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A.B. Yehoshua Looks Back at His Country and Art
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Washington D.C.’s Sixth & I Historic Synagogue is hoping to follow in the footsteps of Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim by winning a coveted Partners in Preservation grant to repair its century-old stained glass windows.
Sixth & I has been chosen to be among 24 finalists competing for a portion of $1 million. Since 2006, Partners in Preservation has disbursed $9 million in grants to historical sites in seven major U.S. cities. This is the first time that the Washington, D.C. metro area is the focus of the effort.
Through online voting, the public has a say in how the funds will be allocated. The synagogue, which is asking for $100,000 and is the only Jewish institution being considered, is currently in 3rd place behind the National Cathedral and Mount Vernon. Sixth & I is up against other major historical sites, such as the Marine Corps War Memorial, the Congressional Cemetery, and Clara Barton’s Missing Soldier Office. The voting continues until May 10.
In the meantime, the public can get a behind-the-scenes tour of the synagogue on Sunday, May 5, as part of a weekend-long community celebration of the competing landmarks. Visitors will get a first-hand look at the sanctuary’s nearly one-dozen historic stained glass windows, many of which have not been touched since their installation 105 years ago, and are therefore in need of repair, cleaning, re-building, restoration and re-leading.
A mother in Northville, Michigan has filed a formal complaint with her daugher’s school district, claiming that passages in Anne Frank’s diary are too graphic for a seventh grade class.
Parent Gail Horalek told the Northville Patch that the school should have asked for the parents’ permission before assigning the book, or at least sent a written warning, as is done for other “sensitive material.”
“If they watch any kind of movie with a swear word in it, I have to sign a permission slip,” she said.
The passage that Horek comes from the unedited, “definitive” version of the diary, in which the teenager writes about her own genitalia:
A rare handwritten copy of the Mishneh Torah by Maimonides has been jointly acquired by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The manuscript was purchased from the collection of Judy and Michael Steinhardt, according to a statement put out by both parties.
“The Mishneh Torah is a rare treasure that unites Jewish literary heritage with some of the finest illuminations from the Italian Renaissance,” said James S. Snyder, Anne and Jerome Fisher Director of the Israel Museum. “On loan for display in our galleries in recent years, the manuscript now becomes a seminal addition to our extensive holdings in illuminated Hebrew manuscripts.”
The manuscript is a perfect example of the rich history of religious art from the Middle Ages, with “six large painted panels decorated in precious pigments and gold leaf, as well as forty-one smaller illustrations with gold lettering adorning the opening words of each chapter.”
Drawn up in Northern Italy around 1497, the Hebrew manuscript includes the final eight books of the first systematic codification of Jewish law. Originally conceived as two volumes, it has a tumultuous history.
American Dream Machine
By Matthew Specktor
Tin House Books, 464 pages, $25.95
Some people will always believe that the Jews run Hollywood. But even if Spielberg, Katzenberg, Weinstein, Bruckheimer, Zucker and the rest of their pals could comfortably form a minyan, the number of Americans who believe that Jews control the film industry has dropped to 22% of the population, compared to nearly half of the country in 1964.
As in any career or industry commonly thought of as Jewish (finance, the garment industry, medicine, etc.), a handful of Jews found success in movies and television for the same reason Jews found themselves trading money for gentiles or sewing shirts on the Lower East Side: because there was opportunity. Jews didn’t invent the film industry in the early 20th century, but they saw a chance to make it bigger and better, and that’s just what men like Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn (born Szmuel Gelbfisz) did.
Writing novels is another line of work that Jews are supposedly good at, and though the novel has chronicled the Jewish-American experience better than any other art form over the last century, the Jew in Hollywood novel has only had two truly great and shining examples: Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust” (1939) and Budd Schulberg’s “What makes Sammy Run?” (1941).
Earlier this week, Helene Wecker shared a golem-centric reading list and wrote about writing a novel in two cultures and Dorkdom. Enter to win a copy of her debut novel, “The Golem and the Jinni,” here. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
I was 28 before I first saw the Statue of Liberty in person. I’d been accepted to grad school in New York City, and my husband (then fiancé) and I flew out together to see the school — and, in my case, to see the city for the first time. It was a hasty trip, with a red-eye flight and a hodgepodge itinerary. We had friends of friends in Chelsea, and they graciously allowed us to crash at their place. It turned out they lived on one of the busiest corners in the city, and the incessant cab-honking kept us awake most of the night. It was a very New York welcome.
