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Jewish Journal

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January 5, 2011

Q-&-A with Wendy Shanker

Leave a Comment / Health /

After Wendy Shanker published her first book, “The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life,” she thought she had fought and won her battle for self-acceptance. But after being diagnosed with Wegener’s disease, a life-threatening autoimmune disorder, she found that her struggle to come to terms with her body — a body that was now slowly deteriorating — was far from over.

The 38-year-old writer and comedian embarked on a mission to find health and wellness by any means necessary, whether through Western medicine or traditional Eastern practices. In her search, she tried everything from acupuncture to cranial massage, consulting with her New York-based physician all the while.

Finally, Shanker went against all advice and stopped taking her medications — only to find her body begin to heal itself. She documented her journey in her newest book, “Are You My Guru? How Medicine, Meditation and Madonna Saved My Life” (NAL Trade, $15).

Jewish Journal: How are you doing now?

Wendy Shanker: I’m doing really well. I feel very good. I’m pretty much drug-free and doing my full-time job, which is taking care of myself, along with my other full-time jobs. It’s good because it would have been terrible to be sick when this book came out. 

JJ: By the end of your journey, you went against medical advice, got off all your medications and your body restored itself. Why and how do you think that happened?

WS: Two things happened — I had hit the point where the medicine was making things worse instead of better. The drug direction I was getting was, “Take more medication,” but I needed to get off them in order to get better. Plus, as I talked about in the book, that X factor, that mystical, “Did somebody say a prayer? Did I hit the right spiritual adventure that made the starts align?” — I can’t discount that. [Eventually] I started taking this new drug, Rituxan, that was a lot gentler, a lot more targeted and that has been a real success story.

JJ: Have you retained any of the practices that you picked up during your journey to stay healthy?

WS: I’m still doing acupuncture and [taking a] lot of the nutrition and supplements that I picked up from Ayurveda. I’m still making my shallow attempts to meditate with as much frequency as possible, doing yoga and exercise, taking vitamins.

JJ: Do you think Judaism helped you in your journey?

WS: I was raised with Reform Judaism, and a huge part of my Jewish identity came from my involvement in youth groups, and friends who were Jewish. As I’ve gotten a little bit older, I think my practice has gotten stronger. I have a lot more connection with the spiritual part of Judaism than I did when I was younger, in the same way I feel spiritual when I’m doing yoga moves. I do think it’s helping me heal. I like that I can look elsewhere for faith and find it, but I also find it in the faith I was raised with.

JJ: You’ve written a lot about body image, both in terms of your struggle with your weight and your struggle with the physical side effects of your illness. What issues do you think Jewish women in particular struggle with in terms of body image?

WS: There is a big struggle. There’s a big struggle with weight, that somehow the Jewish body is too big, it’s too curvy— [and then] there’s a certain body type that’s a skinny Jewish body and those girls worry that their boobs aren’t big enough. Jewish food isn’t exactly kale and peppers, either. Then there are these genetic Ashkenazi gene issues with breast cancer and with Tay-Sachs disease and with certain autoimmune diseases, so that makes life really complicated when you’re worried about your health and you have to wonder, “Does my Jewishness have an effect on this?” It just gives us something else to feel bad about if we choose to.

JJ: You talk a lot about the idea of not blaming yourself for what’s wrong with your health, yet it sounds like you were able to make a big difference in your recovery by doing all the work you did. How do you reconcile not blaming yourself for what’s wrong, yet still take on the responsibility to make it right?

WS: I think that what’s different is the motivation for going out there and empowering yourself. So instead of this idea that “if I’m not getting better it’s my fault because I’m not trying hard enough,” it’s like, maybe you’re not getting better but it has nothing to do with the amount of effort you’re making. Maybe this isn’t the right treatment plan. That’s where I also compared it to dieting — as in, “I’m doing Weight Watchers and not losing weight; it’s me, I’m not doing Weight Watchers hard enough.” Instead of, “Maybe Weight Watchers isn’t the right plan.”

