How Naomi Frankel’s life and work mirrored modern Jewish history
| 7:03 AM Nov 25, 2009
Jewish folklore attributes a certain otherworldly aura to those who die on their birthdays, as if by entering and exiting the world on the same day one’s life acquires a hidden meaning or secret grace. Last Friday, on her 91st birthday, the Israeli author Naomi Frankel passed away. She was largely forgotten; few, if any, ...
Susan Sontag, in a rare turn as filmmaker, visited a traumatized Israel in 1973
| 7:00 AM Aug 14, 2009
In Israel, understanding the present sometimes requires traveling to the past. And what better guide than Susan Sontag: although she is remembered primarily for her writing, the renowned intellectual dabbled in filmmaking as well, and, in the fall of 1973, traveled to Israel to shoot a documentary,
Promised Lands, which will have a rare screening in Brooklyn on Tuesday. She couldn’t have picked a more dramatic moment: the Yom Kippur War was raging, and everywhere Sontag trained her camera she found a country newly despairing over the future prospect of living in peace with its Arab neighbors. The Israel of 1973, it turns out, is depressingly, and clarifyingly, familiar.
Jocheved sets up a snow-cone business
Seventy years after the release of his first book, the bestselling ‘As a Driven Leaf,’ Rabbi Milton Steinberg (posthumously) offers a sophomore effort
Wanted by the authorities, the twins head off to the Promised Land
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
William Kentridge and the art of righting history’s wrongs
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
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