That first afternoon, still fuzzy with jet lag, we took a walk out to the Hudson Park greenway. At Chelsea Piers we stopped to watch the trapeze students swinging through the air above us, looking nervous in their leotards and safety harnesses. We walked out to the end of one of the piers, and that’s where I caught my first real-life glimpse of her.
Wow, I thought. Here I am. There she is.
Ricky Jay is a polymath of the dark arts. A master of sleight-of-hand and considered by some to be one of the greatest magician living today, he is also a historian of magic, a collector of rare books, a lecturer, a film and television actor, and a co-creator of the firm Deceptive Practices, which supplies “arcane knowledge on a need-to-know basis” to film, TV and theatrical companies by using magic and illusions to solve production challenges.
Finally, he is the subject of a fascinating new documentary, “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay,” which opened in New York on April 17.
A combination of extraordinary archival performance footage and a series of lengthy interviews with Jay, it reveals a man who was introduced to magic by his grandfather, then left home at 16 and was taken under the wings of some of the greatest magicians of the time.
Jay spoke to The Arty Semite about discovering magic, his mentors and the Jewish influence on magic and magicians.
Curt Schleier: In the film, you mention that you wanted the magician Al Flosso to perform at your bar mitzvah, and your parents arranged that as a surprise. That seems like a big deal, yet you didn’t seem to get along with your parents. You called it “the only kind thing I remember.”
The Mad Men are us. That was the message “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner offered from the stage at a 92d Street Y talk last night, sitting in between Don Draper’s wives — January Jones who plays Betty Draper, now Betty Francis, and Jessica Paré who plays Megan Draper. Caryn James moderated a discussion and the audience was treated to iconic clips from the show, but Weiner was the real MC, mugging and quipping for nearly two hours with the appreciative Manhattan crowd.
Weiner teased the audience with a reminder that we all have a bit of self-loathing Don Draper and slimy Pete Campbell in us, and that we watch their fictional comings and goings each Sunday night not to gape but to relate — although he suggested that the attractiveness of his cast (the actresses flanking him and lead actor Jon Hamm not least among them), certainly helps smooth the way.
But “Mad Men” has become a cultural touchstone for more than just sharp suits and retro hairstyles, he said: “It’s accidentally related to our everyday life because it’s on a human scale and has a lot of moments of privacy.” The nontraditional, slow-burning plotlines take place in homes and workplaces, and focus on characters being disappointed even when they get what they want. Just like us, apparently.
For instance, viewers’ outright hatred for Pete Campbell, the most bratty and entitled WASP of all the characters, is stirred up because “he is them,” Weiner said. Pete’s ungratefulness grates in particular, by reminding us of our own tendencies toward dissatisfaction. “He’s every bad thing you’ve ever done all at once.”
Earlier this week, Helene Wecker wrote about writing a novel in two cultures and dorkdom. Enter to win a copy of her debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, here. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
Here’s a confession: I haven’t read that many golem stories. Or at least, as many as someone who’s written a book called “The Golem and the Jinni” probably should’ve. I haven’t read Cynthia Ozick’s “The Puttermesser Papers,” or Marge Piercy’s “He, She and It” I haven’t cracked Thane Rosenbaum’s “The Golems of Gotham,” or the more golem-centered volumes of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.
When I started writing “The Golem and the Jinni,” I was really, really unsure of myself. I was embarking on what I knew was my first real book, and it was like all newborn things, delicate and easily disturbed. Something warned me that if I filled my head with the golem stories of other, far more talented writers, I would crowd my own barely-formed golem right out of my brain, or unintentionally mash it into a different image.
Over the years, that intimidation became an almost superstitious avoidance. Maybe now that the book is finished, I can finally crack “The Puttermesser Papers” without worrying that Ozick’s golem will feel more real to me than my own. But in any case, here are a few golem stories that I do know, and that added their own particular flavors to my book, whether I meant them to or not.
The Cornell University Library has acquired a collection of works by the 19th-century German-Jewish scholar Leopold Zunz for its Rare and Manuscript Collections, according to a recent press release.
