Plus elections deferred, spilling the beans, and more
| 5:01 PM Nov 12, 2009
• To mark the creation of a bizarre new Facebook group naming today “Hug a Jew Day,” the Jewish Chronicle asked a few (all male) minor celebs who they would like to embrace; two of them unimaginatively chose Sarah Silverman. Maybe it would be a good day for Sacha Baron Cohen to revisit the Today ...
Of course, she’s just as mean to Jews
| 3:08 PM Oct 14, 2009
Sarah Silverman released a new video over the weekend in which she proposes that the pope sell the Vatican in order to make enough dough to end world hunger. “You preach to live humbly, and I totally agree,” she says, addressing the pontiff in her typical faux-coy manner. “So now maybe it’s time to move ...
Health-care tsuris in Florida
| 4:00 PM Aug 21, 2009
Barack Obama won Florida last November with help from Jewish retirees in places like Sunrise Lakes, where three out of four people voted for him over John McCain. People, for example, like 73-year-old Ronald Clifford, who insisted that whatever Obama does is “the emes.” “You know what that is?” Clifford asked New York Times reporter ...
And other comedy news from the U.K.
| 1:10 PM Jun 30, 2009
Authorities in the city of Glasgow have approved a request for a public showing of The Life of Brian. Since the film’s 1979 release, Glasgow officials, along with those in 39 other areas, have refused to allow the Monty Python comedy about a man mistaken for the messiah to be screened, declaring it blasphemous. “The ...
Musicians doing what feels right
| 11:32 AM Jan 15, 2009
Blanket Statementstein is a band that shouldn’t work as well as it does. When you put 12 hippies on stage, you don’t expect them to play their instruments in sync, much less make actual music. Not even their name makes sense.
Collected on stage, the band resembles the kitchen of a Manhattan apartment during a particularly ...
After a brief ‘honeymoon,’ the newlyweds take up residence in Lodz
Translators, Nazi mutants, and Germanophilia
Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask and Noah Baumbach’s movie Greenberg breathe new life into the figure of the shlemiel
On the eve of the Oscars, an endorsement of ‘The White Ribbon’
A new documentary discusses the legacy of a Nazi filmmaker with his heirs
The anti-‘Edge of Darkness’ email your relatives are forwarding
There are more similarities between Jewish music and Jewish food than meets the ear
At 86, blind and housebound, Fugs frontman Tuli Kupferberg is still dispensing crass words of wisdom
Two bands cultivate the ‘Afro-Judaic’ aesthetic
Making the web’s greatest Hanukkah film
The Fox cult hit ‘Glee’ is about outcasts and Broadway—so naturally it offers a Jewish storyline
Wallace Shawn on being Jewish—onscreen and off
At 50, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom synagogue still glimmers—leaks and all
While trying on new artistic hat, artist develops series of paper coats
A new exhibition explores the overlapping worlds of Christian and Jewish art in medieval Spain
How Russian-Jewish émigrés are changing the face of competitive ballroom dance
How a latter-day vaudevillian from Kansas City got himself to speak perfect Yiddish
As it progressed, the playwright’s autobiographical trilogy grew more dark—and more true
