fbpx
Tom Tugend

Tom Tugend

‘Rachel Corrie’ on stage: agitprop or art?

“The American Jewish community has a problem keeping silent,” says scholar Michael Berenbaum, and he ascribes the “problem” to guilt over our collective failure to speak up during the Holocaust.

Priest, born Jewish, is ‘Torn’

In the opening scene of the documentary “Torn,” an official asks an elderly man for his name, and he replies, “Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel.”

A diplomatic partnership

When Jacob Dayan — along with his wife, Galit, and their three children — arrived in Los Angeles in October 2007 to take up his post as Israel’s consul general for the southwestern United States, L.A. got two activist diplomats for the price of one.

French film asks, what’s in a ‘name’?

Baya Benmahmoud, the heroine of the French film “The Names of Love,” gives new meaning to the concept of political activism. A fervent, if rather naïve, left-winger whose guiding motto is, “Make love, not war,” her mission is to convert right-wing politicians to the correct ideology by sleeping with them. “I am a political whore,” she announces proudly when she meets Arthur Martin, a 40-ish, uptight ornithologist, who rambles on about bird diseases when Baya inquires whether they should make love at his or her place.

[authorpage]

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.