Новости за 27.05.2016

During Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals—a match-up between the defending champion Golden State Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder—Warriors forward Draymond Green drove to the hoop and, in the process, appeared to not-so-accidentally kick Thunder center Steven Adams directly in the, er, kneidlach. This week, NBA chatter was afire when the league made the decision not to suspend Green, an E-40 enthusiast, following its review of a controversial play the day before.

On Wednesday night I attended the annual Authors Guild gala, which helps raise money for literacy awareness, copyright enforcement and writers’ rights. I went as the date of a friend who is a big macher in children’s literature: There’s no way I could have been there under my own steam since tables went for as much as $50,000, and the cheapest individual ticket was $600.

On Wednesday night I attended the annual Authors Guild gala, which helps raise money for literacy awareness, copyright enforcement and writers’ rights. I went as the date of a friend who is a big macher in children’s literature: There’s no way I could have been there under my own steam since tables went for as much as $50,000, and the cheapest individual ticket was $600.

On Thursday, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, after he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Yeshiva University, gave a commencement speech. Call me a homer—I am both a proud Jew and a fervid Pats fan—but the speech is both heartfelt and inspiring without ever feeling trite. It’s required viewing if only because Kraft, a dedicated supporter of Israel and other Jewish causes, shared some personal anecdotes about his father, his childhood, and about his purchase of the Patriots that rings true. Читать дальше...

It seems that Patti LuPone and the infamous picture-taking incident of 2009, when the Gypsy star had a photographer kicked out of the show, may have finally been outclassed—and by one of her dearest friends and closest associated acts: Broadway legend, noted swordsman, and CIA operative Mandy Patinkin.

At the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau last June, two men who had never met in person locked eyes.

Last week, I published a compilation of my favorite anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which ranged from the belief in dolphin Mossad agents to claims about a secret magic vegetable that confers upon Jews special powers. But while the piece paid proper tribute to the theories themselves, it did not recognize the most creative expressions of them.

This year’s Cannes Film Festival was inaugurated by Woody Allen’s Café Society, a middling and derivative rehash of Allen’s signature themes set in the Golden Age of 1930s Hollywood. The film was in turn preempted by the now annual ritual of the latest Allen-Farrow family scandal. This year’s iteration was predicated on the publication in The Hollywood Reporter of Ronen Farrow’s damning essay, “My Father, Woody Allen, and the Danger of Questions Unasked.” The piece defends his sister, Dylan Farrow... Читать дальше...

I never was a big reader of parenting books.

I know I read Anita Diamant’s How To Be a Jewish Parent when I was pregnant, because I dimly recall seeing it in the bathroom when I returned to consciousness sometime around Josie’s fourth birthday. (It’s since been renamed How To Raise a Jewish Child, if you’re on a Google mission.) I’m sure it was good—my mom gave it to me, and she has good taste—but I cannot recall a single thing about it. It’s just gone, along with my memories of both my children’s newborn-ness. Читать дальше...

Attention parents, teachers, rabbis, and anyone else entrusted with cultivating the spiritual and moral development of the young: Take away your children’s books, ban all homework for a while, sit them down in front of the TV, and make them watch Preacher.

At 19, in 1948 shortly after World War II ended I arrived in Paris as a student from New York. I tried to imagine what the world would have been like without Hitler. Would I have ended up living in my Spanish/French world in Paris? Would I have perhaps lived a bit in Vienna? Would I have learned German instead of French and Spanish? Would I have fallen in love with a dark-eyed, young Jewish intellectual, to whom I would have given my heart, whom I would have adored, whom I wasn’t destined to meet, because he was among the already dead? Читать дальше...

The barber shop at 11 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, run by a skillful group of Bukharian Jews, was absolutely poppin’ by mid-morning today. The ship was tight—it had to be, especially on Lag B’Omer, the holiday that interrupts the counting of the Omer, the 49-day mourning period that runs from the second day of Passover until the day before Shavuot.