A.J. Goldmann
By A.J. Goldmann
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Culture How Wes Anderson Became a Jewish Emigré Director in ‘Budapest Hotel’
An elaborately constructed caper set in a fairy-tale Europe on the eve of World War II, Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is many things: a wild tumble through another of the director’s painstakingly designed imaginary worlds; a gleefully overstuffed ensemble piece with an all-star cast; and a near-perfect combination of sophistication and silliness. It…
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Culture Martin Scorsese’s Jewish Bookfellas
“I’ve been reading, or trying to read, the New York Review of Books since 1963, since I was a student,” Martin Scorsese explained at last month’s Berlin Film Festival, where his “Untitled New York Review of Books Documentary” screened as a work-in-progress. “I saw it on a newsstand and it looked very different than the…
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Culture Why Jews Stood Up for Richard Wagner
There’s an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which Larry David is caught whistling Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” to his wife in front of a movie theater. A hysterical and unhinged nudnik accosts him, spouting the common litany of charges against Wagner (“history’s biggest anti-Semite,” “millions of Jews marched to the gas chambers with Wagner’s music…
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Culture Being Jewish in Germany — Or Not
Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany By Yascha Mounk *Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages, $26 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, postwar Germany’s leading literary critic, who died last year at the age of 93, once described himself as “half Polish, half German and wholly Jewish.” Reich-Ranicki later denied that claim, insisting instead…
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Culture Amos Gitai Confirms Status as Grand Old Man of Israeli Cinema
‘Rhythm is political,” said Amos Gitai, wearing a black t-shirt and classic Ray-Bans as he leaned back in his chair at the Cinecittà Lounge of the Hotel Excelsior at the 70th Venice Film Festival. It was erev Rosh Hashana and the 62-year-old director was there to present “Ana Arabia,” his new film — shot in…
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Culture Wagner Festival Confronts Controversial Past
On the occasion of the Bayreuth Festival the Grüner Hügel, or Green Hill, that is home to the Richard-Wagner-Festspielhaus was littered with 500 multicolored “mini-Wagners” — garden-gnomelike figurines of the composer, hands raised as if ready to conduct. These cute statuettes share the hill with an outdoor exhibition, “Silenced Voices,” honoring 53 Jewish singers, musicians…
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News Muslim Clerics Learn Lessons of Auschwitz Firsthand
When Muslims tour Auschwitz and other sites of the Jewish Holocaust, and encounter survivors of that genocide face-to-face, the points of connection they make can be quite unpredictable. For Barakat Fawzi Hasan, a Palestinian assistant professor in Islamic Education at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, a moment of clarity came as he and his co-religionists listened,…
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News Circumcision Controversy Endangers Fight To Keep Rite Legal in Germany
The practice of metzitzah b’peh, a controversial part of some Jewish circumcisions, is reigniting concern about religious circumcision in Germany, where the government only recently fended off an effort to outlaw the ritual altogether. The chief representative of Chabad in Berlin, Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, has been accused of making MBP, as metzitzah b’peh is often…
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