For me, it started with a thrown penny. It clattered to the parking lot asphalt of the swim club I frequented as a child, and in my innocence I bent to pick it up, looking around to see who had lost it. Two teenage girls stared at me, giggling, and refused to take back the…
A major newspaper company has apologized for using Shylock as a clue for the answer “Jew” in a nationally syndicated crossword puzzle after the Anti-Defamation League said it was insensitive. Tribune Media Syndicate, which provides content to 4,000 outlets and reaches 10 million readers, said in its apology that appeared in newspapers on Sunday that…
The Austrian Jewish actor Fritz Kortner (1892-1970) is still a household name among German-speaking theater lovers, due to CD reissues of his readings, paperback reprints of his memoirs, and biographical tributes. Such was not always the case, as we learn from a fascinating essay, “Fritz Kortner on the Postwar Stage: The Jewish Actor as a…
The Independent takes a look at Habonim, the Socialist Zionist youth group that was once home to Mike Leigh, David Baddiel and Sacha Baron Cohen. The Brooklyn Rail revisits the work of Russian Jewish filmmaker Dziga Vertov, on the occasion of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Israeli singer Amir Benayoun (profiled in…
In Poland and Hungary, one of the largest cases of Nazi art theft remains unresolved. Jason Schwartzman loves being “Bored to Death.” Garry Shandling’s pioneering HBO sitcom “The Larry Sanders Show” is getting a revival on DVD. Al Pacino brings Shylock from Central Park to Broadway. Read a history of Israel’s modern dance movement. Egyptian…
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….
Back in March, I wrote an article about how a Native-American memory site was staging an exhibition devoted to Anne Frank. The display, at the Bosque Redondo State Monument in New Mexico, offered a chance to talk about the Jewish-Indian relationship more broadly, from 17th-century interactions with converso settlers to the Native-American embrace of the…
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