|
|
|
 |
|
On the long list of all-time greatest Jewish calamities, the destruction of the Second Temple is surely among the Top 10. We remember it every year on Tisha B’Av, and at every wedding when the groom smashes a glass. But how do we even know about this 2,000-year-old catastrophe? Mainly from the writings of…
What happens when a documentarian turns the camera on himself? “For almost 50 years I’ve been filming other people’s lives,” says Holocaust survivor and filmmaker Marian Marzynski at the start of his new documentary Never Forget to Lie, “but my childhood seems to be my psyche’s unfinished business.” Marzynski and others he interviews…
It’s not so unusual these days for 2 guys with acoustic guitars to play venues around New York City. But it’s pretty rare for those 2 guys to have met during their Israeli army service, and to include traditional Jewish simcha dances on their albums. Enter Isra-Alien, a duo whose music stubbornly…
Julia Child had her glass of wine, Emeril famously “kicks it up a notch,” and viewers across Britain wish Jamie Oliver actually was a naked chef. Every great cooking show has a hook, and Est Gezunterheyt! (“Eat in Good Health!”) is no exception. The brainchild of Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz, and produced by…
Happy 216th birthday to Penina Moise (1797-1880): poet, Southerner, and Sunday school superintendent. Moise’s life could have been a Victorian melodrama: One of 9 children born to French immigrants in Charleston, South Carolina, a fatherless Penina left school at age 12 to care for her asthmatic brother and her sick mother. Despite…
Inside every Jew lies the soul of a Scotsman. So says Vicki Boykis in her short, funny travelogue e-book There’s Something About Scotland. They’re a lot alike, Boykis writes: two bargain-hungry nationalities with endearing attachments to gut-wrenching ethnic foods. (Scots, meet gefilte fish; Jews, meet haggis.) But more than that, Boykis writes, “Just…
You enter a modern glass building and descend into a forest of sorts—”a space of historical imagination.” You wander those woods, modeled after those encountered by early Jewish merchants when they first came to Poland. Later you find yourself lost on a bustling prewar street, which may lead you to a concert of contemporary,…
We’re used to a certain kind of Jewish nostalgia for the old country and the relative simplicity of shtetl life, but nobody’s really serious about going back there. Right? Not exactly. Since 2007, Israeli media artist Yael Bartana has been developing the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, a multifaceted project that includes films, a manifesto, and…
When Pesha Dzimitrovsky, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi in British Palestine, turned 15 in 1921, her schooling was over—or would have been, had she remained in Jerusalem. So her parents shipped her off to boarding school in Weimar-Republic Frankfurt. The move would be her first step in a lifetime of country-hopping…
Lady Gaga’s bizarre videos and catchy lyrics launched the gibberish word into the mouths of adults the world over. But now there’s another Gaga catching on, and it’s not the children’s ball game. Created by Ohad Naharin, artistic director of the Tel Aviv-based Batsheva Dance Company, this Gaga—a “movement language”— is staging a…
Last month, Mississippi passed a law that lets public school students lead prayers over public address systems. The ACLU promised a lawsuit. Sound familiar? It must: this type of mishegas has been going on for over a century. One of the most notable but seldom-discussed clashes started in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1905. It began when…
A matchmaker schools a young woman on how to make gefilte fish for a potential mate. A high school girl plans her future: balancing Shabbat preparations with her duties as Madam President. These and other voices make up Shula Rosen’s Women of Valor, a collection of monologues performed under the title “Chareidi Women Speak” at Jerusalem’s Stage One Festival last…
