Against a red background, a featureless white head, lacking its crown, opens to reveal a set of white steps descending into a black cavern. A man in profile, the barest combination of ivory skin and black robe, stares down into the almost pleading sockets of a skull in his hands. A shining, simple crown hovers…
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner recommended in a visit last week to an elementary school in the shanty town of Lugano that the students read “The Merchant of Venice,” with its anti-Semitic portrayal of a vengeful Jewish moneylender, to understand Argentina’s economic troubles. Following the visit, the president continued to tweet the recommendation, appearing to try…
About a third of the way into “A Happy End” — Iddo Netanyahu’s play about a Jewish physicist’s family that naively chooses to remain in Berlin in the 1930’s — there’s a brief discussion about the impossibility of simultaneity. Young Hans Erdman reveals to his parents, Mark and Leah Erdman, that his anti-Semitic high school…
Incongruous as it may initially sound, “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s immortal line from “Romeo and Juliet” lies at the core of Matt Ogens’s endearingly offbeat documentary “Meet the Hitlers.” In the play, Juliet Capulet famously raises the question to declare that the stigma associated with the surname of her lover, Romeo Montague, will not…
Tongues have been clicking in the Orthodox world about the U.S. debut of Eve Annenberg’s feature film “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” (which I previously wrote about for the Forward here), but the New York Jewish Film Festival screening on January 16 at Lincoln Center sold out quickly and the Hasidic dropouts-turned actors who star…
Culminating over a year of 80th birthday commemorations, the Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim recently had a Manhattan theater named after him. Yet a self-annotated volume of his lyrics due out October 29 from Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, “Finishing the Hat,” still seethes with resentment. The book’s subtitle, “Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments,…
Pacino talking in a husky smokers accent, Pacino accepting an Oscar… Pacino shuckling in the back of a Hasidic shul in Brooklyn? Definitely, not something you’d expect. But the actor was spotted in Brooklyn Hasidic Borough Park neighborhood davening and eating cheesecake early last week, according to a post on the Wall Street Journal’s blog….
The Globe and Mail recently wrote up the latest in the endless “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays” conspiracy theories. This time, though, instead of the usual protestations that the writer must have been a member of the nobility, there’s a new twist. It’s been written up in The Oxfordian, a journal dedicated to disproving Shakespeare’s…
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