Daniel Witkin
By Daniel Witkin
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Culture With ‘The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),’ Noah Baumbach Returns To His Unhappy Place
Regardless of where one is in life or how degrading one’s surroundings may become, family has the ability to dig into us in a special way that nothing else can. Noah Baumbach appears to have internalized this lesson, a sense of how those closest to us can make us more miserable than even the cold…
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Culture Rob Reiner’s War On Russia Is Doomed To Fail
“We have been attacked. We are at War,” says Morgan Freeman in a video posted last week by a new organization called the Committee to Investigate Russia, making the most of his incredible voice. Founded by director, actor, and liberal activist Rob Reiner, the organization is calling for an investigation of Vladimir Putin’s government, suggesting…
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Culture The World of Arthur Szyk
In his 1944 self-portrait, “Ink and Blood,” Polish-Jewish artist and illustrator Arthur Szyk, who immigrated to the United States after Nazi Germany invaded his homeland, depicts himself hunched diligently over an elegant working desk, hard at work on a new painting. Its subject, who has come partially to life but remains pinned to the paper…
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Culture Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes And Their Mexican-Jewish Western
Machismo has become a sort of catchall phrase for aggressive masculinity, but its original meaning refers to something more specific, stranger, and more dangerous. It is this latter definition that propels the action of the recently-resurrected 1966 film “Time to Die” that is playing at Film Forum through Thursday, September 21. I’m not an expert,…
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Culture New Digital Platform To Bring Jewish Family History To Life
Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History has launched an interactive digital platform for Jewish families to explore their heritage. Called “Re:collection,” it invites Jews to upload and curate media that helps to tell the stories of themselves and their ancestors, exchanging familial narratives with other participants. It was created by the museum in collaboration…
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Film & TV How Frederick Wiseman Shot The Great American Novel
They may never get around to writing the Great American Novel, but in the meantime if people need to get a sense of what it’s like to live in this country, they could do a lot worse than to have a close reading of the films of Frederick Wiseman. Since the late 1960s, the indefatigable…
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Music How Steely Dan Saved Wes Anderson’s Career – And Maybe His Life
The year was 2006: a starry-eyed young rapper named Kanye West burst onto the scene with “Gold Digger,” the American public experienced the dawning realization the Iraq War had been a Bad Idea after all, and half-Jewish ‘70s art rockers Steely Dan launched an intervention of their own to revitalize the creativity of indie film…
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Culture How Poets And Novelists Are Mourning John Ashbery
John Ashbery was among the very greatest poets of the postwar era, one of the most imaginative and accurate chroniclers of what he called “the experience of experience.” But he might have blanched to hear himself spoken of in such portentous, non-poetic terms. Following Ashbery’s passing on September 3, his friends and acolytes offered reminiscences…
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