Just before midnight on Monday the phone rang at our house. It was a guest booker from ABC\’s \”Good Morning America,\” asking if I would speak that morning to Diane Sawyer, live on air, about Mel Gibson\’s \”The Passion of the Christ.\”
Mel Gibson\’s film is nothing less then a frontal assault and a collective indictment of the entire Jewish community during the time of Jesus.
Regardless of his true intentions, Sharon, by marking most of the Gaza Strip for evacuation, has almost completely given up on meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the near future. There is a small chance that negotiations may still occur, precluding Sharon\’s withdrawal from occurring in a vacuum. However, if Israel chooses to navigate the risky path of unilateralism, America\’s goal should be to encourage a safe and secure outcome through hands-on engagement.
Setting out onto the yellow brick road of singlehood at 40, I could already see it would be a haunted trail. Those of us, man or woman, who have been married a long time, who have birthed children together, dandled and diapered them together, those of us who thought we were building lifelong partnerships before we were betrayed or bored or desolate or dead inside, cannot help but be haunted.
Tel Aviv — There is barely a line at Counter 15 of Israeli passport control, but still an older guy manages to try and cut me, even though his wife clearly sees that I\’ve been there first. He pretends his line was for my counter, although it\’s clearly diagonal, for the empty Counter 16.
Five years ago, veteran comic book artist Joe Kubert visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He expected to be moved, but since he and his parents had escaped from Poland before the Nazi genocide began, he assumed his emotional reaction would be relatively contained. Then, he saw something that struck him profoundly: \”Yzeran,\” the name of the shtetl where he had been born, etched on a wall filled with names of towns that had been completely obliterated in World War II.
This one word began a creative odyssey that found its completion this month, with the publication of \”Yossel — April 19, 1943,\” Kubert\’s graphic novel about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust — artistic, as well as physical — with the date in the subtitle referring to the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
With her slender figure, long, shining strawberry-blonde hair and big hazel eyes, Alison Wissot looks more like a stage ingénue than most people\’s conceptions of a cantor — not surprising, since that\’s what she was 10 years ago.
Wissot\’s cantorial career is off to a brilliant start: Less than three years after graduating from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion\’s School of Sacred Music in New York, she is filling the largest Reform cantorial pulpit in the San Fernando Valley, the 1,300-household Temple Judea in Tarzana and West Hills.
After watching Mel Gibson\’s two-hour-and-six-minute \”The Passion of the Christ\” at the Fox Studio\’s 200-seat Zanuck Theater, with barely a dozen carefully invited others in the audience, I came away with great admiration for Gibson.
Not for the film, I can assure you.
For while it is superbly photographed by Caleb Deschanel (\”The Patriot,\” \”Being There\” and \”Black Stallion\”) you can\’t but sit in awe of Gibson\’s brilliant publicity juggernaut that could teach Barnum and Bailey a thing or two about the not-so-delicate art of movie promotion and marketing.
Once upon a time, Joel ben Izzy worked as a mime — until he injured his hip in a car crash.\n\nThen he became a storyteller who lost his voice.\n\n\”If I could market irony, I\’d be rich,\” said the wry, rueful performer.\n\nBen Izzy — who eventually regained his speech — recounts the journey in a moving new book, \”The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness\” (Algonquin, $22.95). Woven into the memoir are 15 multicultural folk tales, including the Talmudic legend of how King Solomon achieved wisdom after temporarily losing his empire.
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