For the past 10 years, Dinah Lenney, author of the memoir, \”Bigger Than Life,\” has lived with the memory of the murder of her father, a prominent New Jersey businessman and onetime senatorial candidate who was knifed to death by three teens in Manhattan.
A popular Persian-language drama on Iranian state-run television dealing with the Holocaust contains anti-Semitic and anti-Israel themes, Los Angeles Iranian Jewish activists have revealed. News publications, including The Wall Street Journal, have hailed the new show, \”Zero Degree Turn,\” as sympathetic to the plight of Jews during the Shoah, but Jewish experts fluent in Persian have analyzed the program more closely and have come to a different conclusion.
In the 1950s, a few years after Yiddish culture in Europe had been decimated, there was a bustling metropolis in the Western Hemisphere that still had a thriving Yiddish culture. This city had a number of schools in which classes were taught in Yiddish; there was an active theatrical scene, a couple of daily newspapers, books, literary magazines, songs and musicals — all in Yiddish. There were Yiddish comedians, as well as cafes where Yiddish-speakers gathered to chat and drink tea with a bissel (little) lemon. And there were vacation resorts, a few hours\’ drive from the city, where Yiddish was regularly heard. New York? Montreal? Actually, Buenos Aires.
\”Eight in 10 Americans know two all-beef patties are in a Big Mac, but just over four in 10 — 41% — can\’t name \’Thou shall not kill\’ as one of the Ten Commandments,\” according to a 2007 study. Those not-too-surprising results reported by Kelton Research is why producer Frank Yablans is convinced that this is a critical time to have a studio producing educational, faith-based films. \”We hope to educate young people and families as to where all civilization came from,\” explained the 72-year-old Hollywood veteran. Yablans, born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, said he had a \”typical New York Jewish upbringing.\” For more than 50 years, he has toiled in the film industry, steadily rising through the ranks to president of Paramount Pictures in the early \’70s. \”The Godfather,\” and \”Chinatown\” are just a few of the titles that made it one of the most critically acclaimed and profitable studios of that period. But now, he has turned his focus and passion to his new company, Promenade Pictures, whose first production, a computer-animated film, \”The Ten Commandments,\” is scheduled for release Friday, Oct. 19.
Community briefs.
Scholars, clergy and seminarians gathered this week at the Luxe Hotel to discuss troubling passages and ideas in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and ways of understanding them in modern times, as part of \”Troubling Traditions: Wrestling With Problem Passages,\” a conference co-sponsored by the Board of Rabbis of Southern California and the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding of Sacred Heart University.
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