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'Dictator' Is Sacha Baron Cohen's Best Film Yet

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT-5

Until “The Dictator,” only a certain class of people appreciated Sasha Baron Cohen’s sense of humor — a class that fell between freshmen and juniors. In previous incarnations — as Ali G, Borat and Bruno — Cohen’s humor centered on putting unsuspecting people in awkward situations. It was occasionally funny, but more often just painful to watch.

Cohen’s new film is not only superior to anything he’s done before, it is easily the funniest picture of the year. From the film’s opening dedication — “In loving memory of Kim Jong-il” — to its politically potent conclusion — the title character wins re-election with what appears to be well over 100% of the vote — “The Dictator” is a seemingly unending gag reel.

The jokes ranges from sharp, hilarious satire to scatological references, and he hits his target at least nine out of ten times. It’s one of those rare instances where the trailer doesn’t spoil the film.

General Admiral Haffaz Aladeen has been the undisputed ruler of oil-rich Wadiya since childhood. He has awarded himself hundreds of advanced degrees, Olympic medals and even a Wadiyan Golden Globe for his performance in “You’ve Got E-mail Bomb.”

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Q&A: General Aladeen on Obama and Romney

Wed, 16 May 2012 05:00:00 GMT-5

After I was mercifully saved from the bourgeois enjoyment of a sailing trip off the Horn of Africa in 2008 by the merciful boats of the Navy of Wadiya, I spent several months lying prostrate at the doors of a Wadiyan palace hoping that the then Colonel-General Aladeen would release me.

In early 2010 he deigned to lean out of the door and cover me in the divine mouth-water that meant I would be free to leave as soon as my family sent him a Mercedes Benz S600 and a copy of Lil Wayne’s “Rebirth.” So it was with great personal fondness that I submitted a few questions to him via the intimate medium of email.

Dan Friedman: The peoples of Egypt and Tunisia rose up against their very own rulers. What can dictators do about the Arab spring?

Colonel-General Aladeen: I think that the Arab Spring is a passing fad, like the Atkins diet, or human rights, and you’ll find that pretty soon it will turn into the Crackdown Summer, Torture Fall and Execution Winter. But you know the Arab Spring could have been avoided. I told Mubarak a thousand times: “If you get Wi-Fi in your palace, put a f**king password on it. The people will start using it.”

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Happy Birthday, Arthur Schnitzler!

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:19:00 GMT-5

Today is Viennese-Jewish author Arthur Schnitzler’s 150th Birthday. One of the key modernist writers in the German-speaking world, Schnitzler (1862–1931) is regrettably little-known in America. In his plays, stories and novels, Schnitzler painted a vivid portrait of his place and time, fin-de-siècle Vienna. He was also one of the most controversial and experimental writers, both for his psychological realism and his sexual frankness. Freud considered him a kindred spirit and famously wrote to Schnitzler that the author had discovered through intuition and creativity everything that Freud had uncovered via scientific experimentation.

In Europe, the occasion is being marked with critical editions of Schnitzler’s works, film and lecture series and new productions of his plays.

The center of the Schnitzler festivities is, not surprisingly, Vienna. The Burgtheater is presenting its productions of “Professor Bernhardi” and “Das weite Land,” (adapted by Tom Stoppard as “The Undiscovered Country”) while the Theater in der Josefstadt just premiered a staged version of “Traumnovelle,” a story perhaps best known as the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”

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Slideshow: Yiddish Communist Magazines

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT-5

In conjunction with its conference on “Jews and the Left” (see our story here), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has prepared an outstanding exhibition called “Shades of Red: Yiddish Left-Wing Press in America,” curated by Krysia Fisher and on view until September, 2012. Among the highlights of the exhibition is a series of arresting covers for the Communist monthly Der Hammer, many of them by William Gropper (1897-1977), one of America’s most significant social realist illustrators and painters.

Gropper’s is a classic Jewish American story. His immigrant parents settled on the Lower East Side and worked in the garment industry. He lost an aunt in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which some scholars cite as the reason for his politics. Though, as the conference demonstrated, radicalism was a vibrant part of Jewish life at the time.

Gropper studied art in public school and a portfolio of his work led Frank Parsons to admit him to the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (now Parsons The New School For Design). Gropper worked as an illustrator for Yiddish and English publications including The New York Tribune, The Liberator, The Masses, The New Masses, Vanity Fair and, of course, Der Hammer.