JJ: At the end of the book, you say that you wrote this to empower other people. Do you think that Western medicine leaves people un-empowered?

WS: Yes, I do. It’s not the doctor’s fault, but it’s a really rough system that’s based on the idea that you’re broken and you need to get fixed. There isn’t room and there isn’t time for the doctor to get the holistic view with their patients; they have to fix the one problem that’s in front of them. But instead of blaming doctors or blaming patients, you have to take the responsibility. For me it was, this is the limitation of Western medicine, so what can I bring to it to help balance out the deficits?

JJ: At one point in the book, one of the healers you visit suggests that you talk to your body parts. The conversation you had with your liver was so funny. Are you still in regular contact with your organs?

WS: Yes, I like the idea [of giving] each of these organs a personality. I was joking around with her, but once that organ had a personality, it was hard not to think about it, and it was actually kind of a good format for me to give me body a little credit. I still think it’s kind of silly, but when I get a good test back, I still say, “Thank you, liver, I really appreciate it.” It’s a way of personalizing my relationship with my body.

Q-&-A with Wendy Shanker Read More »

Architects ask: What might a Palestinian West Bank look like?

Leave a Comment / Entertainment /

“Decolonizing Architecture,” an exhibition on view at REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in downtown’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, assumes that the current residents of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank will ultimately have to evacuate their homes. The three architects behind the show appear to have no doubt that those areas will be transferred to Palestinian control.

The question the architects attempt to probe in this compact and provocative display is simultaneously politically theoretical and architecturally concrete: What will happen to the houses left behind when Palestinians take over Israeli settlements in the West Bank?

A query inscribed on one of the walls is more blunt: “How to inhabit the house of your enemy?”

REDCAT’s gallery is currently configured as four rooms, and this exhibition, which has attracted 2,500 visitors since opening in early December, is the first presentation in the United States by the Bethlehem-based organization known as Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency (DAAR). Established by architects Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman in 2007, DAAR brings artists and architects to Bethlehem and encourages them to examine — in a hyper-local and highly critical way — the built environment of the West Bank. The show at REDCAT uses the tools of architecture — including drawings, models, maps and video — to explain one view of the situation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank today.

After viewing the exhibition, Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of the Israel education organization StandWithUs, called it anti-Israel, anti-Semitic and accused the organizers of omitting important context, including the Jewish historical connection to the West Bank. “Israel’s presence in the region was described in ugly terms, without any mention of the terror attacks that necessitate Israel’s military oversight of the area,” Rothstein wrote in an e-mail.

Weizman is no stranger to controversy. The Israeli-born, London-based architect is best known for co-curating “A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture,” a show intended to be the official Israeli submission to the 2002 World Congress of Architecture but which was withdrawn at the last minute by the Israel Association of United Architects. The association’s president later called it “one-sided political propaganda” in The New York Times. (A version of the exhibit was mounted in New York and Berlin; the catalog was reprinted in 2003.)

By putting forward a vision of what might happen to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the REDCAT show harkens back to questions asked in advance of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005 — explicitly so. Visitors to “Decolonizing Architecture” are welcomed by an ominous two-minute video clip of one settler’s house being torn apart by a backhoe — one of the more than 1,000 residential buildings destroyed before the disengagement from the 22 Israeli settlements in Gaza was complete.

In the section titled “How to inhabit the house of your enemy?” the show looks past the currently stalled peace negotiations and offers a bricks-and-mortar vision for the evacuated settlements in the West Bank radically different from what happened in Gaza. “The guiding principle,” the architects write in the text that accompanies the exhibition, “is not to eliminate the power of the occupation’s built spaces, nor simply to reuse it in the way it was designed for, but to reorient its logic to other aims.”

The show presents the Israeli settlement of Psagot (population 1,600) as a test case for this kind of transformation. Founded in 1981, Psagot sits on a hilltop east of Ramallah (population 27,000) and south of the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh (population 38,000). First and foremost, the DAAR architects propose that the settlement — which today functions as a gated community for religious Jewish settlers separated from the Palestinian areas around it — be woven into the urban fabric of the Palestinian cities nearby.

