Who was more Jewish — Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton? This question was the basis for squabbles between the married Hollywood superstars, according to Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s “Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century.” Taylor was a celebrated convert to Judaism, but Burton was proud of having a Jewish maternal grandfather in his native Wales. Burton further argued that the Welsh are the “Jews of Britain,” referring to ethnic stereotyping directed against his fellow Welshmen. By contrast, he told his wife, “You’re not Jewish at all. If there’s any Jew in this family, it’s me!”
Further evidence of Burton’s sympathy for Yiddishkeit is to be found in the newly published “Richard Burton Diaries.” (Yale University Press) Burton’s entry for June 6, 1967 reads that a friend had advised him that “war had broken out between Israel and Egypt and other Arab idiots.” On June 12, Burton noted with some hyperbole and underlinings, “The Israeli war is over. The Israelis completely destroyed the forces against them in 3 days with what seems a mopping-up action of two days… That clever idiot Nasser resigned and then ‘at the behest of his people’ returned to office 16 hours later.”
In the first of a two-part series, Lisa Traiger traces the growth of Israeli folk dancing from one dance — “Hora Agadati” in 1924 — to 4,678 in 2005.
Jordana Horn surveys the career of the remarkable Moroccan-Israel actress Ronit Elkabetz, who was recently honored by the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival.
Philologos is, as we all suspected, a nerd.
Jay Michaelson argues that current political arguments are not “l’shem shamayim.”
Howard Shapiro explores San Francisco Symphony artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas’s tribute to his late grandparents, Yiddish theater stars Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky.
The 19th century New Orleans-born entertainer and sex symbol Adah Isaacs Menken is still shivering timbers long after her premature death in 1868. Back in 2003, Renée M. Sentilles, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University, published an enjoyable scholarly analysis with Cambridge University Press, “Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity.” On February 1, Lyons Press published a more popular offering, “A Dangerous Woman: The Life, Loves, and Scandals of Adah Isaacs Menken, 1835-1868, America’s Original Superstar” by Michael and Barbara Foster.
Pitched at a resolutely pop-culture level, “A Dangerous Woman” dishily recounts how in 1856 she married a Jewish musician, Alexander Isaac Menken, and to a journalist who asked if she had converted to Judaism, she responded, “I was born in [Judaism] and have adhered to it through all my erratic career. Through that pure and simple religion I have found greatest comfort and blessing.”
Onstage Menken did a little of everything, whenever possible when garbed in form-fitting tights, whether minstrel acts, celebrity impressions of noted actor Edwin Booth (the brother of Lincoln’s assassin), and tightrope walking. Yet despite this circus-like activity, even more than later famous showbiz converts such as the late, lamented Elizabeth Taylor, Menken shows every sign of being a devoted student of Judaica, reading Hebrew fluently and pondering the Talmud and other sacred texts. Menken was a regular contributor of poems and prose to the newspaper “The Israelite,” founded and edited by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian profiles Rabbi Michael Lerner on the 25th anniversary of Tikkun Magaine.
Watch a selection of Elizabeth Taylor’s best roles.
How Jewish playwrights adapted Shakespeare for the Yiddish stage.
“The Jump Artist,” the debut novel by Austin Ratner, has won the $100,000 Sami Rohr prize. Read the Forward’s review here and an excerpt here.
Robyn Creswell interviews Peter Cole, translator of kabbalistic poetry.
As far as celebrity marriages go, perhaps none have been as tumultuous as the 12-year-long saga between Hollywood Golden Age starlet (and Jewish convert) Elizabeth Taylor and Welsh actor Richard Burton.
After beginning an illicit affair on the set of “Cleopatra,” Taylor and Burton were married in 1964 and called it quits in 1976, though they gave it another unsuccessful shot the next year.
“Furious Love” (Harper), a joint biography of the two actors released in June, chronicles what the sub-headline calls the “marriage of the century.”
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