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Lawyer Blames Library for Death of Kafka Claimant

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:00:00 GMT-5

Crossposted from Haaretz

Ruth Wiesler, one of two sisters claiming to be the heirs of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts, and who had been battling the State of Israel over their possession, has died at age 80. Wiesler and her sister, Eva Hoffe, claimed they inherited the manuscripts from their mother, Esther Hoffe, who had been the secretary of Max Brod, Kafka’s close friend and heir to his literary estate. Esther Hoffe died in 2007 at the age of 101.

The state, however, argues that Brod’s will clearly stated that “manuscripts, letters and other documents will be given over for safekeeping to the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, or the municipal library of Tel Aviv, or another public archive in Israel or outside Israel,” and as such, they had never been Hoffe’s property to begin with.

Of the two sisters, Wiesler, who died two weeks ago, was seen as more willing to come to a compromise. It remains to be seen whether her two daughters, who will presumably inherit her part of the Hoffe estate, will take the same moderate line. Wiesler’s attorney, Harel Ashwall, said: “The legal hearings in the case made a decisive contribution to the deterioration of her health.”

Beth Din of America Launches New Journal

Tue, 15 May 2012 05:00:00 GMT-5

Standard halacha, or Jewish law, demands that Jews take their disputes to a court of Jewish law — a beit, or beth, din. It’s a hard sell in countries where Jewish courts have no power of enforcement and the secular courts seem fair. To get Jews to follow the policy in real life, rabbis have to convince them that their courts provide just and prompt resolutions to disputes. The recently produced first issue of The Journal of the Beth Din of America, published in collaboration with the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University, seems a sophisticated effort to do just that.

The journal features an article by Rabbi Yaacov Feit that gives a straightforward history of this policy. For Jews to take their disputes to any court other than a beit din is an insult to the Torah, according to the Talmud and later classical sources. Yet Feit does not ask whether it insults the Torah to study other legal systems, or to earn a living from them. Should a Jew attend law school in America, or serve as a lawyer or judge? Working as a lawyer also seems an insult to the Torah, but Feit does not consider this case. In practice, many observant Jews do earn their livelihoods in American law.

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Author Blog: Nice Jewish Girl on the Balance Beam

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:40:00 GMT-5

Dvora Meyers is the author of “Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess.” 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 you tell someone that you used to do gymnastics, she frequently answers that she, too, did it. When she was 7. And hadn’t thought about it in years. The implication is clear — gymnastics is the sort of sport you’re supposed to outgrow. In most instances, you start doing it before you know how to sign your own name and it’s over by your first adolescent growth spurt, joining the childhood hobby trash heap, which for me includes rollerblading and playing with Barbie dolls.

But in my case, I couldn’t seem to shake the sport unlike the rest of my practice peers, who ended their involvement with gymnastics by the end of high school. There I was, about to start grad school in creative nonfiction at 23, still checking the online message boards devoted to the sport daily in order to learn which Romanian gymnast had a new vault or who was injured and or who quit and so on. (The gymnastics community, both online and in real life, is especially tight knit for the same reasons that Jews tend to cluster together — there are so few of us who give a damn.)

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Monday Music: Israeli Indie Scene Grows Up

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:00:00 GMT-5

Crossposted from Haaretz

On Friday evening, in the children’s area of the Yaarot Menashe festival complex, you could hear a young mother calling her child, “Geva, come, the show is starting soon.” Since there aren’t many 5-year-olds named Geva, and because Geva is the name of one of the stars of the Israeli indie scene, one could toy with the idea that little Geva was named after big Geva, singer Geva Alon. There’s a good chance that isn’t actually the case, but at that moment, in light of the large number of children running around in the festival area, and in light of the tightly knit communal atmosphere in the place, one might be tempted to fantasize about the small Israeli indie nation as a cultural body in which young parents name their children after the heroes of the scene (“Asaf, Yehu, stop fighting and go play with Uzi and Daniela”).

