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Footnote to Footnote

Introducing new columnist J. Hoberman

by
Dan Klein
March 06, 2012
Footnote. (Sony Pictures Classics)
Footnote. (Sony Pictures Classics)

Yesterday, you may have noticed we were lucky enough to be flaunting a virtuouso review of Joseph Cedar’s Footnote by film critic J. Hoberman.

Hoberman was film critic at the Village Voice for 34 years, and will now be writing a monthly film column for Tablet Magazine. Mr. Hoberman has written about film for decades, but he’s also written persuasively about Jewishness and Jewish identity, and picked fights with some of the biggest in the critic business.

“Probably the biggest debate I was ever involved in was precipitated by my critique of Kael’s “Shoah” pan,” Hoberman said in a January interview with the New York Times. “We had a heated exchange in the back row of the Broadway Screening Room. People seemed surprised to see us so worked up over a movie. She told me that I had made things hard for her at The New Yorker, and I said: “What the hell are you talking about Pauline? You wrote the review!”

Or, as he described the moral lesson of Footnote, “The mistake that, however honest, remains unacknowledged can bring the Temple itself crashing down on our heads.”

His upcoming columns will examine The Three Stooges and The Dictator.