“You see, it is suburban in relationship to Jerusalem,” Weizman says of Psagot, in a video on the “Decolonizing Architecture” Web site. The settlement is about 15 miles from Jerusalem, but sits practically adjacent to Al-Bireh and Ramallah. “It’s very close to the Palestinian urban fabric,” Weizman said, “so it’s urban in the context of Ramallah and Al-Bireh, and it’s suburban in the context of Jewish Jerusalem.”

What might actually come of Psagot in a negotiated peace deal for a two-state solution remains unclear, as is true of the entire West Bank. “If you try to make a line around Psagot as a settlement bloc, you’ve got some trouble,” Americans for Peace Now West Coast Regional Director David Pine, who also visited the show, said. “There’s no line that you can draw without cutting communities of Palestinians in half.”

“Decolonizing Architecture” doesn’t attempt to draw any such lines. Instead, it simply assumes that places like Psagot will one day be evacuated and transferred over to Palestinian control, and that the transfer will necessitate some architectural modifications to the houses left behind, if only to turn the settlers’ homes —highly visible representations of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank — into something that could better serve Palestinian purposes. (One of the simplest changes they propose is the removal and reconfiguration of the pitched red-tile roofs typical of Israeli settlement residential architecture.)

To be sure, the DAAR architects aren’t the only ones proposing architectural visions for a future Palestinian state. Doug Suisman is a Santa Monica-based urban designer whose infrastructure plan called “The Arc” recently won the “2010 Future Project of the Year” at the World Architecture Festival. Developed over the last six years in partnership with the RAND Corp., Suisman’s plan calls for a mix of railroads, motorways and bus routes to connect the primary Palestinian cities in the West Bank and Gaza to one another.

“We assumed that there was a peace accord in place,” Suisman said. By this, he meant that an agreement about borders — including a solution for Jerusalem and for the West Bank settlements — had somehow been reached. “Huge assumption,” Suisman acknowledged.

In creating “The Arc” — an inherently hopeful, self-consciously apolitical vision of a future Palestinian state — Suisman avoided looking at Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “It’s an important question, but it’s not the most important question,” Suisman said.

By contrast, “Decolonizing Architecture,” which looks directly at the settlements, does not make the same assumption of a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, as the architects explain in the exhibition brochure, DAAR was launched as a way to entertain “the possibility of significant transformation” in the theoretical realm, despite its being “blocked by the political impasse known as the ‘peace process.’ ” Despite numerous attempts to reach them, none of the architects involved in the show responded to requests for comment.

“Decolonizing Architecture” is on view until Feb. 6 at REDCAT. Architect Alessandro Petti will participate in a panel discussion at the gallery on Wed., Jan. 26 at 7:30 p.m. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd Street, Los Angeles. 213-237-2800. redcat.org.

Architects ask: What might a Palestinian West Bank look like? Read More »

‘Heritage’ positions American Jews in Jewish America

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment, Judaism /

“Heritage,” warns Beth S. Wenger in “History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage” (Princeton University Press, $35), “is always a partisan effort.”

According to Wenger, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of its Jewish studies program, the heritage embraced by American Jews is invented if not entirely imaginary. She insists that the way American Jews see themselves can be “self-congratulatory, often embellished, and sometimes a blend of fact and fiction.”  She argues that “American Jews gradually manufactured a collective Jewish history in the United States,” and the end result has been “[t]he creation of a shared, usable Jewish past” but not necessarily a wholly factual one. 

Viewed from the stance of a professional historian, the whole enterprise of heritage-making strikes her as a “messy blend of truth and myth … often self-aggrandizing and self-congratulatory, and almost always self-serving.” The purpose of Jewish myth-making in America has been to “[foster] a sense of Jewish belonging” in a place where we are a tiny minority, and she concludes that “Jews wrote America into Jewish history, and Jews into American history.”

