Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree I don’t know about you, but these days, when my mailbox bulges with solicitations from just about every non-profit organization known to man, I can’t help but wonder whether there might be another way to go about it. The history of fundraising, after all, is the history of innovation….
Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically…
It doesn’t take long to work out that Woody Allen’s latest film, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” is about the merits and limits of delusion. The film is structured like a high school term paper, à la: this will be a film about deluded people; here are some deluded people; this has been…
It’s no secret that Woody Allen has a deep disaffection for organized religion. And it definitely ain’t a secret that Judaism, the filmmaker’s born religion, is the most frequent target of his jokes. (Here’s my personal favorite, from “Zelig”: “I’m 12 years old. I run into a synagogue. I ask the rabbi the meaning of…
Talk about the pot calling the kettle all sparkly and shining. Woody Allen went on record this past weekend at the Cannes Film Festival defending fellow filmmaker Roman Polanski. Polanski, who has been under house arrest in Switzerland since September and who faces possible extradition to the U.S., pleaded guilty in 1977 to statutory rape…
On March 22, I went to a “Serious Night” party at B’nai Emet synagogue, in St. Louis Park, MN where the bar mitzvah scenes as well as some others in the Coen brothers film “A Serious Man” were filmed. One of the audience members recounted his query to one of the Coen brothers asking why…
In a second season episode of Larry David’s HBO comedy series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry is caught whistling a Wagner tune outside of a film premier and is accused of being a self-hating Jew. On the show it’s all for laughs; “I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish!” Larry…
Although Shabbetai Zevi naturally gets most of the attention, Jewish history has been marked by a series of impostors. On February 16, Bloomsbury USA publishes a collection by the late New Yorker reporter St. Clair McKelway, “Reporting at Wit’s End,” which includes the complete 1968 book “The Big Little Man from Brooklyn” about the Jewish…
100% of profits support our journalism
