President Barack Obama will embrace Jewish history while skirting the morass of West Bank settlements when he visits Israel this week – a selective itinerary laden with diplomatic signals. The tour, running from Wednesday to Friday, is meant to warm Israelis to the cool-tempered, second-term Democratic leader who is prodding their rightist prime minister, Benjamin…
“It Is No Dream” is a biographical documentary about the life of Theodor Herzl. The good news is it isn’t a nightmare, either. Filmmaker Richard Trank does a better-than-decent job telling the story of the father of Zionism. He integrates contemporary footage of places where Herzl lived and visited with archival footage in an interesting…
The German Jewish graphic artist Hermann Struck (1876-1944), who emigrated to the Holy Land in 1922, was famed for the multiple portraits which he created of Theodor Herzl. But he was more than just a pioneering artist before Israel’s statehood was declared. A small, well-chosen exhibit, Hermann Struck in Galilee, was on view at the…
Three central Jewish thinkers, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz were all profoundly inspired by the medieval legend of Tannhäuser, a knight and poet who worshipped the goddess Venus. Herzl and Peretz were also fans of the 1845 opera based on this legend, by the notoriously anti-Semitic Richard Wagner. This paradox is explored…
I think it’s time we faced up to the hard truth about Louis Pasteur. The famed 19th century French scientist was a rank bigot. He’s been getting a free ride for too long, and it’s got to stop. The evidence is shocking but undeniable. It seems that while Pasteur was supposedly devoting his career to…
Denis Lachaud is a multitalented French actor, playwright, and novelist. One of his previous novels for young adult readers, “I am Learning German” from Les éditions Actes Sud in 1998, investigated how, for a French boy of German extraction whose parents refused to discuss the Second World War, learning an ancestral language could be a…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Three cheers for Tel Aviv! Recently, the Lonely Planet travel guide singled out the Mediterranean entrepot as one of its top 10 cities for 2011. “Tel Aviv is the total flipside of Jerusalem, a modern Sin City on the sea,” it noted, adding that “hedonism is the one religion…
Earlier this week, Lavie Tidhar wrote about Jewish vampires and Hebrew punks and searching for Osama. His new novel, “An Occupation of Angels,” is now available. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on…
100% of profits support our journalism
