Dudamel, Israel: A Love Story
Watch a video of Gustavo Dudamel with the Israeli Philharmic at the bottom of this page
With Gustavo Dudamel taking the podium this weekend at Disney Hall as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new music director, Los Angeles is embracing the Venezuelan prodigy as a perfect catch. But even at 28 he is well traveled, and has already had a love affair with Israel.
Just minutes after Hezbollah rockets fell on Haifa during the 2006 war with Lebanon, Dudamel took his place before the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO), lifted his baton and conducted the orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. There’s a photo in an online IPO newsletter showing Dudamel and his wife toasting the orchestra’s 70th anniversary. And when it came time for the Israel Phil to pick a conductor to lead the ensemble on its American tour last year to honor Israel’s 60th anniversary, Dudamel won the honor.
In fact, Dudamel has made a point that Israel is where he got his breakthrough with a major international orchestra.
“I’ve conducted orchestras before it, but the IPO gave me the first opportunity to conduct a major orchestra in a regular concert season and to collaborate with star soloists,” Dudamel told the Jerusalem Post in 2006. (For this article, his representatives said he could not be available.)
Evidence of the Dudamel-IPO romance comes in many forms. He’s conducted the orchestra more than 35 times, mostly in Israel but also on a tour to Italy. He’s visited individual musicians’ homes, met their families and partied with them. Avi Shoshani, the orchestra’s secretary general, attended Dudamel’s wedding. The musicians feel such warmth for him that they are known to refer to him simply as “the kid.” And then, there’s the music, which has won raves.
Mark Swed, music critic for the Los Angeles Times, reviewing the IPO’s visit to Southern California under Dudamel last November, noted an “unmistakable chemistry.”
The program for these concerts said a lot about the relationship between the Israel orchestra and Dudamel. He led them in Leonard Bernstein’s “Jubilee Games,” a piece the great Jewish American conductor wrote as a statement of playful affection for the IPO. By performing the work in the United States, Dudamel claimed his stake as an honorary citizen of both the American and Israeli musical worlds.
All that since he had his first contact with the Israelis, in the summer of 2005.
“What happened,” explained Shoshani, speaking from Israel, “is that he first came to us by sheer coincidence. Zubin Mehta was forced to cancel a visit to Israel, which never really happened before. His mother was dying, and he had to go back to Los Angeles. When we discussed who would replace him, it had to be a superstar equivalent to him, a Muti or a Levine, or it had to be a young person with a big talent. [Mehta] said, ‘I have a name,’ and that was Gustavo. He gave me a number in Caracas.”
The longtime head of the Israel’s top orchestra found that, on paths of opportunity where others might walk, Dudamel tends to run.
“We discussed repertoire,” Shoshani continued. “He said, ‘I want to conduct Mahler’s Fifth,’ and I was very, very much against it. I talked to him not like the director of an orchestra, but more like father to son. I said, ‘Gustavo, you will be committing suicide to conduct the Mahler Fifth with the Israel Philharmonic. Mahler is the language of this orchestra. It has done Mahler with Bernstein, with Solti, with Abbado. You will embarrass yourself.’ But he insisted that I was wrong and he was right.”
“In the first intermission of the first rehearsal, after an hour and a half, the musicians came to me and said, ‘He has such a passion and such a connection with the music.’ He went out for lunch and dinner with them and played chamber music. As a violinist, he is very much at home. And he became part of our [IPO’s] 70th anniversary celebrations. It became a love story.”
Declining to get specific, Shoshani said he’s talking these days with Dudamel about his conducting the IPO in the future, even as the conductor gets an enthusiastic welcome in Los Angeles. Shoshani said he feels confident the relationship will continue.
Beyond the IPO, one of Dudamel’s closest musical friends is the renowned violinist Gil Shaham. The 38-year-old Shaham was born in America to Israeli parents, who brought him back to Israel when he was 2. He made his debut at age 10 with the Jerusalem Symphony and, about a year later, with the IPO. Shaham, reached at his apartment in Manhattan, said he and Dudamel have performed together about eight times, often in Israel.
Los Angeles audiences will get a chance to experience this musical friendship in November, when Shaham joins Dudamel as part of his inaugural L.A. season, to perform Alban Berg’s violin concerto.
Shaham says he can’t recall just how they first met, though he said they’ve spent considerable time together in Tel Aviv, New York and London. “We’ve seen each other on many occasions, and I do feel like we’ve struck a kind of closeness,” Shaham said. “We’ve met each others’ families and we hang out outside of concert halls.”
