Новости за 22.08.2018

Listening to presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani ramble on about legal matters and digress into a philosophical speculation about the meaning of truth, one was sorely tempted to ask him to cease and desist from hocking unz a chainik – a Yiddish phrase that any New Yorker, even one of Italian ancestry, would surely recognize.

I’m at a protest in Warsaw’s central square with dozens of concerned citizens, children on their parents’ shoulders, seniors in wheelchairs. They carry posters and cheer “free the media!”  “democracy not dictatorship!” Every day the government passes another unpopular law: restricting abortion and gay marriage, attempting to gut the constitution, curtailing the freedom of the press.  Now the government is trying to fill the supreme court and the elections board with politically-biased appointees. Читать дальше...

These are gloomy times for indie cinema, almost as depressing as the films themselves. TV keeps people in their homes and Netflix is hijacking the movie industry with its in-house production for streaming only. And while struggling Hollywood is still looking for redemption overseas, the American indie film industry is left to crumble in dark empty screening rooms. Who will be the last person to turn off the light, or rather turn it on? It might well be Oren Moverman, a rare success story in these dark times. Читать дальше...

Growing up in Israel in the 1980s, Coca Cola was the beverage of the everyday. Coke was what you reached for when you got back home from school. It was what you were served with Shabbat dinner. It was synonymous with soda, second only to water in the pantheon of drink. But it wasn’t what we yearned for: That honor was reserved for Pepsi.

For Hanoch Levin, a great Israeli playwright, author, and poet born in 1943, death was the one and only true muse, the great and bottomless well of inspiration. And so, it is only appropriate to remember this iconic author shortly after his yahrzeit last week, 19 years after his death of bone cancer, at age 56. Death permeates, in some way or another, nearly every poem of the recently published Lives of the Dead: Collected Poems of Hanoch Levin, translated by British poet and playwright Atar Hadari. Читать дальше...

For Emily Kramer-Golinkoff, starting her own nonprofit was more than an act of humanity. It was her only hope.