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Sundown: Pop Goes the Agitprop

Plus Obama’s champions and apologists, and more

by
Hadara Graubart
April 20, 2010

• A blogger reports from Russia, where she just checked out the new film Pop, a government sponsored “bush-league morality play” featuring “blatant and antediluvian anti-Semitism.” [True/Slant]

• In other “pop” news, Gershon Kingsley, 87-year-old composer of the electronic classic “Popcorn,” tells of escaping Germany before the Holocaust and his abiding love for his home country: “If you make a friend in Germany then you have them for the rest of your life.” [NYT]

• A member of J Street’s advisory board beseeches American Jews to stick with President Obama, a “visionary” who “is listening to the American-Jewish community.” [JTA]

• Meanwhile, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen believes that when it comes to Israel, “What’s missing on Obama’s part is not necessarily good intentions but the perception of them. He ought to do what Egyptian President Anwar Sadat did in 1977 to assure Israelis of his sincerity. Go to Jerusalem.” [WPost]

• And at an Independence Day event, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman also echoed the accord with Egypt and affirmed of the city on everyone’s lips that “Jerusalem is our undivided, eternal capital.” [Ynet]

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