Nextbook Festival of Ideas
Nextbook's "Jews and Power" festival in NYC is on May 18. For info on how to join us,
click here. For a taste of what's in store, check out participant Aaron David Miller: "Jews and their non-Jewish allies have a powerful voice on America's Middle East policies, but they should not and do not
have a veto."
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05.09.08
Familiar Territory
Unlike many of the scholars committed to reviving Yiddish, performer and archivist Mendy Cahan, founder of Israel's
YUNG YiDiSH Centre, was raised with the language. "His life replicates in a nutshell the process of modernization that affected an entire people and produced that
powerful amalgam of Hasidic themes and cosmopolitan disenchantment that is Yiddish literature," says
Haaretz.
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05.09.08
Hip to Be Square
Marissa Brostoff traces the evolution of hipster style to two iconic musicians. Lou Reed, she says, got points by "identifying himself with urban Jews of an
earlier generation"; Jonathan Richman, meanwhile, continues his attempt "to maintain the demeanor of a Bar Mitzvah boy trying to rustle up the courage to ask a pretty girl to dance."
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05.09.08
Free at Last
Laura Bialis's
Refusenik examines the movement to liberate Soviet Jews.
The Jewish Week suggests that, with genocide in Darfur and continued problems in Russia, the film "should serve as both an
organizing tool and a cautionary tale." As for the myriad interviewees, including
Natan Sharansky: "It doesn't take anything away from
their bravery to say the film about them gets tedious," says
The SF Chronicle.
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05.09.08
In His Own Words
The Times Literary Supplement explores the concept of intertextuality in a review of
The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. Contributors see
Levi as "a double agent, engaged in 'ironic rewriting of divine utterances in
secular terms.'"
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05.08.08
Developing Intolerance
Michael Kimmelman assesses the rise of anti-Semitism in Hungary. While Communism attempted to eradicate differences, the opposite may have since become a problem: "What is now
being denied here is the notion that Jews, no matter how we behave, are the same as non-Jews," a sociologist tells him.
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05.08.08
Riding the Waves
Surfwise portrays
"Doc" Paskowitz, a legendary health-nut who brought surfing to Israel, as "the
alpha-male antithesis of the shtetl Jew." The film operates in "colorful-geezer mode," says
The Village Voice; Paskowitz complains director Doug Pray "wanted to
make me an oddball."
Tony Michels included Paskowitz in his take on Jews who hang ten.
The
LA Jewish Film Festival kicks off tonight; a highlight—
Little Traitor, based on
Amos Oz's
Panther in the Basement.
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05.08.08
The Cat Came Back
The Rabbi's Cat 2, the latest installment in
Joann Sfar's graphic novel series about an observant talking feline in 1930s Algeria, drifts "between precise historical details, enthusiastic
tall tales and meditations on what it means to live as a person of faith in a world that doesn't share it," says Douglas Wolk.
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05.07.08
By Any Other Name
Haaretz reprints a letter in which writer
Aharon Reuveni claims credit for naming the Jewish state in 1948. In it, he summarily rejects "all manner of bizarre, faulty, untoward and tasteless names" including "State of the Hebrews." Israel, he wrote, "hints at
man's war with the forces of nature, which is the basis for all human progress."
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05.07.08
Ilyas Malayev, Musician
"What Malayev knows almost
nobody knows," a colleague once said of the performer, composer, and poet legendary in the Bukharan community. In Queens, his adopted hometown, he was known for his interpretation of traditional
folk music that "originated as the court music of feudal Bukhara." Malayev died last week.
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05.07.08
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