More than 100 works by Zunz, in German and English translation, were donated by Rabbi Steven M. Glazer, a longtime Zunz scholar and enthusiast. In addition to books the collection also includes handwritten notes, works by contemporaries of Zunz, and artworks depicting Zunz such as a lithographic print and “a whimsical bust.”
Zunz (1794-1886) was a founder of the discipline known as “Wissenschaft des Judentums,” the scholarly study of Judaism and the Jewish people. In 1819 he established the The Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews in Berlin, along with the poet Heinrich Heine and others.
According to the Cornell press release, Glazer, a rabbi at Congregation Beth Emeth in Herndon, Va. and a professor at George Washington University, has spent decades researching Zunz and displays a “Zunz” license plate on his car, which he calls the “Zunzmobile.”
Watch Steven M. Glazer talk about Leopold Zunz:
David Goyer has become a go-to guy for the superhero set. It started with the Blade movies. He wrote all three and directed the last. Then he went on to write the story and/or screenplay for the three Christopher Nolan Batman films. And now there is his script for the upcoming “Man of Steel.”
Ironically, the last is not something he wants to talk about. There is a veil of semi-secrecy around the film, which is a re-boot of the Superman story. Instead, Goyer wants to talk about his new show, “Da Vinci’s Demons,” which airs on Starz. It was renewed for a second season shortly after the interview took place and before the second episode aired.
Goyer chatted to The Arty Semite on the phone from Wales about Leonardo da Vinci as a young crime-fighting, opium-smoking, hedonistic genius searching for humanity’s forgotten knowledge.
Curt Schleier: Your idea for da Vinci struck me as totally different and inventive. How did it come about?
David Goyer: I was approached by BBC Worldwide, which [wanted to get involved in] American productions, and wanted to see if I could do something historically based. So we started bandying about various historical [figures] like Cleopatra and da Vinci. I thought da Vinci was pretty cool, so I went off and wrote up this crazy proposal thinking this would be too crazy for them. But they really liked it.
What struck me is the similarity between your da Vinci and Sherlock Holmes. Was that intentional?
The next work from Gary Shteyngart, the novelist known for books such as “Absurdistan” and “Super Sad True Love Story,” will be a memoir, The New York Times reports. The book will be titled “Little Failure” and will be released in January 2014 by Random House.
According to Shteyngart’s editor, David Ebershoff, the book will be a “candid and deeply poignant story of a Soviet family that comes to America in 1979 to find its future.” Shteyngart himself said in a statement that “I’ve finally written a book that isn’t a ribald satire and because it’s actually based on my life, contains almost no sex whatsoever. I’ve lived this troubled life so others don’t have to. Learn from my failure, please.”
At least Shteygart won’t have any trouble finding other writers to provide blurbs.
Earlier this week, Helene Wecker wrote about dorkdom and writing while Jewish. Enter to win a copy of her debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, here. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
Yesterday I wrote that my novel, “The Golem and the Jinni,” is “pretty darn Jewish.” In truth, that’s only half the story. There are two cultures in my novel, set in New York at the turn of the 20th century: the Jews of the Lower East Side, and the Syrian immigrants who lived in what’s now New York’s Financial district.
When I started writing this book, I was incredibly daunted at the idea of writing about a culture that wasn’t my own. At a guess, I know slightly more about Syrian culture than your average American Jew: my husband is Arab American, so I married into the knowledge, as it were. But it’s one thing to know the foods and the holidays and the etiquette, and to learn how to say salaam aleikum and shukran and insh’allah when the cousins visit. It’s quite another to create fictional characters who belong to that culture, hopefully true to life and free of generalizations. I really, really didn’t want anyone to read my book and cringe, like a British person watching Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.
And as soon as I started to research, it became all too clear just how little I knew. The residents of “Little Syria,” as it was called, weren’t Muslim but Christian, mostly Maronite Catholic and Eastern Orthodox from what’s now Lebanon. I’d always been flummoxed by the various and subtle differences between Christianities, and now I felt even more daunted. I tried to plug my ignorance with books and informational websites, and often ended up more confused than when I started. I went so far as to order a back issue of a Catholic magazine that had an article I wanted to read. Before long they’d given my name to every Catholic mailing list in America. One charity even mailed me a rosary. I still have it, hidden in the back of my sock drawer, as though from God’s prying eyes. How the hell do you throw out a rosary?
