Nothing Sacred

Derring-Do

It takes some chutzpah to make a joke about September 11 before an audience of New Yorkers, but last night Robert Klein pulled it off. Introducing the Best Documentary winner—Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope crossing of the World Trade Center towers—at the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner, Klein said, “Years ago I wasn’t crazy about the twin towers. But 9/11—that was going too far.” Yow! Klein grew up in the Bronx in the ’50s, so he gets a pass. Penélope Cruz, accepting the Best...

The Schlockford Files

Idle Worship

Several years ago, I was working in my local supermarket. It’s not that I moonlight exactly, it’s that I am a member of a food co-op. All sorts of folks are members of this kibbutz-like enterprise, including a conspicuous number of Rastas and Lubavitch.

One day as I was working, a skirt- and wig-wearing woman whose groceries I was scanning started asking me questions—my name, my occupation—and, upon hearing the answers, invited me to a Sabbath dinner. She scribbled her phone number on a a calling card, on one side of...

The Schlockford Files

Holiday Hoedowns

This year, Hanukkah in New York City has occasioned myriad opportunities for Jewish music appreciation. While I personally wish they were a bit more spread out (a girl can only be so many places at once!), if you have to pick and choose, here's a bit of a rundown:

The Sephardic Music Festival opened last night. "The point of the festival is not really to make one specific musical point—there’s a wide range," says Rob Weisberg on the WNYC blog. Offerings like Asefa, who combine North...

Nothing Sacred

Hoochie Coochie Men

In Cadillac Records, the highly entertaining fictionalized history of Chess Records that opens today, the most arresting characters are, unsurprisingly, the musicians—Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), Howlin' Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Chuck Berry (Mos Def), and Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles). Leonard Chess, who founded the company in Chicago in 1950 with his brother, Phil, is played by Adrien Brody. Len, as his stable of rowdy bluesmen and -women called him, was born Lejzor Czyz in Motal, Poland, in 1917, and moved with his family to Illinois in 1928. (Phil is played by Shiloh Fernandez, and his role...

The Schlockford Files

Any Club...

In the Fall 2008 issue of n+1, that magazine's editors charge that Nextbook offers a “provincial” venue, one “hobble[d]” by a failure to take into account the American milieu in which Jewish culture is created. Well, they may belittle the platform, but we're certainly not embarrassed by the people who have stood on it:

Read our excerpt of All the Sad Young Literary Men by n+1 editor Keith Gessen here, and listen to our interview with him here.

Read n+1 editor Marco Roth's disquisition, “My Father's Library,”

Nothing Sacred

Palm Beach Story

The Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival kicks off tonight. Among the many movies they're screening through December 14 is Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman's remarkable animated documentary about his experiences in the 1982 Lebanon war. (Bashir opens in Los Angeles and New York on December 25.) Also showing: One Day You'll Understand, Amos Gitai's drama about a Frenchman who digs into his family's past (Nextbook's Sara Ivry wasn't wild about it, but at least one critic was); Hey! Hey! It's Esther Blueberger, an Australian comedy about a quirky 13-year-old;...

Nothing Sacred

Out of the Closet

Gus Van Sant's astonishingly powerful biopic Milk opens today. Sean Penn's performance as Harvey Milk, the San Francisco politician and gay-rights activist who was assassinated 30 years ago, is sensitive, nuanced, and far more charming than you might expect. Dustin Lance Black's screenplay addresses Milk's Long Island Jewish origins without fanfare: when he moves to San Francisco and decides to open a store in the Castro, he tells his lover that such a bourgeois endeavor makes him "just like Morris and Minnie Milk of Woodmere, New York." And when the liquor store owner across the...

The Schlockford Files

Nearer to Me Than to Thee

Once upon a time, during college, a friend of mine house-sat at her cousin’s super cool artsy loft. A bunch of us visited one evening and sat around the place, basking in our proximity to greatness. Well, proximity by association anyway on account of the cool pad belonged to a one-time girlfriend of Bob Dylan, made extra famous by her appearance on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Six degrees of separation? Hah! I span half that distance to reach Mr. Dylan, and my nearness bestows special status and a whole lotta...

Der Kish A film by Paul Fischer