Goodbye, Columbus.\nAnd goodbye Portnoy, Tevye and Yentl, too.\n\nA glance back at the films of 1998 reveal Jewish characters who break the mold, overturn the stereotype, and stretch the image of Jews on-screen.
\”The Last Night of Ballyhoo\” arrived at the Cañon Theatre in Beverly Hills last month with impeccable credentials.
Artists from places as far afield as Brooklyn, Baltimore and Tal-Shahar, Israel, and as near as Beverly Hills will be exhibiting at the 18th annual Festival of Jewish Artisans at Temple Isaiah on Nov. 21-22. Among the crafts on the display will be sandblasted glass, ceramics, gold and silver jewelry, textiles, calligraphy, papercutting, photography and inlaid wood. Eleven of the 28 artists are new to the festival, but many have been exhibiting in the social hall of the Pico Boulevard synagogue for years.
\”It\’s an Italian-Jewish mother thing. They don\’t understand that you\’re not hungry anymore!\”
If you think the Academy Awards are unfair, biased and arbitrary, wait until you see what we\’ve come up with for our first Jewish film awards.
In Roger Hanin\’s semi-autobiographical film, \”Soleil\” (1997), 13-year-old Meyer is kicked out of school for being Jewish in Vichy North Africa. It is a sign that things have changed for his family in Algeria, where Jews had peacefully lived for centuries amid the Moslems. Now, Meyer\’s communist father must go into hiding; his mother, Titine (Sophia Loren), must raise her children alone, charming black marketeers into giving her food. She manages to talk authorities into keeping Meyer out of jail when he is caught writing anti-government graffiti.
It was 1942 when 29-year-old Eli Leskley, a Czech-born Jew, was sent to Theresienstadt, a fortified ghetto 50 kilometers from Prague. As a visual artist, he was assigned to the sign workshop, where he had access to paper, paint, ink, pencils and other art supplies. With what must have been a combination of remarkable courage and an overpowering need to document what transpired there, Leskley secretly painted dozens of prison-life scenes, mostly with watercolors and ink on office-sized paper taken from the workshop.
The sounds of heaven and earth merge when David De\’or and Shlomo Bar, two internationally acclaimed Israeli artists, combine their musical talents.
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