Iosef’s version of a “safe space” is a filthy, unheated Jewish dorm where students occasionally die of tuberculosis, or a lecture on a random topic in a hall where he can duck in and hide while running from his attackers—for a full five minutes, until they find him and drag him out. As Iosef puts it one afternoon, “I received two punches during today’s lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches.” Microaggressions, indeed.
The wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof is one of my favorite Jewish moments on film. The scene is drenched in family, nostalgia and an aching foreknowledge of the Holocaust.
On a bright September day, an unlikely trio met for lunch to discuss art, politics and culture. Having published an unauthorized biography of Woody Allen last year, I couldn’t wait to have lunch with him for the first time.
Film icon Charlie Chaplin starred as the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator, a 1940 political satire that Chaplin wrote, produced and directed. The film, including Chaplin’s parody of Hitler, was a direct response to the Nazi Party’s false assertion that Chaplin was Jewish—and the banning of all of his films.
For pure cheesy pleasure, I’d go with The Ten Commandments, which frightened me so much as a child that I was actually taken out of the movie theater. I’m tougher now and, besides ever since taking my own kids on the Paramount Pictures tour that explained how the filmmakers used pre-CGI techniques to part the Red Sea, I’ve wanted to watch the thing through properly with lots of use of the pause button.
In Barbra Streisand’s musical Yentl, Nehemiah Persoff, a World War II veteran originally from Jerusalem, plays Rebbe Mendel. Mendel secretly gives Talmud lessons to Yentl (Streisand), a young girl living in a late 19th century Polish shtetl at a time when women are barred from religious study. Yentl ultimately disguises herself as her late brother in order to enter a religious school, where drama ensues.
It’s not every day that an adult in her mid-80s can read a book meant for fifth-graders (ages 10-11) and be reduced to tears.
The day you left was the Ninth of Av, / a day of grief, the Temple destroyed.
The Kinsey Sicks, a dynamite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet, explode on Theater J’s stage for a limited run of their new politically charged show Things You Shouldn’t Say, saying and singing anything they damn well please.
“Rabbis were telling me that if I have a gift like that, I shouldn’t sit on it. But I felt that rap was going to lead me away from my spirituality.”
Blond and rather slender for its type, a pickle barrel stands by the takeout counter of the famous Washington, DC delicatessen Wagshal’s. Lined with plastic, it may satisfy a certain nostalgia but amounts to no more than a storage unit on the bulk-bin grocery aisle—a pale iteration of the big-bellied, oak casks I remember from my childhood.
