup on August 7. Filmmaker brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, 88-year old documentarian Frederick Wiseman and visual artist Julian Schnabel are on the bill…
Visual artist and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Julian Schnabel has donated one of his limited edition “Blind Girl Surf Club” surfboards to a charity auction in California for Surfers Healing: A Foundation For Autism. The black surfboard, which has a picture of a girl with a purple mark over her eyes on one side and “Blind…
Vanity Fair interviews comedian David Wain for the 10th anniversary of his cult comedy “Wet Hot American Summer.” The Smurfs have been said to be misogynist and anti-Semitic, but the screenwriter of the upcoming Smurfs movie is David Weiss, an Orthodox Jew. Natalie Portman named her child “Aleph.” Good grief. A new book looks back…
In the first of a two-part series, Lisa Traiger traces the growth of Israeli folk dancing from one dance — “Hora Agadati” in 1924 — to 4,678 in 2005. Jordana Horn surveys the career of the remarkable Moroccan-Israel actress Ronit Elkabetz, who was recently honored by the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival. Philologos is,…
Over the objections of the Israeli government and the American Jewish Committee, the United Nations yesterday hosted the American premiere of a movie sure to generate further controversy with its depiction of Israel’s 1948 founding. Based on a novel by Palestinian writer Rula Jebreal, “Miral” tells the stories of several Palestinian women over the course…
David Grossman has won the German Book Trade Peace Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Isaac Bashevis Singer comes to Carbondale, Illinois. As the music consultant for The Israeli Opera, Idan Raichel has chosen Vieux Farka Touré to open the new season on November 26. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in…
The Oscar-nominated director Julian Schnabel is preparing to shoot “Miral” on location in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Variety reports. The film, starring the Palestinian actress Hiam Abbas, is to be based on Rula Jebreal’s book about Hind Husseini — the founder of Jerusalem’s Dar Al-Tifl orphanage. “Miral” will be set between the years 1948…
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