Although Ari Folman’s “The Congress” didn’t make the main competition at the upcoming Cannes International Film Festival, it will open the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, the festival announced yesterday. The film is reported to be part-animated and part-live action, and stars Robin Wright, Paul Giamatti, Jon Hamm and Harvey Keitel, among others.
Folman, an Israeli filmmaker, is best-known for his Oscar-nominated 2008 film “Waltz With Bashir.” The new movie is based on “The Futurological Congress,” a satirical science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. In the novel, Lem’s hero Ijon Tichy travels to the Eighth Futurolgical Congress in Costa Ricato to discuss the overpopulation of Earth, among other ills. During the Congress a guerilla insurrection is put down with the use of new psychotropic chemical weapons, a foreshadowing of things to come.
According to early descriptions, Folman’s adaptation seems to have little to do with the original storyline. Deadline.com reports that Wright plays an actress who agrees to be digitized and turned into a virtual figure by a Hollywood movie studio, retaining no rights to her likeness. Although that plot is absent from Lem’s novel, I’m curious to see what Folman does with Lem’s surreal narrative and satirical themes. Based on his track record, I think it’ll be interesting.
Enter to win a copy of Helene Wecker’s debut novel “The Golem and the Jinni” here. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
When I started looking through the extensive and awe-inspiring Visiting Scribe archives, one theme kept popping out at me: the perennial question, “What Does It Mean to Be a Jewish Writer?” I decided I’d use my space here to offer my own take, but as I thought about it, the question kept shifting into something else. Not what does it mean to be a Jewish writer, but why am I a Jewish writer?
Because I am, undeniably. True, I’ve only written one book so far, “The Golem and the Jinni,” but it’s pretty darn Jewish. My one other published piece, a short story called “Divestment,” is about a German Jewish woman in the last years of her life. When I think about possible future projects — novels, short stories, maybe a screenplay? — inevitably it contains some element of Judaism, either at its center or cree ping in around the edges.
This surprises me more than you might think. I don’t live what anyone would call a visibly Jewish life. On Friday nights you’ll find me on the couch, eating takeout and watching Doctor Who. My weekly dose of group spirituality comes on Sundays, when I drive 45 minutes to a Buddhist meditation center. My husband is a nice young Arab-American man I met in college. (Bashert!) There’s no Mogen David around my neck, and no mezuzaha at the door, though we do have a lovely silver menorah and an antique page from the Quran. My toddler daughter has only one Jewish-themed board book on her groaning shelf, titled “Let’s Nosh!” — and, let’s face it, that sums up a lot of my religious expression right there.
Music legend Leonard Cohen was a double winner at this past weekend’s JUNO Awards held in Regina, Saskatchewan. The JUNOs, presented by The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, are the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys.
Cohen was named Artist of the Year, and he also received the JUNO Award for Songwriter of the Year for three songs on his “Old Ideas” album. Cohen was not in attendance at the various JUNO ceremonies and galas to personally receive the honors.
While newcomer Carly Rae Jepsen bested Cohen by winning three awards, the 78-year-old icon beat out both the “Call Me Maybe” singer and pop star Justin Bieber for Artist of the Year. Cohen has now won five JUNOs over the course of his career.
Jewish performers Drake, Adam Cohen (Leonard Cohen’s son), and Toronto group Jaffa Road were among the JUNO nominees this year.
E.L. Konigsburg, the author of more than 20 beloved children’s books, died April 19 at 83. She was a two-time winner of the Newberry Medal, and the only author to receive the Newberry Medal and the Newberry Honor in the same year.
Her best-known book, “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,”published in 1967, has become a classic. School Library Journal named it one of the “Top 100 Chapter Books” of all time. It tells the fictional story of 12-year-old Claudia Kincaid (many of Konigsburg’s protagonists are 12-years-old, “Because it is at that age that the serious question of childhood is asking for an answer,” she once said), who runs away from home with her younger brother in tow. The two set up housekeeping at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and engage in a mystery having to do with an angel sculpture, possibly made by Michelangelo, purchased at auction from one reclusive Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Among Konigsburg’s other works is “About the B’nai Bagels” published in 1969, and like “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” illustrated by the author. The protagonist of this book is Mark Setzer, a boy preparing for his bar mitzvah whose life is complicated by his mother’s becoming his Little League baseball team’s manager.
