I can think of three popular ideas about what God actually looks like: the bearded man wearing a white robe who sits on a cloud deciding when to make earthquakes and who sometimes shows up in a burning bush; George Burns in “Oh God!” and, long before he actually played God in “Bruce Almighty,” many…
When Sami Rohr was a young real estate developer living in Bogotá, Colombia, in the 1950s, fundraisers from abroad often came to collect money from the local Jewish community. While Rohr donated to all of them, and encouraged his employees to do the same, emissaries from the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement impressed him more than others….
When I first heard the music from “A Chorus Line,” I immediately declared it the best musical ever written. This was perhaps a bold claim for a 9 year old to make: I didn’t know who Marvin Hamlisch was, or that the musical had won him the Pulitzer Prize, or that it had been the…
Judith Crist, a popular American film critic whose acerbic commentary helped herald a new era of film critics at newspapers and media outlets across the United States, died on Tuesday. She was 90. Her son, Steven Crist, said his mother died in New York after a long illness. She was born Judith Klein to parents…
Marvin Hamlisch, the composer who wrote the scores for dozens of movies and a half-dozen or so Broadway shows and won Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize, has died in Los Angeles. He was 68. The musical creative force behind the films “The Sting” and “The Way We Were” for which he…
Sami Rohr, a major philanthropist whose giving created and sustained hundreds of Chabad Lubavitch houses around the world, died at the age of 86. Rohr, who died Sunday in South Florida and was buried Tuesday in Jerusalem, reportedly gave some $250 million to Jewish causes, especially Jewish education and culture, throughout the world through his…
Ulrike Hessler, the first woman to be appointed intendant of the historic, four-century old Saxon State Opera in Dresden, popularly known as the Semper Opera, died July 30 in Munich, after a 19-month battle with cancer. She was 57. I first met Hessler eight years ago, when she was the director of the press office…
My Facebook feed blew up last night with appreciative status updates in tribute to Nora Ephron. The burst of activity made me wonder whether everyone’s Facebook feed was full of Ephron’s urbane wit, or if things were quieter in places where people prefer NASCAR to Zabar’s. Today, the day after her untimely death from illness…
„לווייתן ברוח“ באַקענט דעם לייענער מיט באַקאַנטע ייִדישע פֿיגורן, ווי י. ל. פּרץ, ש. אַנ-סקי און חנא שמערוק