Children are part of the landscape of the independent music festivals that have sprung up in recent years, but there seemed to be more of them than ever at the Yaarot Menashe festival, which took place this past weekend, in a forest in the north, somewhere between Megiddo and Yokne’am. If at the previous indie festivals the vast majority of the audience was composed of people aged 20 to 30 (an estimation, of course, not a fact) who had not yet begun raising families, the 2012 Yaarot Menashe festival was a gathering of young people and families.

Out and About

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:00:00 GMT-5

Jordan has freed the publisher of an online newspaper charged with propagating “anti-regime sentiment.”
Actor Elliott Gould has become the new face of Aish HaTorah.
Watch Mandy Patinkin speaking at a Peace Now conference in Jerusalem.
Read an excerpt from Isaac Bashevis Singer and Maurice Sendak’s “Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories.”
Seth Lipsky defends the Obama campaign’s new “Forward” slogan.
The Cameri Theatre’s production of “Cabaret” was selected as the “Play of the Year” at the Israeli Theatre Prizes. Read our review of the play here.

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Yiddish Poems From Daughter to Mother

Sun, 13 May 2012 05:00:00 GMT-5

Sheva Zucker’s late mother Miriam was still attending a women’s Yiddish reading group in Winnipeg until just a few months before she died last January at age 97. So, even before her mother passed away, Zucker knew what the best way would be to memorialize her.

“My mother was never a shul-goer, and davening is not the fullest expression of my Judaism, either,” Zucker, executive director of the League for Yiddish, told The Arty Semite. “I wanted some way some other than just saying Kaddish that was more meaningful for her and for me.”

That desire led Zucker to create a blog titled “*Liderlikht,” or “Candles of Song,” within weeks of her mother’s passing. The blog, on which she posts Yiddish poems about mothers, went live on February 9. Each week, she posts a different poem in its original Yiddish, with English translation and transliteration. She also includes a brief biography of each poet.

“Candles of Song” comes from a line in the first poem Zucker posted, “Frum” (Piously), by Rashel Veprinski: “Piously as my mother the waxen wicks / I light my candle of song.” Veprinski (1896-1981) came to New York from Ukraine in 1907, and began writing poetry at age 15. She was first published in 1918 in the journal “Di Naye Velt,” and she went on to write several books of poetry, as well as an autobiographical novel, short stories, and many articles for Yiddish periodicals. From the 1920s she lived with the famous Yiddish writer Mani Leyb, until his death in 1953.

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'Starriest' of Silent Film Stars Back on Screen

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT-5

Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree

When you combine the sizzling artistry of violinist Alicia Svigals with the smoldering film presence of Pola Negri, the silent film star and Hollywood darling of the interwar years, sparks are sure to fly.

Building on the current fascination with the world of silent films, which “The Artist” and “Hugo” set in motion, the Washington Jewish Music Festival will screen The Yellow Ticket, a 1918 film, on May 21. Less than an hour in length, this full throttled melodrama explores the triangulated relationship of Jewish identity, prostitution and modernity through its focus on a Jewish woman’s unhappy experiences in St. Petersburg.

The Polish actress whose long red lacquered nails and off-screen romances with Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino prompted The New York Times to dub her the “queen of screen vamps,” the “starriest of stars,” played a Jewish heroine so convincingly that Hitler and Goebbels forbade the showing of her films in Germany because they believed she was Jewish.

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Author Blog: Montefiore’s Ramsgate

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:00:00 GMT-5

Earlier this week, Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award Winner Dr. Abigail Green wrote about the making of a good biography and traveling in the footsteps of Montefiore. 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:

Sunday, June 17 will be Montefiore day in Ramsgate, the faded seaside resort where Sir Moses and his wife Judith lived for nearly 50 years. Ramsgate was incorporated in 1884, the year Montefiore turned 100, and the town’s most distinguished resident donated the new mayor’s chain of office — gold, as you would expect, but rather surprisingly made up of the Hebrew letter mem, Montefiore’s own initial. For the first time in many years, Ramsgate has its own mayor again — and the chain has reminded him of the town’s distinctive Jewish heritage. So Ramsgate has launched a Montefiore Heritage Society, and is inviting the great and good to commemorate the opening of Montefiore’s private synagogue there on June 17, 1833.