In New York, the two visited Gray’s Papaya, a famed hot dog stand near Lincoln Center that draws a lot of Juilliard students. One night, in London, they stayed up late drinking and plotting an imaginary event at which Shaham would play the music of Pablo de Sarasate, a Spanish composer whose violin pieces Shaham and Dudamel both love, while Dudamel and his wife would dance traditional Spanish dances.
Shaham recalls sitting in the back of a London taxi and telling Dudamel he was heading to Los Angeles to perform Aram Khachaturian’s violin concerto.
Dudamel suddenly performed long stretches of it using solfège, the syllabic vocal device musicians learn to sing scores. Dudamel, Shaham found, had mastered it with a special passion. “I love this piece. And it turns out he knew it backwards and forwards. And there we were, the two of us, in the back of the taxi, solfèging the slow movement and laughing.”
When Shaham won the prestigious Avery Fisher prize last year, Dudamel made a surprise appearance in New York to present it. “Stop, my friend,” Dudamel called to Shaham, as the violinist started to leave the stage after a performance.
Recently, they’ve talked about the approach they’ll take to the Berg in Los Angeles in a few weeks. The concerto is part of a project Shaham is undertaking to explore the surge of violin concerti composed in the 1930s. It was Berg’s last finished work. He was not Jewish, but the Nazis banned his high-modernist music for being “degenerate.”
Shaham says Dudamel harbors a special fondness for the piece.
“The music making with Gustavo is incredible,” he says. “But it’s also that he’s so genuine and open with his feelings. He’s really made friends in Israel. He’s gotten close to the orchestra. It is unspoken, but I think that in Israel, by now, he’s regarded as a kind of honorary Jew, an honorary Israeli. I think he senses that there is that much feeling about him, and that it has all happened very naturally.”
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Anne Frank RARE VIDEO ONLINE
The only known video footage of Anne Frank has been made public by the Anne Frank House Museum.
On Friday, the museum uploaded to YouTube a 20-second video shot in 1941 in which the young diarist is briefly seen leaning out a window, the Guardian reported.
“The footage is very moving and very unique because these are the only moving images of Anne Frank,” Annemarie Bekker of the Anne Frank House was quoted as saying.
The film was taken during a family wedding about a year before the Franks went into hiding in 1942. They were discovered by the Nazis in 1944 and Frank was deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died at age 15. Her posthumously published diary has sold millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages.
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Coen Bros ‘A Serious Man’: seriously skeptical of faith
The word on the new film, “A Serious Man,” directed by Joel and Ethan Coen (aka “the Coen brothers”) is that it is, well, ‘seriously’ Jewish.
Writing from the recent Toronto International Film Festival, Vanity Fair contributor Michael Hogan called the film “seriously awesome”; but not without a caveat on its Jewish themes: “I’m not usually a fan of things that are super Jewish,” he writes. “Jewish I like,” he admits, but, “all that Fiddler on the Roof crap?” No thanks.
Also at Toronto, Sharon Waxman interviewed the Coens for her Web site, The Wrap, and asked them if they thought the public would see the film as “too Jewish.” Joel was apparently un-amused by the question and simply rubbed his eyes. Ethan gave it a bored stab, ignoring its substance: “If we were going to make it at a budget that was not crazy, it wouldn’t be.”
“The vein of fatalistic, skeptical humor that runs through so many of [the Coens’] movies,” writes A.O. Scott in his New York Times review of the film, “has frequently had a Jewish inflection, both cultural and metaphysical. Here, that inheritance, glancingly present in movies like ‘Barton Fink’ and ‘The Big Lebowski,’ is, so to speak, the whole megillah.”
While ‘A Serious Man’ refrains from the kind of sappy, overindulgent Jewish shtick that makes “Fiddler on the Roof” so beloved by many Jews (and probably intensely nauseating for just as many non-Jews), it still remains deeply entrenched in a Jewish milieu.
Rumored to be based on the biblical story of Job, ‘Serious’ tells the story of Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor with a sweet-natured soul to whom bad things happen for no apparent reason. Gopnik lives a conventional yet depressing life among a Midwestern Jewish community that begins to fall apart when his domineering wife decides to leave him for a widower, a foreign-exchange student attempts to blackmail him for a passing grade, and the tenure board informs him that they have received unflattering letters about him, just as they are about to decide on his professorial future. Gopnik is also father to two self-involved teenages who largely ignore him and brother to a maudlin gambling addict who is threatened with arrest. When Gopnik is about to reach a breaking point, it is suggested to him that he go and see “the rabbi.” Gopnik then visits three rabbis, all of whom are either blithering caricatures, unavailable, or without real wisdom. None of them have an answer for Gopnik, which says something about the Coens’ attitude towards religion in general; it is unabashedly skeptical.
