Simon Schama Steals The Show
The Effusive British Historian And Master Storyteller Is Back To Tell Part Two Of His History Of The Jewish People.
A Short History of Little Words
It’s hard to escape the OMGs and LOLs of today, but don’t blame millennials—acronyms actually originated thousands of years ago with the development of the ancient Hebrew alphabet. Around the 10th century BCE, Hebrew letters emerged out of ideographic pictures and, soon after, groups of letters started to be used in place of frequently recurring words.
A Jewish Artist in Post-Dreyfus Paris
When the 22-year-old Italian Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, his health was already compromised. He had suffered childhood bouts of pleurisy, had nearly died of typhoid fever at age 11 and had been diagnosed with tuberculosis at 16. In his first years in the City of Light, which was rife with anti-Semitism in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair…
Our Readers’ Favorite Jewish Films
We asked our readers: What’s the best Jewish movie scene of all time?
Book Review | The Book of Separation by Tova Mirvis
One Shabbat, toward the end of the morning service, Tova Mirvis was stricken by a debilitating headache, in which “the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head.”
Book Review | Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss
In three of her novels thus far, Nicole Krauss inhabits multiple points of view, exploring the almost mystical ways in which lives that seem separate can intertwine.
Book Interview | Max Brooks
Max Brooks, the only child of Mel Brooks and the late Anne Bancroft, is best known as the world’s foremost zombie expert. “He’s a zombie laureate,” The New York Times once described him.
Tell Us: What’s Your Favorite Jewish Movie Scene?
In our latest symposium, we asked directors, actors and experts: What’s your favorite Jewish scene from a film? Now, we want to hear from you.
Emotional Ethnography: A Q&A with ‘Menashe’ Director Joshua Weinstein
Director Joshua Weinstein’s camerawork credits include The New York Times, PBS, several Coors Light commercials and a few documentaries. Menashe—which premiered at the Sundance Film...
Book Review | For Two Thousand Years by Mihail Sebastian
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.
Favorite Jewish Movie Scenes of All Time
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.
My Lunch With Woody
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.