It’s good to see the town embracing its Jewish past because it hasn’t always been thus. And yet to Victorians, Montefiore and Ramsgate were synonymous. Before Montefiore’s arrival, this was a typical English working port, with a good beach and some gracious Georgian housing. By his death it had acquired not just a synagogue, but a replica of the Tomb of Rachel (where Montefiore mourned his own lamented Judith), a range of Jewish schools and boarding houses, and something called the Lady Judith Theological College, which was a cross between a yeshiva and an Oxford college. And of course there was East Cliff Lodge itself: Montefiore’s home, a neo-Gothic gentleman’s residence that was at once typically Victorian and full of the most extraordinary Judaica.

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Friday Film: Annette Insdorf on Philip Kaufman

Fri, 11 May 2012 08:00:00 GMT-5

By choosing Philip Kaufman (“Quills,” “Henry and June”) as the subject of her latest book, Columbia University Film School professor Annette Insdorf hasn’t just given his films an extreme close-up. With “Philip Kaufman” (University of Illinois Press), the first book-length study of the impossible-to-categorize director, Insdorf has also nominated Kaufman to the pantheon of cinema greats like Francois Truffaut and Krzysztof Kieslowski — the subjects of her other acclaimed studies. Insdorf spoke to The Arty Semite about Kaufman’s versatility, quixotic characters, and what makes him a world-class director. Kaufman’s latest film, “Hemingway & Gellhorn,” premieres on HBO May 28.

What drew you to Philip Kaufman as a subject?

Annette Insdorf: I’ve been appreciating his films for over 20 years, always surprised and disappointed at the lack of sustained, serious study of his superb work. When I showed his movies to my Columbia students — especially “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Right Stuff” — their enthusiastic respect confirmed my sense that Kaufman’s films deserve more attention. The problem has been a lack of recognizability; because he is so versatile and is drawn to different kinds of material, even cinephiles don’t realize that the same person directed films as disparate as “The White Dawn,” “The Wanderers,” “Henry and June” and “Rising Sun.”

Kaufman is the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland. Is there anything you’d characterize as a Jewish sensibility to his work?

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Yiddish Theater Takes on Capitalism

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:00:00 GMT-5

Since 2005, the New Worlds Theatre Project has been presenting classic Yiddish drama in English translation. This season they’re presenting a new English translation of H. Leivick’s 1921 play “Shmates,” here called “Welcome to America,” a naturalistic drama about the corrosive effects of American capitalism on a traditional Jewish immigrant family.

In the notes to the play, director Stephen Fried charts its artistic lineage from Leivick’s original script to the work of Clifford Odets and later to Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” With this production it’s a fair connection to make. Artistic Director Ellen Perecman’s translation and adaptation highlights the painful shuffle of traditional hierarchies that inevitably follow the entry into American style capitalism.

The production is tightly paced and features some excellent performances, especially from Alice Cannon and Donald Warfield as matriarch and patriarch Rokhl-Leye and Mordechai Maze. The Maze’s very modern, very materialistic daughter has just gotten married, without seeking the permission of her father. What’s worse, she has married her father’s boss’s son. Now Mordechai has to face the double humiliation of being a rag sorter working for his own son-in-law.

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Out and About

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:00:00 GMT-5

Roman Polanski is set to direct “D,” a thriller about the Dreyfus Affair.
Comic book legend Stan Lee is writing an Elvis comic.
Listen to a recording from the legendary Yiddish poet, partisan and Shoah song collector Shmerke Kaczerginski.
Take a look at the first book illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

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Tango Takes Flight in '8cho'

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT-5

In Brenda Angiels’ “8cho” (pronounced “ocho”), the audience is transported to a smoky tango nightclub. The musicians on guitar, piano and accordion provide a steamy, fast-paced rhythm, while Viviana Finkelstein, a petite, blond bombshell, catches the eye of two competing suitors. The romantic drama of the scene looks familiar, but this tango is anything but ordinary. Attached to a bungee cord, Finkelstein is thrown from man to man high into the air — every spin, twist, and dip defying gravity and bringing new energy to this classic Argentine dance.

“8cho,” which made its Broadway debut on May 4 at the New Victory Theater, is the newest of Angiel’s aerial dance creations. The show, running until May 20 at New York’s historic family-oriented theater, features six dancers. Accompanied by Juan Pablo Arcangeli’s tango orchestra, they perform a series of athletic vignettes ranging from sensual to humorous.