Was the 2006 kidnapping, 24-day long torture, and murder of 23-year-old French-Jewish cell phone salesman Ilan Halimi by a suburban Paris gang fueled by anti-Semitism? In the new documentary film, “Jews & Money,” there’s no doubt about the answer.
In the film we see lawyers arguing over the validity of anti-Semitic hate crime charges, but filmmaker Lewis Cohen’s starting point is obvious. The story of Halimi’s murder and its aftermath serves as a springboard for the history and development of Western anti-Semitis, and the adoption of its elements by Islamists and others opposed to the State of Israel.
In particular, it is the gang leader’s admission that Halimi was targeted because of the belief that all Jews are rich, which sets the stage for the filmmaker’s investigation of this invidious canard.
Cohen told an audience at the first screening of the film’s final cut on April 17 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco that it was the topic of Jews and money, and not the Halimi case specifically, that first interested him. He said he hadn’t thought much about the origin of the stereotype until he took an extended trip to Europe about five years ago. He decided he wanted to focus on the subject, and when someone told him about Halimi, he realized the crime was an excellent framing device.
For the first time in its 50-year history, Israel’s annual International Bible Contest for high school students ended in a tie. This year’s winners were Elior Babian of Beit Shemesh and Yishai Eisenberg of Passaic, N.J. Eisenberg, a student at Yeshiva University High School, is the first American to win the contest in 20 years.
Fifty-eight teens from over 26 countries took part and were eliminated in the competition’s earlier rounds. They came from Australia, Bulgaria, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Germany, South Africa, Holland, Hungary, Uruguay, Italy, England, Estonia, Argentina, Panama, the United States and Mexico.
The annual Yom Ha’atzmaut event drew a huge audience at The Jerusalem Theater and was held under the auspices of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who not only presented the prizes to the winners, but also contributed the most challenging questions of the contest’s final round.
When the nervous Eisenberg and more relaxed Babian continued to have tied scores after each answered 12 of Netanyahu’s questions, the contest’s panel of judges decided to break with precedent and name both teenagers the winners.
Earlier this week, Allison Amend wrote about the Jewish connection to art. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
So why would a nice Jewish girl not write nice Jewish fiction? My last book, “Stations West,” was about Jewish immigrants in 19th-century Oklahoma. It was very “Jewish.” It was so Jewish it was nominated for the Sami Rohr Prize (but not so Jewish that it won). One would expect that my next book would be even more “Jewish.” Yet, on the outside it perhaps doesn’t appear to be.
The book jacket calls my new novel “A Nearly Perfect Copy” “a smart and affecting novel of family and forgery set amidst the rarefied international art world. Elm Howells has a loving family and a distinguished career at an elite Manhattan auction house. But after a tragic loss throws her into an emotional crisis, she pursues a reckless course of action that jeopardizes her personal and professional success. Meanwhile, talented artist Gabriel Connois wearies of remaining at the margins of the capricious Parisian art scene, and, desperate for recognition, he embarks on a scheme that threatens his burgeoning reputation. As these narratives converge, with disastrous consequences, A Nearly Perfect Copy boldly challenges our presumptions about originality and authenticity, loss and replacement, and the perilous pursuit of perfection.”
The Cannes International Film Festival announced the lineup for its main competition today, and the film I was hoping for most isn’t there.
Still, there are movies to look forward to. Chief among them is “Inside Llewyn Davis,” by Joel and Ethan Coen, about a Bob Dylan-esque Greenwich Village singer-songwriter in the 1960s, which is supposed to be loosely based on Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street.” And Roman Polanski’s “Venus in Fur” will be competing, based on David Ives’s Tony Award-winning play of the same name.
What won’t be screening is “The Congress,” a part-animated, part-live action film by Israeli director Ari Folman. That’s the same Ari Folman who made the spectacular “Waltz With Bashir” in 2008, which did premiere at Cannes and which went on to be nominated for an Oscar as the Best Foreign Language Film.
“The Congress” is supposed to be based on “The Futurological Congress,” by Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, though plot synopses floating around the Internet make it sound totally different. If it’s anything like the spirit of the book, however, it should be phenomenal. We’ll just have to keep our eyes on Venice, Toronto and Berlin.
Watch the trailer for ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’:
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