Iosefâs version of a âsafe spaceâ is a filthy, unheated Jewish dorm where students occasionally die of tuberculosis, or a lecture on a random topic in a hall where he can duck in and hide while running from his attackersâfor a full five minutes, until they find him and drag ...
The wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof is one of my favorite Jewish moments on film. The scene is drenched in family, nostalgia and an aching foreknowledge of the Holocaust. ...
On a bright September day, an unlikely trio met for lunch to discuss art, politics and culture. Having published an unauthorized biography of Woody Allen last year, I couldnât wait to have lunch with him for the first time. ...
Film icon Charlie Chaplin starred as the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator, a 1940 political satire that Chaplin wrote, produced and directed. The film, including Chaplinâs parody of Hitler, was a direct response to the Nazi Partyâs false assertion that Chaplin was Jewishâand the banning of all of his ...
For pure cheesy pleasure, Iâd go with The Ten Commandments, which frightened me so much as a child that I was actually taken out of the movie theater. Iâm tougher now and, besides ever since taking my own kids on the Paramount Pictures tour that explained how the filmmakers used ...
In Barbra Streisandâs musical Yentl, Nehemiah Persoff, a World War II veteran originally from Jerusalem, plays Rebbe Mendel. Mendel secretly gives Talmud lessons to Yentl (Streisand), a young girl living in a late 19th century Polish shtetl at a time when women are barred from religious study. Yentl ultimately disguises ...
Blond and rather slender for its type, a pickle barrel stands by the takeout counter of the famous Washington, DC delicatessen Wagshalâs. Lined with plastic, it may satisfy a certain nostalgia but amounts to no more than a storage unit on the bulk-bin grocery aisleâa pale iteration of the big-bellied, ...
The Ottomans ruled what is now Israel for 400 years, and during that time they made some iconic contributions to the man-made landscape. Sultan Suleiman I (a.k.a. Suleiman the Magnificent) completed the current walls of Jerusalemâs Old City in 1541. The Jaffa Clocktower, finished in 1903, was built to celebrate ...
Although such comparisons remain rare, for Jews and non-Jews the golem serves as a concept uniquely suited to expressing the fears and insecurities of the modern era. As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in 1984, âThe golem story appears less obsolete today than it seemed one hundred years ago. After all, ...
Israeli novelist Dorit Rabinyan was enjoying a peaceful afternoon at home on December 30, 2015, when a phone call from an old friend, Haaretz journalist Or Kashti, changed her life. âI have something to tell you,â he said. âIt may be the biggest story I will ever break.â âGood for ...
Dani Dayan has an unusual background for an Israeli diplomat. The Argentinian-born secular Israeli and successful tech entrepreneur was Israelâs chief advocate for the settlers from 2007 to 2013 as chairman of the Yesha Council, the umbrella organization of municipal councils of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. ...
As the medium maturedâand the number of web series grewâa subgenre of Jewish web series appeared, which now includes a mix of serial storytelling, comedy and documentary. Here are some of our favorite Jewish web series available today. ...