“THE STATE OF ISRAEL IS UNDER ATTACK,” blares the headline in May’s Rue Morgue magazine. But the threat’s not coming from the usual suspects. This time, it’s zombies, serial killers and apocalyptic plagues that have the country on high alert. And it’s happening on the big screen. Israeli horror is finally coming into its own…
Nearly a half-century after making his first film — the Hasidic-inspired “Goldstein” — director Philip Kaufman is having a moment. MoMA recently hosted a weeklong retrospective of his work, from brainy pop (“The Right Stuff”) to high art (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”). Film scholar Annette Insdorf just published “Philip Kaufman” (University of Illinois Press),…
Since moving to Manhattan to launch his performing career 17 years ago, composer, playwright and actor Taylor Mac has graced stages from Sydney to Spoleto to San Francisco. But the Obie Award-winning artist has never been invited to perform uptown — until now. On May 24, at The JCC in Manhattan, Mac will premiere “Sleep…
Daniel Okrent has a punch line ready when he’s asked how he discovered “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” the Web-video-series-turned-book that became a viral sensation in 2009. “I became an old Jew,” said the esteemed historian, inventor of the fantasy game Rotisserie League Baseball and first public editor of The New York Times. Now, Okrent can…
By choosing Philip Kaufman (“Quills,” “Henry and June”) as the subject of her latest book, Columbia University Film School professor Annette Insdorf hasn’t just given his films an extreme close-up. With “Philip Kaufman” (University of Illinois Press), the first book-length study of the impossible-to-categorize director, Insdorf has also nominated Kaufman to the pantheon of cinema…
“Circumcision has been least challenging part.” “God chose. Said no. Now what? “Sunday night? Yes, lobster is kosher.” Millions of words, over thousands of years, have been written about the nature of the Jewish soul. But the most precise distillation of our people’s essence may have finally arrived in fewer characters than a tweet. “Six…
By day, as photo and film archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Jesse Aaron Cohen tends to thousands of images of bygone Jewish culture. By night, he’s half of the Brooklyn-based “existential pop” duo Tanlines, whose new album, “Mixed Emotions,” will sound “absolutely stupendous when you’re driving during the daytime with your windows…
At Marvel Comics, where he spent years as a group editor on “Spider-Man,” Danny Fingeroth worked closely with the costumed character’s conceptual father — the legendary Stan Lee. Fingeroth, now senior vice president of education at New York’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art,. Fingeroth, now senior vice president of education at New York’s Museum…
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