Paul Newman directed a pioneering, independent film shot at a Yiddish theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and you’ve probably never heard of it, much less had a chance to see it. It was never released beyond a short run, in 1962, for an Oscar nomination that it never got. Newman’s biographers apparently have never…
Revisiting many of Paul Newman’s films for a story about his first directorial effort, “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco,” one thematic constant stays so clear it’s as if he’d made them for the purpose of stressing it: The search for principles to steer by as a man making one’s way through the world. 1) The…
Growing up, many girls have a Prince Charming in mind. So did I. I knew exactly that I wanted to marry a handsome, Jewish boy one day. I was determined that he should not only be clever and well-educated, but also funny — and look like Paul Newman in Exodus, where he plays the Jewish…
Most people know Chaim Topol as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” But to a group of sick Jewish and Arab children in the Galilee, Topol is their biggest cheerleader. Israel’s first international movie star was instrumental in the creation of the Jordan River Village, a camp for children with serious and life-threatening illnesses. He…
Admirers of the 79-year-old filmstar Piper Laurie, especially her three Oscar-nominated performances in “The Hustler” (1961), “Carrie” (1976) and “Children of a Lesser God” (1986), may not know about the abiding importance of Yiddishkeit to her achievements. Laurie, born Rosetta Jacobs in Detroit in 1932, makes this aspect of her life and art evident in…
This week marks an important milestone for Kevin Youkilis, a star hitter for the Boston Red Sox of baseball’s American League. I bring this up not primarily because of its significance for baseball, about which I know little, but rather because it is the latest clue in an ever-widening mystery, namely the intense but seldom-discussed…
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