Few American musicals have won more sustained audience devotion than “West Side Story,” the 1957 brainchild of an all-Jewish creative team. Playwright Arthur Laurents, choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, collaborated, despite sustained tensions, to produce a musical that has been staged around the world for six decades and inspired an…
This week brought the 2018 Oscar nominations, the single best outcome of which is that now everyone has good reason to use the brilliant photo, above, of nominee Agnes Varda eating an Oscar statuette. It’s applicable in every situation. Angry at the establishment? Consider munching on an Oscar. Trying to figure out who you want…
It’s shaping up to be a Jew-ish year at the Oscars, with chosen nominees in several of the major categories. But the recognition for other minority and oppressed groups — surprise attention in the top categories for “The Big Sick,” “Get Out,” and “Lady Bird” alongside the very Jewish “Call Me By Your Name” —…
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Hezbollah criticized the Lebanese government on Friday for allowing cinemas to screen Steven Spielberg’s film “The Post” despite calls for a ban because of the director’s links to Israel. The movie premiered in Beirut this week after Lebanon’s interior minister ruled against any ban. Activists in Lebanon had campaigned against the film…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Lebanon’s interior ministry has overturned a ban on screening the newspaper drama “The Post,” directed by Steven Spielberg. Lebanon’s censorship board had made the decision to ban the film based on a “boycott Israel” list, which Spielberg appears on since he shot some scenes from the 1993 film “Schindler’s List” in Jerusalem,…
Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Whether or not you have the holiday off, take some time this weekend to honor King’s legacy. Here’s a list of Jewish ways to celebrate the holiday — it’s from 2016, but still relevant! — but the best way to continue King’s work is to help address continuing…
I don’t want to be your token crazed liberal arts millennial, but the fact is that if Steven Spielberg had criticized Natalie Portman’s Golden Globes comment about the “all-male nominees” for best director, I would have have built a model of E.T. and burned it in effigy, and I would have demanded that you do…
(JTA) — A researcher says Mormons have posthumously baptized the late Lubavitcher rebbe, the grandparents of Carrie Fisher and Steven Spielberg, and hundreds of Holocaust victims, violating an agreement to halt the practice. Helen Radkey, a Salt Lake City-based independent researcher who has been looking into the Mormon practice of posthumous baptisms for two decades,…
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