Charlton Heston as Moses. Johnny Depp as Tonto. Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi. Laurence Olivier as Othello. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. All white actors who have played non-white characters on the big screen. And now Christian Bale has joined their ranks, playing Moses in Ridley Scott’s upcoming biblical blockbuster, “Exodus.” The film, which tells the…
‘Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, ‘Choose lambs for yourselves, for each family, and slaughter the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood which is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood which is in the…
Like it or not — and who among us actually likes it — come April 15, you will need to have filed your 2013 income tax return with the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps one way to feel better about the painful and often inconvenient process is to recognize that it has roots in the biblical…
Well, rankings of the world’s most famous people from the past 6,000 years are in. Israeli-born actress Natalie Portman has beat out Ariel Sharon, Moses has an ever-so-slight lead over Muhammad and Jesus Christ is apparently the world’s number one Jew. The project, an endeavor of the Macro Connections group at MIT’s media lab, includes…
In the decades since a bunch of British Jews created Limmud, its model of volunteer experts offering a pluralistic smorgasbord of Jewish teachings, arts offerings and performances has turned into a worldwide movement. But through all these years, the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom has never attended Limmud in the country where it all…
On the 17th of Tammuz, which will be observed as a fast day on June 25 this year, Moses smashed the Ten Commandments on the foot of Mount Sinai after hearing the sounds of and seeing the idolatrous celebrations devoted to the Golden Calf. The idea, presumably, was that the bovine abomination was so atrocious…
“Les Miserables” is an epic tale of suffering, oppression, and one man’s quest to find himself. Is it just me, or have we heard that story before? No, sadly, Victor Hugo was not a secret Jew. But Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, who wrote the lyrics of the famous musical, are. Schönberg was born in…
By now, I suspect that most Forward readers are aware that Herman Wouk, at the ripe old age of 97, has just published a novel called “The Lawgiver,” whose plot hinges on the efforts of an assorted band of characters to produce a movie based on the life of Moses. Determined to outdo Cecil B….
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