Новости за 23.03.2018

The Week In Rear View is back, baby. Only spring break could stop me from delivering the goods, and by the goods, I mean Jews in the news.

Ancient Rome’s Emperor Titus isn’t a name that comes up at Holocaust events. Yet on March 5th, at the Fellowships at Auschwitz Ethical Leadership Awards Gala (FASPE) held at Manhattan’s Espace, 92 year old Marian Turski, survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, two death marches, and Theresienstadt, used this first century Roman to illustrate a moral conundrum involving historical evidence of the Warsaw Ghetto and linked it with FASPE’s role as ethical explorers.

Ever hear of the epic poem “The Cat is a That”?

I didn’t think so. I wrote it a few years back for a Jewish magazine catering to Hassidic/yeshivish folk, in order to address a common confusion of appropriate pronouns. It included the immortal lines:

Continue reading "The Duck in the Long Johns" at...

“Keeping others waiting is the prerogative of the powerful,” quipped Roland Barthes. We spend a good part of our lives waiting. We wait in lines and in waiting rooms. We wait for news, for change, for avocados to ripen. Life feels, at times, like one inexorable wait. But all waiting is not the same. There is the waiting of futility summed up by these seven words: Your call is very important to us. Then there is the waiting of productivity: The wait as we digest, process, percolate, and grow an idea. Читать дальше...

The Third Reich is unthinkable without its propaganda. And Nazi propaganda is unthinkable without its films. This is the premise of Hitler’s Hollywood, a new documentary on the German film industry under the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945, directed by Rüdiger Suchsland.

Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story is a new musical by the trio of Hannah Moscovitch (“the wunderkind of Canadian theatre,” says the CBC); Moscovitch’s husband, Christian Barry (who also directs); and singer-songwriter Ben Caplan (who also wrote most of the songs). A winner at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it’s now playing off Broadway through April 22.

When it comes to Passover cuisine, most home cooks know to avoid wheat, oats, rye, and other forbidden ingredients. But what consumers might not realize is just how much cotton they eat during the holiday. Yes, cotton—not the fluffy white stuff, per se, (though some might accuse matzo of tasting about as exciting as the fabric fiber), but the oil extracted from cotton seeds.

It began inconspicuously, as so many riots do. People jostled in a sparsely policed public square lined with Jewish-owned shops. Worshippers idled after Easter services at the nearby Ciuflea Church, some drinking steadily once services ended, and teenagers as well as Jews—restless near the end of the long, eight-day Passover festival—were all rubbing shoulders. The weather was suddenly and blissfully temperate, dry after intermittent rain.

Not every season of RuPaul’s Drag Race has a Jewish contestant (we’re looking at you, All-Stars Season 3), but there have been plenty. In fact, two self-identifying Jewish queens have taken the crown— Jinkx Monsoon and last season’s Sasha Velour. So with Season 10 upon us, do we have another Semitic contender in the person of one Miz Cracker?