Новости за 11.04.2018

The Jan Karski Humanitarian Awards Night is one of the Polish-Jewish saga’s annual doses of optimism. The event, organized under the auspices of the Polish-Jewish Dialogue Committee and hosted by the Polish Consulate in New York, recognizes Jews and non-Jews who are helping to heal the painful and in all likelihood permanent wounds that the near-total extermination of the country’s Jewish community created. But not this year: On Tuesday, the Consulate announced that the dinner was “canceled,”... Читать дальше...

Oh, Zuck.

As I type this, Mark Zuckerberg has just begun his second day of Congressional testimony. Like Donald Trump, who met Parkland survivors clutching notes saying, “I hear you,” in his tiny pink fingers, Zuck came armed with talking points that were helpfully captured by news photographers. His read, in part, “Respectfully, I reject that. Not who we are.”

Continue reading "No Way to Say You're Sorry, Zuckerberg" at...

“Impeach” is a word that has apparently been on some lips (and in some dreams) over the past year or so. The Yiddish word for bringing a public official before a tribunal to face an accusation of misconduct is, well, impeach. As in: “Halevai ehr vet zayn impeached. (Halevai” meaning, “if only”; “ehr” meaning “he”; “vet zayn,” “will be”).

There’s hardly a better way to commemorate Yom Ha’Shoah than to contemplate the sacrifice of more than half a million American Jewish men and women who enlisted to fight Hitler, often facing significant prejudice from their brothers and sisters in arms. That’s the subject of GI Jews, a documentary airing tonight on PBS.

It is no wonder that Jews tend to be intensely patriotic Americans, or that our reading of American history is generally optimistic. We tell ourselves that there was anti-Semitism in America, but it went away; that America hesitated to fight Hitler, but eventually defeated him. When Jewish liberals are critical of America, it is usually in a spirit of disappointed love: we want the success of our American experience to be extended to everyone. The great American Jewish liberal question is Allen Ginsberg’s... Читать дальше...

Special thanks to Biz Nijdam, Caroline Welsh, Gregory Spinner, and my landsman David Hirmes, for their invaluable practical and existential help with this piece.

Do you know about the Law of Attraction? The basic idea is that good feelings attract good feelings. Apparently, it works with pianists, too. If you’ll recall, one of the highlights of our February Tel Aviv trip was meeting and collaborating with Yung Yidish pianist David Serebryanik. Turns out, enjoying wild-haired, wildly talented Russians just brings more of the same. As in, last week I unexpectedly dined with the astonishingly famous pianist, Evgeny Kissin, at the Congress for Jewish Culture Driter Seyder. Читать дальше...

Your favorite Jewish/Maori filmmaker/dreamboat is at it again. He has officially announced his next project, but, in traditional Waititi style, it’s not what you expect.