As Hogan notes, “All religion can tell him is that it’s God’s will. But is that really true? Why would God want to punish him this way? It’s impossible to say.” Hogan admires the film as “an extremely hard-headed meditation on love, faith, and destiny”—indeed, it is one without answers or rationale or even hope for divine redemption. That bad things happen in life is inexplicable and unavoidable, say the Coens, and religious faith is no real recourse for a man in need.
“What he encounters,” writes A.O. Scott, “apart from haunting music and drab suburban sacred architecture, is silence, nonsense and — from that metaphysical zone beyond the screen, where the rest of us sit and watch — laughter.” One of the biggest laugh lines in the film—that is oft repeated—is the expression of puzzlement that ensues when Gopnik’s wife insists on a “get”—a religious divorce document —“a what?” several characters reply, incredulously. The film is funniest when mocking many of the cultural norms experience by American Jews: boredom at services, ineffectual Hebrew schools and a near crippling fear of ascending the bimah for a B’nai Mitzvah (in the movie, Gopnik’s son nurses his anxiety with a drug induced haze).
The Coens may not have had the most enriching experience of Judaism—or religion—growing up as they did in a largely Jewish Minneapolis suburb in the 1960s, but the impact of their Jewish upbringing is evident. Secular, cultural Judaism is the lens through which they view the world, with all its bizarre and humorous idiosyncrasies, but alas, it is ultimately, a mostly empty enterprise. Are the Coens using the film to make a case for atheism? Scott wonders, “Are the Coens mocking God, playing God or taking his side in a rigged cosmic game?”
Well, they’re certainly working out some serious Jewish angst – Hollywood style.
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Mahmoud the Jew?
The news yesterday from London’s Daily Telegraph seemed like the kind of conspiracy theory story more common to the Muslim world. (Remember that Pakistani report about Osama bin Laden being a crypto-Jew?) Now rumor has it that the mighty Zionists once counted as members of the tribe the clan from which Iranian nut-job-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hails. Seriously:
A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.
A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.
The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad’s birthplace, and the name derives from “weaver of the Sabour”, the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior.
Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.
Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: “This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad’s background explains a lot about him.
“Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.
“By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society.”
Logically, it would make sense. Nourizadeh is correct: Part of converting includes deeply splitting from traditions of the past, even attacking them. And a Jewish family tree doesn’t play well in Arab politics.
However, Karmel Melamed, The Jewish Journal’s resident Iranian Jewish expert, isn’t buying it. He says that after a morning of interviews and lingual study, he “cannot verify a single shred of evidence that would suggest this story is accurate in anyway.” Read more of that here.
Palestinians urge world: Stop Judaization of Jerusalem
The Western-backed Palestinian Authority on Monday urged the world to “force [Israel] to put off its attempts to take over Jerusalem and Judaize it,” as violence flared in the old city and in eastern Arab neighborhoods.
The Palestinian cabinet, issuing a strong statement after a meeting in the West Bank town of Ramallah, condemned what it called a plan by Jews to “perform religious rituals” in the Temple Mount compound which contains the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site.
Read the full story at HAARETZ.com.
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‘Family Guy’ gets Jewish makeover
Lois Griffin – a Jew?
That’s the revelation from last night’s episode of “Family Guy” (titled “Family Goy”), which included Stewie in payot and a kippah reciting a “L’hadlik Ner” blessing during a Passover seder (followed by Mola Ram’s prayer from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” before he removes Meg’s heart).
This second episode of the season, written by Mark Hentemann, begins with a geektastic “Super Friends” parody opener and then meanders through some flat gags about Peter falling in love with a Kathy Ireland cutout before moving on to a mostly sharp-witted Jewish plot. As can happen in “Family Guy,” the script’s humor takes a few mean-spirited, dark turns, including one gag that only a white supremacist could love –- shooting at Jews.
The Jewish plotline begins when a breast cancer scare leads Lois (voiced by Jewish actress Alex Borstein) to discover that her mother, Barbara Pewterschmidt, is a Holocaust survivor who gave up her Judaism to help her husband get into country clubs (“It was the right thing to do, dear,” Mrs. Pewterschmidt says).
“So Grandma Hebrewberg is actually Jewish?!” Lois asks.
“Yes, when she moved to America, her family changed their name. It was originally Hebrewbergmoneygrabber,” her mother says.
“Family Goy” includes the brief return of Jewish accountant Max Weinstein, the titular character from the episode “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein,” who reassures Lois she doesn’t need to change her life. (Another returning “Weinstein” character: the congregational rabbi voiced by Ben Stein.)
