Jewish culture
Broken Glass, TricycleFriday, 08 October 2010
We are in Brooklyn in 1938 and Sylvia Gellburg, a middle-class Jewish housewife, is paralysed from the waist down. It’s a hysterical paralysis brought on by the shock of seeing newspaper pictures of the cruelty meted out to German Jews during the... Read more... |
The Case for God?, BBC OneMonday, 06 September 2010
Sometimes you get the impression the Beeb wishes religion would quietly go away. You see it in the gradual transformation of the Sunday morning slot from the lightweight Heaven and Earth Show to Nicky Campbell’s lighter-weight Big Questions and now... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Impresarios Victor and Lilian Hochhauser, Part 2Friday, 06 August 2010
In the second part of this historic career overview interview with the unique British impresarios, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser talk about their razor-edged relations with Soviet apparatchiks and the pressures they came under to prevent artist... Read more... |
The ReboundTuesday, 20 July 2010
Let me lay a friendly fiver that many critics will rubbish this film, for the following reasons. It’s a romcom, and a Hollywood one at that, the lowest form of cinematic life for many (most often male) critics; it stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose... Read more... |
Who Do You Think You Are? - Sarah Jessica Parker, BBC OneSunday, 13 June 2010
American television's desire to upgrade the BBC’s Who do You Think You Are? into a prime piece of emotional real estate was never likely to meet any serious resistance. Even stripped of the stridently Hollywood voiceover that teed up the US version... Read more... |
Stephen Fry on Wagner, BBC FourWednesday, 26 May 2010
Is there anywhere Stephen Fry will not go? I mean in documentaries. We’ve had Fry on depression and Fry on America, Fry on HIV and Fry on endangered species. Movingly, we’ve had Fry on who he thinks he is, an odyssey in which he discovered that much... Read more... |
the Artes Mundi Award goes to...Thursday, 20 May 2010
Great excitement at the Artes Mundi Awards in Cardiff’s National Museum last night as the UK’s largest cash prize for the winner of any UK contemporary art competition - a staggering £40,000 - was presented to the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. Two... Read more... |
Iram: Shalom Aleichem's shtetl life comes to LondonWednesday, 19 May 2010
Tonight at the Barbican's Pit, kicking off a run of ten performances, a rather unusual piece of theatre opens. It's not a big play, it probably won't make great waves and it does involve reading surtitles. Called Iram, it's an Israeli adaptation, in... Read more... |
Family Guy Weekend, BBC ThreeMonday, 10 May 2010
Something decidedly odd happened at one of last year’s Proms. In a night celebrating the golden age of the MGM musicals, one of the performers was Seth MacFarlane. The average Prommer wouldn’t have known MacFarlane from a poached egg. And even his... Read more... |
Unorthodox Jews: The Secret Worlds of Holy Rollers and Eyes Wide OpenFriday, 07 May 2010
Jews may or may not have built the pyramids, but we know for certain that they built Hollywood. The names of the men who founded MGM, 20th Century Fox and Paramount speak for themselves: Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer, Marcus Loew, Joseph Schenck,... Read more... |
The InfidelTuesday, 06 April 2010
On the face of it, The Infidel should be a hoot. The screenwriting debut of comic David Baddiel, one half of two of the cleverest comedy duos of the past 20 years (Newman and Baddiel, Baddiel and Skinner), and starring stand-up comedian Omid Djalili... Read more... |
A Serious ManThursday, 19 November 2009If you stick with the Coen Brothers' new film until the end of the final credit crawl, you will notice the legend, in small print, "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." I wouldn't be so sure: they certainly put their hero... Read more... |
