Entertainment

A collection of Egyptian artifacts unearthed 96 years ago by Jewish Egyptologist Georg Steindorff and forcibly sold under the Nazis will remain at the University of Leipzig.

Fashion designer John Galliano went on trial in Paris for making anti-Semitic and racist remarks to patrons at a local cafe.Galliano arrived at the...

The directors of the Oscar-winning documentary \"Strangers No More\" brought their statuettes to the Israeli school that was the subject of the film. Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon allowed the students of the Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, 70 percent of whom are immigrants, to pass around the Oscar statuettes.

A Palestinian art academy has put a $7 million Picasso painting on display. The painting, Pablo Picasso\'s \"Buste de femme,\" painted in 1943, is on loan from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands. It went on display in Ramallah Monday as part of the “Picasso in Palestine” exhibit.

Perhaps the single biggest surprise in “The Synagogue in America: A Short History,” by Marc Lee Raphael (New York University Press: $30), is its sheer entertainment value. Raphael, who holds the Nathan Gumenick chair of Judaic studies at the College of William and Mary, has produced a short, highly readable and wholly illuminating study that will delight anyone who has ever sat in shul and told himself the beloved old Jewish joke that ends with the punch line: “To that one, I never go.”

In 2002, director/playwright Karen Sommers heard a story on National Public Radio about the Jewish American Board of Peace and Justice, a Jewish mediation court on the Lower East Side of New York that adjudicated disputes among community members between the late 1930s and 1956. The proceedings took place in a back room of the House of Sages, a synagogue led by Rabbi Shmuel Aaron Rubin, who presided over the cases, which were recorded and carried on such Yiddish radio stations as WLTH and WEVD. According to the Yiddish Radio Project Web site, where many of the programs heard on old-time Yiddish radio are archived, the conflicts covered everything from “the complaints of abandoned parents to altercations over ill-fitting sheets.”

Now that another presidential campaign season is upon us, you can count on a fair amount of Bible-thumping between now and election day. But if you wonder what the Bible really says about abortion, homosexuality, capital punishment and other contemporary concerns, the real answers are to be found in “The Bible Now” by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky (Oxford University Press: $27.95).

Actress Natalie Portman has given birth to a baby boy, her first child. People magazine was the first to report Tuesday that Portman gave birth; the report did not say when the baby was born or where the birth took place. Portman\'s publicist had not confirmed the birth as of Wednesday morning.

The words “money laundering rabbis” in any book subtitle seems guaranteed to arouse the curiosity of at least some Jewish Journal readers. Add into the equation that the “informant” of the subtitle is a rabbi’s son; that fact might fairly be termed the clincher. This truth-is-stranger-than-fiction crime narrative is told by Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin, reporters for the Newark (New Jersey) Star-Ledger, in “The Jersey Sting: A True Story of Crooked Pols, Money Laundering Rabbis, Black Market Kidneys, and the Informant Who Brought It All Down” (St. Martin’s Press, 386 pages, $26.99).

When Canter’s Deli first opened in Los Angeles, it was not at its now-famous location on Fairfax Avenue, but in Boyle Heights. And though Canter’s and most of the neighborhood’s Jews have long since deserted Boyle Heights, it was forever touched by the culture of the Jewish community that once called it home. Later waves of immigration brought Japanese, Latino and Russian immigrants to the area, giving Boyle Heights a unique and vibrant ethnic vibe.

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.

For the fifth straight year, Tel Aviv native Anat Cohen received the clarinetist of the year award from the Jazz Journalists Association. The awards were presented Saturday in New York City.

In addition to commentating on The Sperminator, the new editress of the New York Times and “why women aren’t funny”, TheWrap.com’s editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman...

It may be stunningly self-involved to assume “X-Men” is about the Jews but Jewish Telegraphic Agency editor in chief Ami Eden makes a convincing...

He was often called “the Jewish James Bond” and “the Conscience of the Holocaust” for his activities in the pursuit of Nazis. It was a mission to which the late Simon Wiesenthal dedicated some 58 years of his life, after having been a prisoner in several concentration camps during World War II. The iconic figure lives again in the one-man show “Nazi Hunter — Simon Wiesenthal,” starring and written by Tom Dugan. The production is now running at Theatre 40, a professional theater company located on the campus of Beverly Hills High School.

Let me say right away that I am an ardent and devoted fan of David Mamet. I have only a very small collection of movies on DVD, but two of them are “The Spanish Prisoner” and “House of Games,” both of which I’ve watched repeatedly. My wife, Ann, and I were in the audience for Mamet’s production of “Boston Marriage” at the Geffen and again when he produced a magic-and-memoir show featuring Ricky Jay.

Coldplay removed a message posted on its Facebook page urging the British rock band\'s fans to check out the \"Freedom for Palestine\" music video. The link to the song and video, which features musicians from around the world, was discovered removed from the Coldplay page on Monday, less than a week after it was posted. It presents depictions of Israeli army checkpoints and the security fence.

Last week, Atlantic national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg announced his plan to move his eponymous blog, “Goldblog” to the online Jewish magazine, Tablet. This came...

“Trial or not, John Edwards is the Charlie Sheen of American politics - great hair and no chance for rehabilitation.” —Democratic consultant Jack Quinn...

Gender violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other conflict zones around the world is a subject of continual research and education through witness testimonials, podcasts and information presented by the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. But this year the museum took a look back, delving into a topic from history that, surprisingly, is entirely new pivotal research about the rape of Jewish women during the Holocaust, described in a new book by two female scholars.

Since Scientologists are so famously cagey, leave it to a big-mouthed Jew from New York to produce a major motion picture about Scientology. I’m...

Husband and wife team Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, authors of “Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza” (Schocken/Nextbook: $26.95), share far more than a marriage -- they enjoy a similar sensibility, one that is delightfully romantic and utopian, but also serious and intellectual and intuitive. It feels as if they both carry a heavy burden upon their shoulders, a wounded empathy of sorts for all those who suffer needlessly. Reading their work sometimes feels like entering a paradise where deeper truths about our common humanity are slowly revealed while the drumbeat of tribal loyalties grows dimmer.

What’s better than a silly little scandal starring a nice Jewish congressman to stir the pot in the circumcision debate? Call it divine intervention,...

It’s impossible to watch Chris Weitz’s transcendent new film, “A Better Life,” without wondering about the struggles of every immigrant laborer in Los Angeles....

Except for her petite frame and that little black dress, you’d never know Nina Tassler once wanted to be an actress. She was entirely...

As “X-Men: First Class” continues to glean first class reviews, it’s worth noting that the mutant saga is perhaps the most Jewish superhero film...

The British rock band Coldplay in a message posted on its Facebook page urged fans to check out the \"Freedom for Palestine\" music video. The song, performed by music artists from around the world and British artists including Maxi Jazz and Dave Randall of the group Faithless and Jamie Catto of 1 Giant Leap, features depictions of Israeli army checkpoints and the security fence. The artists were performing under the auspices of Freedom OneWorld.

When the curators from Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) came calling two years ago, my husband, Ron Magid, had prepared for them a veritable smorgasbord of art by the gothic filmmaker Tim Burton. Among the fare sprawled across our dining room table was a pointy-eared cowl from “Batman,” Jack Skellington storyboards from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and puppets from “The Corpse Bride,” whose ghoulishly charming heroine sprouts a maggot from her eye.

It’s no secret that there are powerful forces within the American Jewish community who feel deep distrust and doubt when it comes to President...

Apparently, hotels, nightclubs and restaurants are not fashionable enough to undergird developer Sam Nazarian’s SBE lifestyle brand, so he’s adding a new, unlikely element:...