A revolution in Jewish consciousness was at work among the Jews who managed to reach the New World. “The Zionist typology of the ‘new Jew’… had an American corollary,” Wenger writes. “American Jews created a myth of America as the new Zion, an alternate form of the Promised Land.” So it was that the Yiddish poet Avraham Liessin, writing in 1897, saw the Statue of Liberty as a symbol with special meaning for Jewish immigrants: “Man/freed from tyranny/grows free and proud/with a spirit that knows no bound/and a will forged of steel.”

Of course, Jews were always mindful that they represented a small fraction of the population, even if they refused to concede that America was essentially a Christian nation. Thus, for example, when Christian patriots depicted America as “the divine successor to biblical Israel,” Jews tried “to subvert the Christian nature of that claim by reinserting Jews into the story and allotting them a primary share of the founding myth.” Thus, for example, one prominent Reform rabbi celebrated the American centennial in 1876 by declaring that “Moses, the son of Amram, and George Washington are the two poles of the axis about which the history of mankind revolves.”

Here Wenger sees “one of the most common practices of Jews in America,” that is, the use of civic holidays “from Thanksgiving to Columbus Day to the Fourth of July” as occasions on which Jewish Americans “conjured and performed myriad versions of American history and sketched a Jewish place within it.” And she points out that it was not only a matter of making speeches and putting on pageants — the now-discredited notion that Columbus was Jewish came to be “codified as part of the collective heritage of American Jews.”

Some of the most compelling passages in Wenger’s books address the less familiar moments in Jewish history. She recalls that the Jewish War Veterans sold its own brand of shaving razor during the Depression as a fund-raising effort (“Use the J.W.V. Blade!”), and some radical Yiddish schools “openly ridiculed Judaism (and all religion) as corrupt,” as in a poem that appeared in one school primer: “The Rabbi and the Cantor —/Their income’s no pittance!/Of course. They tell us,/That the boss is always right.”

More familiar is her account of how Haym Salomon, an obscure participant in the American Revolution, was transformed into “the first and perhaps most enduring heroic figure of American Jewry.” Although he played a “key role in securing financial support for the American cause,” Wenger insists, “everything else said about him … can be characterized as either hopeful speculation or blatant distortion.” So it was that the Jewish community of Los Angeles gathered on Jan. 7, 1944, to unveil a monument in his honor — “a statue of ‘heroic size’ that depicted Salomon in a seated posture, closely resembling the image of Abraham Lincoln sitting solemnly at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.” After several moves, that same statue now stands at the Third Street entrance to Pan Pacific Park.

The self-invention that Wenger describes so expertly in “History Lessons” is not over yet.  When Robert Rifkin wrote a letter 2004 addressed to the Jewish community of 2054, he asserted that American Jewry “had come of age.” But Wenger warns us that “he likely overstated the finality of its evolution,” and her own conclusion is that “American Jewry remains constantly in the process of ‘becoming.’ ”

“History Lessons” is a work of scholarship, but it is an especially lucid and accessible one, and the book has a unique appeal for a nonacademic Jewish readership. Indeed, we are the subject of Wenger’s impressive study, and it is fascinating to read about ourselves in its pages.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs on books at ‘Heritage’ positions American Jews in Jewish America Read More »

Australian government appeals Zentai ruling

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

The Australian government is appealing a court ruling that spared an alleged Nazi war criminal from being extradited to Hungary.

Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor approved the extradition of Charles Zentai in 2009, but a Federal Court judge overturned the decision last year.

The government on Tuesday appealed the ruling that said Zentai, 89, of Perth, was not eligible for extradition.

Zentai, a former soldier in the Hungarian army, is wanted for questioning in the murder of an 18-year-old Jewish man in Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944.

He has vehemently denied the claims since they surfaced in 2005 following a campaign mounted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Zentai says he left Budapest on Nov. 7, 1944—the day before Peter Balazs was murdered.

The Wiesenthal Center’s spokesman, Efraim Zuroff, said the appeal “is the correct response by the Australian Government, which should be commended for its perseverance in this case. His fate should be decided in a court in Hungary.”

