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Sundown: Jewish News for Italians

Happy Columbus Day! Plus, Abbas flipped, the Coens dissed, and Potok staged

by
Hadara Graubart
October 12, 2009

• Italy has a new publication, Pagine Ebraiche (Jewish Pages), that aims “to speak to the external world, not the internal Jewish world.” In other words, it’s a Jewish paper for non-Jewish Italians—who, apparently, care! [JTA]
• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who kowtowed to pressure from the United States and Israel to postpone an investigation into the accusation of Israeli war crimes in the Goldstone Report, has reverted to kowtowing to pressure from his constituents (and, perhaps, from Hamas), and is now calling for immediate action. [NYT]
• When the Coen brothers consulted Markle Karlen, “the most vital and fluent member of the local Jewish Community Center’s Yiddish club” on the Yiddish section of their script for A Serious Man, he deemed it “the usual shtetl shtick. A woodchopper. A poor old woman. A dybbuk. Who needs it.” [WP]
• A Bay Area critic spends most of his review of a theatrical production of Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen retelling the plot, but it seems like he liked it. [SF Chronicle]
• A blogger praises the subtle knowledge of Judaism that permeated The New York Times’s recent piece on the Shabbat elevator fiasco. [Get Religion]

Hadara Graubart was formerly a writer and editor for Tablet Magazine.