Aerial choreography has the potential for gimmickry, but Angiel avoids such pitfalls through her sophisticated choreography and intricate rigging of cords, bungees and ropes. The dancers jump over each other and tango up the wall, creating mesmerizing visual effects. Lucas Coria, linked by his wrist to a bungee, performs a breathtaking solo sweeping and gliding his limbs across the floor as though skating on ice.

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Author Blog: Jewish Journeys

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT-5

Earlier this week, Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award Winner Dr. Abigail Green wrote about the making of a good biography. 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:

For the past 10 years I’ve been travelling the world in Moses Montefiore’s footsteps. This was a man who spent much of his (long) life on the road: Besides the usual round of European tourist destinations (Paris, Florence, Rome, Frankfurt and Berlin), he visited Jerusalem seven times in total and passed through innumerable Jewish communities as he embarked on politically motivated missions to places like St. Petersburg, Istanbul, Marrakesh and Bucharest.

But what does it mean to travel in the footsteps of a man who’s been dead for over 120 years, and why bother? After all, it’s impossible to recreate the 19th-century travel experience in our world of cars, planes and high-speed trains. (I once met a Reform Rabbi who followed the Montefiores’ route during their first trip abroad; apparently it was very scenic, involving only minor roads.) More to the point, most of the places Montefiore visited have changed beyond all recognition. It’s not just that Bucharest is full of shabby, Ceausescu high-rise flats, or that a whole quarter of Marrakesh is devoted to glitzy hotels. The real problem is more fundamental. The shifting currents of world history mean that places that were once heartlands of the Diaspora are now barely Jewish places at all.

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Q&A: Drew Lovejoy on Irish Dancing

Wed, 09 May 2012 05:00:00 GMT-5

Drew Lovejoy proves that you don’t need to be Irish to excel at Irish dancing. Lovejoy, a 17-year-old American biracial Jew, recently won his third consecutive All Irish Dance Championship, the oldest competition in the Irish dance world. He was also the 2010 Irish dance world champion in his age group.

Growing up the only Jewish youngster in Greenville, Ohio, Lovejoy had an unconventional childhood. A profile of Lovejoy in The New York Times published in March brought him a lot of attention, but he said that the piece misrepresented what it’s like to be a Jew, and particularly a Jew of color, in the Irish dance world. He set the record straight and shared more about himself in a recent phone conversation with The Arty Semite.

Renee Ghert-Zand: Can you tell us about your family and your Jewish identity?

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Israel Museum to Feature Interactive Movie Screen

Tue, 08 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT-5

Crossposted from Haaretz

A huge, interactive movie screen made by Israeli designer Ron Arad will be the backdrop to films and performances at the Israel Museum in August.

The cylindrical installation at the Jerusalem museum is one of dozens of exhibits, events and activities that make up this year’s Jerusalem Season of Culture, which begins in late July.

Arad’s installation, called “Curtain Call,” was made for the Roundhouse cultural venue in London. It is a curtain made of 5,600 silicon rods suspended from a ring that is 18 meters in diameter and serves as a “canvas for films, live performance and audience interaction,” according to the Roundhouse.

'Wild Things' Author Maurice Sendak Dies at 83

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:48:00 GMT-5

Maurice Sendak, author of beloved children’s books such as “Where the Wild Things Are” and “In the Night Kitchen,” died May 8 at age 83 of complications from a stroke.

Sendak, who was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Poland, broke the conventions of children’s literature with his dark and psychologically acute early books. “Where the Wild Things Are” was published to acclaim and controversy in 1963, and received the Caldecott Medal in 1964. In 1966 Sendak published an illustrated version of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s children’s story “Zlateh the Goat,” which received the Newbery Medal.

Though Sendak produced few children’s books since “Outside Over There,” which was published in 1981, his latest work, titled “Bumble-Ardy,” came out in September 2011. According to The New York Times, a posthumous book titled “My Brother’s Book,” inspired by Sendak’s late brother Jack, is set to be published in February 2013.

In recent years Sendak enjoyed a renewed popularity that included a 2009 film version of “Where the Wild Things Are,” directed by Spike Jonze, and exhibits of his work at museums such as the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library. He also curated an exhibit of Hanukkah lamps at The Jewish Museum in New York and in January made an appearance on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report.

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