‘2012’ Film, Apocalyptic Times and Jewish Wisdom

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Monday, November 16, 2009

Angella Nazarian Seeks Her Place in the World

by Dora Levy Mossanen

Angella M. Nazarian’s “Life as a Visitor” (Assouline Publishing) is a memoir/travelogue/compilation of touching poems plus beautiful photographs captured during the author’s travels to more than 50 countries. Nazarian is an honest and candid writer who raises hope that dreams can be achieved even if one is uprooted from one’s homeland and even if the glass souvenirs she so desired in her childhood in Iran were out of reach in a cabinet, “locked and the key put away.” But not for long. An avid photographer and traveler, Nazarian managed to discover her own key while visiting foreign lands, where she collected her own souvenirs and came to believe that, “a similar theme or experience has a way of collapsing the distance between past and present, here and there.”

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Prose Rescues Anne Frank From Sainthood

By Jonathan Kirsch

Anne Frank is a unique figure in the iconography of Judaism. Of the 6 million victims of the Holocaust, her face is the only one we all know intimately and even subliminally. It has been said, and it’s perfectly true, that she has become the Jewish equivalent of a saint — cherished and revered. How else to explain the thrill and terror that I felt when a long-lost film clip showing Anne Frank recently surfaced on the Internet?

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Five Reasons Vampires Aren’t Jews

By Rabbi David Wolpe

Their day begins at night, they show a certain aversion to the sign of the cross and they dress in black. Of course, I am talking about Jews.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Jewish Screenwriter Pens ‘Kosher’ Vampires for ‘Twilight’

By Danielle Berrin

Melissa Rosenberg, the screenwriter of “The Twilight Saga,” is 6 feet tall with straight blonde hair, a pale complexion and a long, slim nose. Not exactly the most ethnic mien imaginable.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Phish, Shabbat Mingle in Coachella

By Ryan Torok

For three days over Halloween weekend, between 30,000 to 40,000 fans of the eclectic, free-form rock band Phish gathered on the Empire Polo Fields in Indio, site of the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, for Phish Festival 8. RVs and thousands of small camping tents staked out territory throughout eight campgrounds. And in one of those tents, on Friday night, Rabbi Yonah Bookstein led 35 people in a Kabbalat Shabbat service. This was the Shabbat Tent.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Jews Dominate Auteur’s New Play

by Iris Mann, Contributing Writer

“I am intrigued with all things Jewish,” actor, author, director and filmmaker Henry Jaglom declared. “I must admit that I pick up a book in a library or in a bookstore, and I turn to the table of contents and look up ‘Jews.’”

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Mad Men’s Don Draper and Jewish Tradition

by Mark Pearlman, JInsider.com

Who is the most influential man of the year? Last year it was Barack Obama, but this year it is fictional TV character Don Draper of the Emmy-winning show “Mad Men,” according to Askmen.com. Draper is an ad executive who on the surface seems to have a perfect life: handsome, beautiful wife, three kids, great home and career. But it’s an American dream not satisfied — and ultimately the antithesis of a Torah-led life. To better understand this powerful fictional...

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Madonna brings Kabbalah rabbi Michael Berg to Rio

JTA

Pop star Madonna brought a rabbi on a mysterious visit to Brazil.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Rabbi’s book says Jews can kill gentiles

JTA

A West Bank rabbi has written a book that says Jews can kill non-Jews who threaten Israel.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

When good people do not believe in God

By Jonathan Kirsch

Among the more surprising things that I discovered in “Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe” by Greg M. Epstein (William Morrow: $25.99, 250 pps.) is the fact that Harvard University offers its students the services of a humanist chaplain, a job held by the author himself. “Humanism,” which the author spells with a capital “h,” has been elevated into the equivalent of a religious affiliation at one of the world’s greatest universities.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Oz Mines Country’s Past in Personal Narratives

By Meredith Price Levitt

Just as the first heavy rain of the season began to beat against the large red awning of the Marilyn Monroe Café in Ramat Aviv, an area in north Tel Aviv, Amos Oz stepped under the protected terrace, looked around and smiled as I stood to shake his hand. Punctual to the minute at his preferred meeting place, he arrived unfettered by either a cell phone or an umbrella.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Goldhagen, Hirsi Ali and Fenton Bring New Works to L.A.

