A.J. Goldmann
By A.J. Goldmann
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Culture The Jewish Museum in a Town With Only One Jew In It
From Berlin to Moscow; London to Vienna; Copenhagen, Denmark, to Budapest, Hungary, and, recently, Warsaw, Poland, the map of Europe is dotted with museums dedicated to the history and culture of Jewish communities past and present. Although the Jewish Museum in Prague dates back to 1906, the majority of Jewish museums now on a Jewish…
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Culture No Redemption For Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ in Bayreuth
If I needed to choose my favorite incongruous moment from Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s spectacularly bad production of “Parsifal,” which opened this year’s Bayreuth Festival, I would choose the shukling, or davening, Jews in tzitzit and yarmulkes, who appear in the third act chorus. Titurel, the ancient leader of the Knights of the Grail, has just…
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Culture In the Case of Shylock V. Antonio, Judge Ginsburg Presides
Vengeful. Bloodthirsty. Merciless. Jewish. William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” is practically synonymous with Shylock, the moneylending Jew who demands a pound of flesh from his Christian nemesis Antonio (the actual merchant of the title). But Shakespeare’s romantic-comedy-meets-courtroom-drama it is also full of thorny legal issues. Was there ever a demand for payment prior to…
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Culture Director William Friedkin Finds His Jewish Connection
As I prepare to interview William Friedkin, I keep thinking about an assignment I had in high school. A much-loved high school history teacher asked us to write a term paper analyzing a classic European film alongside its American remake. The pairing I chose was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Wages of Fear” (1953) and Friedkin’s “Sorcerer” (1977)….
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Culture Why We’re in a Golden Age For Israeli Cinema — And Politics Has Nothing To Do With It
Hugging the port of Cannes on either side of the Grand Palais du Festival is Village International, a colony of national pavilions, each promoting their own homegrown fare. This year, for the very first time in the history of the festival, Israel set up its own pavilion, right alongside China’s, whose red flag waged vigorously…
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The Schmooze Of Iggy Pop, the Three Stooges and the Mezuzah in the New Almodovar Movie
My ongoing quest for Jewish stories at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is turning up slim pickings. Aside from the Israeli entries in the festival (the subject of my next report), there are few places to turn under the Côte d’Azur’s radiant sun for a heimisch taste of yiddishkeit. Was that a mezuzah I spotted…
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The Schmooze Searching for Jews at the Cannes Film Festival
The news from Cannes’ opening weekend was reassuringly familiar. Woody Allen opened the festival for the first time since 2011’s hit “Midnight in Paris,” with a far more tepidly received entry. Ken Loach was forgiven for reneging on his promise of two years ago to stop making films after “I, Daniel Blake,” a tear-jerking critique…
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Film & TV This Must Be the Best Anne Frank Adaptation We’ve Ever Seen
It’s been nearly half a century since George Stevens’s multiple-Oscar-winning 1959 film “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the first and best known of the many film adaptations of “The Diary of a Young Girl,” was released. For many it remains the ultimate cinematic treatment of this classic of Holocaust literature. But that perception might be…
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