For those Angelenos looking for a respite from million-dollar hype and \”Happy Meal\” tie-ins to studio blockbusters, late autumn is also a time when a flurry of small, offbeat film festivals grace local movie screens. Among them is the modest but engaging, Cinema Judaica: The Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival.
If Jonathan Kirsch\’s purpose in writing \”Moses: A Life,\” was to offer the reader a mightily researched, comprehensive chronicle of midrashic, scholarly, secular, Christian and even some Muslim commentaries about Moses and the events immediately surrounding his life as told in the Bible, he has succeeded. Anyone seeking explanations for a given period or event related to Moses need simply look to this well-organized volume.
Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, says that he\’s opening up a new front in his organization\’s 85-year campaign to protect Jews from defamation. This new fight is a little different from battles past, though, because its target is other Jews.\nFoxman wants Jews to watch their language when they talk about fellow Jews. Otherwise somebody could get hurt. Another Israeli prime minister, for example.
When she was 16, KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour was captivated by her studies with the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich. \”Yiddish is magic,\” he told her. \”It will outwit history.\”
I am probably being unfair, but I will say right off that I am unhappy with Los Angeles\’ Jewish book fair, which starts Nov. 14. Partly, my grousing is about those writers who are absent; and, partly, it is a response to the fair\’s theme — or, should I say, lack of theme.
Even for an international film producer and inveterate traveler, Arthur Cohn has covered a lot of territory recently. During the last week in October, the winner of a record five Oscars and producer of \”The Garden of the Finzi-Continis\” and \”Central Station\” was feted in Shanghai at his very own \”Arthur Cohn Day\” by the Chinese government and film industry.
While cities such as Detroit and St. Louis were holding major Jewish book festivals year after year, drawing celebrity authors such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, observers here asked, Why isn\’t there a Jewish book festival in Los Angeles?
The life of Los Angeles Sheriff Sherman Block served as a textbook chapter in the American-Jewish saga, in which the grandson of East European immigrants and former deli counterman rose to lead the nation\’s largest county law enforcement agency.
Ed Zwick, the director of \”Glory\” and \”Courage Under Fire,\” is finding himself under siege. Critics are charging that his new film, \”The Siege,\” in which the government incarcerates Arab Americans after Middle Eastern terrorists detonate bombs in New York City, dangerously stereotypes Arab and Moslem Americans.
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