Peter embraces his wife’s Jewish heritage—donning a tallit, kippah and Star of David necklace (chest hair included), and changing his name to “Chhhhhhhh.” When Lois objects, Peter complains, “Leave it to a Jew to take all the fun out of being a Jew.” His enrolling the kids in day school is good for a few laughs, along with his pushing Lois to dress frum in the bedroom to turn him on and, wanting to be humiliated, says, “Tell me I don’t earn as much as your friend’s husband.”
The episode’s conflict is introduced via the ghost of Francis Griffin, Peter’s father, who chastises him for forsaking his Catholic beliefs. Peter immediately shuns his wife (“It’s the only religion with the word ‘ew’ in it”) and crucifies her on a makeshift cross made from Stewie’s crib. The episode takes a truly tasteless turn when Peter emulates Amon Leopold Göth, the Plaszów concentration camp commandant featured in “Schindler’s List,” sitting shirtless in his bedroom window with a rifle aimed at his wife, shooting at her and the town’s other well-known Jew, Mort. After Lois apologizes for Peter, Mort responds with, “No problem, Lois. That’s just how people say hello to me.” The bit crosses the line and hits with the same thud as the protracted scene from the episode “Long John Peter,” in which Peter is offered up as the real killer of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson and O.J. is portrayed as the couple’s horrified best friend.
As Lois and Peter square off over whether the family will celebrate Passover or Easter, the resolution pulls in Jesus—a semi-regular character on the show—to reach an interfaith bridge of understanding, which seems to offer tepid support for Judeo-Christian belief and indulges mildly funny slights against Islam and faith in general.
My hope is that the series will roast the familial Jewish themes introduced in “Family Goy,” rather than continuing on the Jews-as-targets route. The show has regularly featured some inspiring Jewish gags – both in good taste and bad. And while highbrow community in-jokes would be better received by Jewish viewers, the likely reality is the Holocaust humor will continue to dominate. “Family Guy” voice actor Seth Green—also a Jew—once shared with me something Borstein told him prior to the launch of “Robot Chicken”: “The moment you put a bunch of Jewish writers in a room, you’re going to get a ton of Hitler jokes.”
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Have iPhone, Will Cook
With 85,000 applications available for the iPhone, you can stream videos, go onto your favorite social networks, play games, read countless books and play instruments…just to name a few. You can now cook on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Well, not cook on your phone, but with the help of your phone with Kosher Cookbook.
Kosher Cookbook is a brand new application, launched in time for the High Holidays, and on the “What’s Hot” list in the iTunes App Store. From chicken soup and tzimmis to moussaka, the cookbook doesn’t stick to your basic Jewish foods. The Kosher Cookbook offers 300 recipes, 50 Shabbat meal plans, and over 150 photos, all from the comfort of your own phone. But wait – there’s more! No, you don’t get a set of Ginsu knives for ordering, but you do get customizable meal plans and an ingredient list that turns into a shopping list. The list also allows you to uncheck items you already have on hand. Just grab your phone and head to the supermarket. The recipes are broken up into categories by dessert, breakfast, appetizer, parve, meat, dairy, and “my recipes,” where you can bookmark your favorites. You can further filter results by type of cuisine, food type, or course.
Alexander Libkind, CEO of APPSolute Media, came up with the idea for the cookbook about a year ago. “We were looking to create a user experience that starts at the meal planning stage and takes the user all the way to taking the food from the oven, and Gloria Kobrin’s cookbook was the perfect product for the app,” so they included her recipes.
According to Libkind, within the next few months they will be adding whole new books, as well as updates released before the end of the year.
These updates include:
1) The ability to email your shopping list to another person or directly to the store.
2) The ability to add your own items to the premade shopping lists.
3) More recipes and cookbooks.
Although I have not tried any of the recipes yet, I have skimmed through the application, which seems user friendly and easy to navigate. I also skimmed through the recipes and found them to be quite basic like Franks ‘N’ Beans or Breadcrumb Stuffing. There are a few that stood out for me, however, such as the Fudgey Flourless Chocolate Cake, Coconut Chewies and Moussaka (Pareve). I am willing to give it a try. Alexander’s favorite is the Spare Ribs with Hoisin Sauce, which his wife cooked on Rosh Hashana, “and it turned out amazingly great reviews.” Another one he recommends is Armenian Meatballs with Sour Plum Sauce.
Kosher Cookbook is available in the iTunes App Store for $4.95, which is a lot cheaper than most cookbooks and won’t wind up lost in the shuffle between the countless others on your bookshelf or countertop.
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