By Tom Tugend

November is a splendid month for Angelenos who like to keep up with new books and meet the people who write them.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Amid criticism, film festival showcases Israel’s Arabs

By Gil Shefler, JTA

When iconic Israeli news anchor Haim Yavin released his documentary series “In the Land of the Settlers” in 2005, he lay his journalistic reputation on the line.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Bringing a ‘Golem’ to Life

By Karla S. Blume

For a scare steeped in Jewish mysticism this Halloween, REDCAT is bringing Paul Wegener’s “The Golem” to the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater on Friday and Saturday night. But the screening of the 1920 silent horror classic, which recounts the Eastern European legend of a large clay figure brought to life to protect the Jews of Prague, will be accompanied by the debut of an improvised musical score by Brian LeBarton.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

A Private Eye’s Adventures Are Author’s Dream

By Naomi Pfefferman

Uninhibited author Jonathan Ames — creator of HBO’s quirky detective comedy, “Bored to Death” — once followed a pursuit he describes as “religious cross-dressing”: primping his blond hair and donning blazers to “infiltrate WASP society” in his 20s. While at Princeton University, Ames had become smitten by what he calls “the aesthetics of the WASPy young gentleman” as depicted in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and W. Somerset Maugham. When this charade put him in hearing distance of an anti-Semitic remark, he often said nothing, hoping to “pass” and to be liked.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Soupy Sales dead at 83

LATimes.com

Even though the occasion is sad, there is something oddly bracing in setting out to write about a man who called himself "Soupy." We need more Soupys in this self-important, don't-you-dare-throw-that-pie world -- and now there is one less, Soupy Sales having died Thursday at the age of 83.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Israeli Designers Dazzle at First L.A. Fashion Week Appearance

By Dikla Kadosh

The hot ticket in town last week was the local debut of Israel’s burgeoning fashion industry at Downtown L.A. Fashion Week.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Interpreting the Unspeakable

by Iris Mann, Contributing Writer

The power of art as a personal restorative, a historical document and a weapon against overwhelming oppression is tellingly illustrated in Hilary Helstein’s upcoming documentary, “As Seen Through These Eyes,” scheduled to open in Los Angeles Oct. 23. The movie’s executive producers are Hollywood heavy-hitters Michael Jacobs, Jerry Offsay and Irv Weintraub.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Shadows of the Sun

By Tom Teicholz

When the German forces surrendered to the Allies in May 1945, World War II in Europe ended. However, for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, the trauma of what they endured wasn’t over. For many, the effects lingered on in ways large and small, noticeable and not, often in ways their families came to know.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Jewish Actress Sophie Okonedo Explores Biracial Identity

By Naomi Pfefferman

“I’m a North London, working-class, black, Jewish girl,” actress Sophie Okonedo said. “I love my upbringing because it had so many different colors; it’s given me the equipment to play lots of diverse roles.”

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Leo Frank, Revisited

By Naomi Pfefferman

When T.R. Knight chants the Shema blindfolded and with a noose tightening around his neck in the role of Leo Frank, his character’s terror is palpable. The scene takes place as the inevitable tragic dénouement of the historical musical “Parade,” now playing at the Mark Taper Forum, the story of the anti-Semitic trial and lynching in 1915 of a pencil-factory manager accused of brutally murdering a 13-year-old girl. In this production, Frank lives again via this boyish, 36-year-old actor best known for his part in the original cast of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Reluctant Jew Who Shaped U.S. Zionism

by Adam Kirsch, Tabletmag.com

At 900 pages, “Louis D. Brandeis: A Life,” by Melvin Urofsky (Pantheon, $40) may be more than twice the size of an ordinary biography, but because Brandeis had four major careers, even this door-stopper of a book can claim to be economical.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Sharon Waxman Takes on Hollywood

By Danielle Berrin

In August, when Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein gave his first on-the-record interview addressing the widespread speculation that his company was failing to a New York Times reporter who had written little about Hollywood, Sharon Waxman was, well, pissed.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Childhood Fears Feed ‘Wild Things’

By Naomi Pfefferman

When the 39-year-old filmmaker Spike Jonze began visiting the author and illustrator Maurice Sendak at his rural Connecticut farmhouse years ago, Sendak often spoke of how his Jewish immigrant relatives inspired the toothy monsters in his children’s classic, “Where the Wild Things Are.”