When Bernard Rose first met superagent Jay Moloney, the inspiration for his controversial new film, \”ivansxtc,\” he was a hot young director courted by every agent in town. \”I was staying at the Mondrian, and gifts would suddenly appear in my room,\” says the 41-year-old Jewish Brit, who had just made an acclaimed 1988 drama, \”Paperhouse.\”
Like Maya, the troubled Jewish teen in Jessica Litwak\’s radiant solo show, \”Victory Dance,\” the author couldn\’t find a date for her senior prom. \”I finally went with some guy who insisted we have sex afterwards, though I didn\’t want to,\” says Litwak, 43. \”Later he wouldn\’t drive me home, so I slept in my yellow prom dress on his floor and walked home the next morning, my dress all crumpled, feeling lonely and lost. Until I found the theater, I spent my teenage years feeling worthless and invisible.\”\n\nThe poet Maya and her friends — dubbed \”a minyan of witches\” by Maya\’s Marxist grandma — traverse a similar journey in \”Victory Dance,\” at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center\’s Davidson/Valenti Theatre through June 22. The homely Jewish heroine, neglected by her hippie parents, is so self-hating she envisions paying for a prom date with humiliating sex. Her pal, Luna, an English orphan, is a closeted lesbian; African American actress Grace is oppressed by an abusive boyfriend. For all three girls, the price of admission to the \”Victory Dance\” — the senior prom — is confronting a dysfunctional part of herself. Each does so with the help of an idealistic, creative writing teacher and supernatural emissaries, such as the biblical Miriam.
\”Hitler\’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and the Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military\” by Bryan Mark Rigg (University Press of Kansas, $29.95).
Bryan Mark Rigg\’s most controversial assertion is \”Hitler\’s Jewish Soldiers\’\” least relevant matter. In a complicated opening chapter, he claims that 150,000 individuals (almost exclusively male) served in the German military who were, by Nazi racial standards and laws, Jews of some quantity. By his calculations, perhaps as many as 6,000 \”full\” Jews (with four Jewish grandparents) were in the Wehrmacht — but the greater number comes, of course, from the highly assimilated, aggressively nationalistic, and thoroughly acculturated \”quarter\” and \”half\” Jews, those with one or two Jewish grandparents, respectively. (The mathematics is darkly amusing: two half-Jewish parents make up one half-Jewish child.)
As gauche and unseemly as it may be, permit us, just once this year, to blow our own horn.\n\nThe Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles has earned 10 Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism from the American Jewish Press Association (AJPA) — and one of our longtime contributors has been honored with a lifetime service award.\n\nThe 21st annual awards ceremony, for work published in 2001, was held last week in Evanston, Ill.,\n\n
A few months ago, I asked my father, now happily retired, what profession he would choose if he were starting over again.
\”Oh, I\’d do the same thing,\” Dad said. \”I\’d be a salesman.\”
\”A salesman?\”
\”Yes. I\’m good at it.\”
It\’s Father\’s Day, and I am so glad that Dad is around to read this: Dad, I had you wrong.
Ever meet someone who always seems angry? A person ready to bite at your every word? An individual before whom you need to walk on eggshells whenever you interact with them?
For Magbit Foundation, 2002 will go down as a year of change. Over its first dozen years, the prime objective of the nonprofit, including its Young Leadership Division and its Women\’s Group, has been to raise $400,000 a year in scholarship funds for college students.
A full-page advertisement in Variety last Monday marked the entertainment industry\’s first public show of support for Israel since the outbreak of the second intifada.
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