Misha Berson
By Misha Berson
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Culture The press dismissed her as a ‘national trinket.’ Now this much-loved, sometimes mocked Jewish actress is telling her own story
One memoir wasn't enough for Miriam Margolyes, known for roles in Harry Potter (and about 150 other films and shows). Her latest is a mix of thoughtful reflection and scatalogical storytelling — with a bit of score-settling on the side
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Culture How Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford changed the way we are
50 years ago, 'The Way We Were' brought us a love story we hadn't seen on screen before
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Culture More than 60 years later, ‘West Side Story’ still matters — here’s why
Recently I went to a Seattle cineplex to see the new “West Side Story” film. But my dance with the show didn’t start there. It all began in 1959. I was an artsy nine-year old girl living in suburban Detroit, and one of my favorite things was my modern dance class. It met every Saturday…
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Culture Tom Stoppard’s early genius and late reckoning with Jewish identity
Tom Stoppard: A Life. By Hermione Lee. Knopf, 896 pages In 1993, Tom Stoppard was in rehearsals at London’s National Theatre for “Arcadia,” his epoch-hopping and mind-bending tale of love, mathematics, poetry and landscape design which is often considered his finest play. One day, during a lunch break at the National, the celebrated British playwright…
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Culture Warts and All, Wendy Wasserstein Had Love to Spare
Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein By Julie Salamon The Penguin Press, 460 pages, $29.95 ‘Uncommon Women and Others” was Wendy Wasserstein’s first major play. And Julie Salamon’s well-researched, engrossing new biography, “Wendy and the Lost Boys,” makes it clear that Wasserstein was no commonplace woman herself. This revealing and…
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News Cool and Dashing, Paul Newman Was a New Kind of Jewish Star
While in high school in the early 1960s, my older brother bore a fleeting, flattering resemblance to Paul Newman. Any movie buff could see it. Like Newman, he was fair-skinned, with curly light-brown hair and striking aqua-blue eyes. And like Newman, he was cool. Hipster cool. Shades-wearing cool. But there was something else, something subliminal,…
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Music For Bob Dylan’s biographer, ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction
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Culture They were a kosher bakery success story — 80 years later, people are still trying to make a buck off their babka
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Culture ‘A Complete Unknown’ proves that one thing about Bob Dylan will certainly endure
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News 18 notable Jews who died in 2024
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Fast Forward Department of Ed resolves Title VI antisemitism complaints against 5 U of California campuses, U of Cincinnati
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Yiddish World Frankie’s Menorah (a Yiddish Hanukkah story)
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