JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
As a high school English teacher who writes poetry in her free time, I read a poem a day at the start of each class period. Last September, I read poems by Emma Lazarus, because students were going to be writing an essay about her famous sonnet “The New Colossus.” When I introduced her to…
There’s an old Yiddish expression my Lower East Side grandmother Ida was fond of: “When luck happens, offer it a seat.” Luck happened. My family has been loyal customers of Moscot Eyewear for nearly 100 of its 100 years; my bespectacled elderly father will buy from no one else, and my grandparents bought there when…
The Cannes film festival conjured up the “Roaring Twenties” on Wednesday with a glamorous opening night premiere of Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby”, complete with dancers in flapper dresses on the red carpet and umbrellas to keep off the rain. Nicole Kidman, a member of the jury at the biggest cinema gathering of the year,…
Every generation gets the film version of “The Great Gatsby” it deserves. Ours will be a 3-D “Gatsby” directed by Baz Luhrmann — he of the hyperactive, swooping camera of “Moulin Rouge!” and the highly stylized, gaudy adaptation of “Romeo + Juliet.” But like every previous “Gatsby” adaptation, this one will speak with just the…
Elizabeth Gaither and Jared Nelson in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ Photo by Steve Vaccariello. F. Scott Fitzgerald — who dubbed the 1920s “the Jazz Age” — would surely approve. This week, jazz clarinetist and composer Billy Novick and his band, the Blue Syncopators, will play Novick’s score for The Washington Ballet’s production of “The Great Gatsby”…
Shooting is under way on the new Hollywood version of “The Great Gatsby,” and director Baz Luhrmann has made several interesting choices, including casting. The Australian director behind “Moulin Rouge” has cast Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan in the role of Meyer Wolfsheim, a shady Jewish character based on real-life criminal Arnold Rothstein, whose most infamous…
