Image courtesy Cassis Films (JTA) — The idea for “Aya” began with a daydream: What if you were waiting for someone at the airport and instead you picked up a total stranger? What then? That wisp of a fantasy, dreamed up by Mihal Brezis many years ago while waiting with a friend at Tel Aviv’s…
Every year since 1963, Poland has submitted a movie for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Nine of the country’s past submissions have been shortlisted for the prize, and 2015 marks the 10th: “Ida,” a black-and-white film about a Polish nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) who discovers she is Jewish and that her parents were…
Awards season is here. I love it so much that I wish I were receiving an award myself. Seriously, I will accept any award, from any ceremony, in any category. “Where is my award?” I will ask, while watching my TV. But absent some miraculous occurrence whereby I am transported into another dimension in which…
(JTA) — If Damian Szifron’s “Wild Tales” (“Relatos Salvajes” in Spanish) wins an Academy Award on February 22 — it was nominated last week for Best Foreign Film — it will be Argentina’s third Oscar and the first for a film directed by an Argentine Jew. The film, which combines humor, suspense and violence, consists…
Wes Anderson’s whimsical film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” was nominated for nine Academy Awards Thursday morning, just days after winning the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical. Named one of the best films of the year by several top critics, it could earn Anderson, a director whose cult following has steadily grown over the…
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the nominations for the 87th Academy Awards. Winners will be revealed in Los Angeles on Feb. 22, when Neil Patrick Harris makes his debut as Oscars host. Leading the pack is Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel,” inspired by the writings of Austrian-Jewish novelist Stefan Zweig,…
Broadway star, Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning film and TV actor, folk singer, recording artist, radio host, raconteur, advocate for the arts, international human rights activist — Theodore Bikel has been all of these things and more over the course of his long and intensely rich career, and he’s still going relatively strong at the age…
I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir By Lee Grant Blue Rider Press, 480 pages, $28.95 Oscar-winning American Jewish actress Lee Grant is one of the rare performers (along with Zero Mostel) to have eventually triumphed over the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. She did so through a combination of fierce determination, zesty…
צוליב דעם וואָס ס׳רובֿ פּאַריזער אַשכּנזים שטאַמען פֿון פּוילן, קומט די ליטוויש־ייִדישע קולטור נישט אָפֿט צו רייד
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