‘We lament the loss of the treasures of the library at Alexandria, and the great step back in knowledge it entailed. The same thing will happen if we lose the music of the concentration camps. It’s an imaginary library that may never materialize.” Walking the narrow streets of the decaying industrial city of Barletta in…
The youngest person saved by German industrialist Oskar Schindler has died. Leon Leyson, who Schindler called “Little Leyson,” died of lymphoma on Jan. 12 in Whittier, Calif., at 83, the Los Angeles Times reported. Leyson was 13 when he went to work at Schindler’s factory in Krakow, Poland, where he had to stand on a…
“He,” a somber Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise intoned after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, “is a sin-offering for our iniquities.” This sentiment, expressed in a black-draped congregation in Cincinnati, was echoed in countless other memorial services across the North. Peace had been declared but days before; now, synagogues recited the Kaddish for the fallen president….
My suspicion that Steven Spielberg can’t really do historical films isn’t anything new, although the fact that he keeps trying shows at least how ambitious he can be. Conversely, the fact that he keeps failing, at least in my opinion, may point to a wider incapacity on the part of his audience, meaning you and…
Monika Hertwig remembers leaving a screening of Schindler’s List suffering from shock. “I kept thinking this has to stop, at some point they have to stop shooting, because if it doesn’t stop I’ll go crazy right here in this theatre,” she told the BBC this week. Hertwig’s not a daughter of Holocaust survivors. She’s not…
The Polish-born Jew who typed up Schindler’s list is being buried today in Augsburg, Germany, where flags will fly at half-mast in his honor. Mietek Pemper, who typed the names of more than 1,000 Jews saved by the ethnically German industrialist, was 91, and had lived in Augsburg since 1958, working as a consultant and…
It’s a staple of Hollywood and European cinema, and now a Holocaust movie is being shot in China. Xinhua, the country’s official news agency, reports that production will soon begin on “The Melanie Violin,” a drama about a Jewish musician who flees Europe for Shanghai and falls for a local love interest. The film will…
Saul Austerlitz is the author of “Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy.” His blog posts are appearing this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series please visit: Being on tour for a book is simultaneously…
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