The government’s appeal is expected to be heard by the full bench of the Federal Court.

Australian government appeals Zentai ruling Read More »

Shabbat in Liverpool: New CD adapts Beatles’ tunes for services

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Music /

When is it kosher to listen to the Beatles on the Sabbath?

When your chazan adapts the Kabbalat Shabbat Friday night service to the melodies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Lenny Solomon, the founder of the song-parody group Shlock Rock, employed “nusach Liverpool” for a service in late December at the Young Israel of Hollywood, an Orthodox synagogue in South Florida.

“I’ve never had more pride in anything else that I have ever performed,” said Solomon, who has been in the Jewish music business for 25 years. “I had created something new that could be sung in the shul. This is something that I had never done, and I was beaming by the time the services ended.”

The service was the culmination of a years-long project for Solomon that has included the release of a CD with 21 Beatles’ songs set to various parts of Shabbat services and liturgy.

On the CD, “Shalom Aleichem” is sung to the tune of “With a Little Help from My Friends”; the “V’Shamru” portion of kiddush is set to “The Long and Winding Road”; “Ein Keloheinu” sounds like “Let it Be”; and the Havdalah service is set to “Imagine.”

The story of the CD began in 2004 when a friend and neighbor asked Solomon, who lives in Israel, for the 40th birthday gift of a CD of the songs of Kabbalat Shabbat set to Beatles music. Solomon was skeptical but the neighbor, Allen Krasna, sent him an Excel spreadsheet with the Beatles’ songs in one column and the prayers and songs of the Shabbat service on the left.

Solomon went to work.

Working on and off, he needed nine months to take the 35 tunes and incorporate the melodies to the words of the Shabbat prayers.

Solomon recorded the CD, “A Shabbat in Liverpool,” in 2005, but it took another five years to obtain the proper licensing to release the project. The collection finally was released publicly last November as a 21-song CD, which is available for sale at Amazon and other retailers. (Samples of the collection are available at shlockrock.com.) Solomon was in the United States promoting the CD.

Dec. 24 marked the first time that Solomon actually used the songs in a real service. The reaction at the Young Israel of Hollywood seemed to be mostly positive.

“I enjoyed it and sang along with Lenny,” said congregant Avi Frier. “I think it will take awhile, though, for something like this to really catch on and became mainstream, like the Carlebach minyanim.”

It was hardly the first time Jewish services have been set to secular music. Some of the most popular Shabbat tunes originally were secular songs, such as “Erev Shel Shoshanim” (“Evening of Lilies”), a Hebrew love song written in 1957 by Yaffa Yarkoni.

“Every song that comes into this world has a holy spark,” Solomon said. “It is the obligation of the Jewish musician to take the best melodies of the secular world and bring them from the side of darkness to the side of light. This will cause the Jewish people to get closer to God and hasten the redemption.”

Krasna, whose request spawned the creation of the CD, agrees.

“I’m in favor of anything that is done in the service that elevates one’s spirituality,” said Krasna, a lifelong Beatles fan. “Certainly, Conservative and Reform synagogues may embrace this kind of thing more easily, since they always look for ideas to make their services more relevant to the times. But I believe there is a place for these tunes even at Orthodox synagogues.”

Solomon sees the Beatles service as a work in progress.

“My first effort at leading the service was not perfect,” he said. “I do hope I’ll have the opportunity to do this again, so that other congregants can learn the service and appreciate the rich Shabbat liturgy in a brand-new way.

“I’m also convinced that there are many people who ordinarily do not attend a synagogue but who can be introduced to the holy words of our Shabbat prayers through this music.”

Shabbat in Liverpool: New CD adapts Beatles’ tunes for services Read More »

Snow dumping topples headstones in Brooklyn cemetery

Leave a Comment / United States /

New York City snow removal trucks dumped tons of snow from the area’s recent blizzard into the city’s largest Jewish cemetery, toppling 21 headstones.

An iron fence around Brooklyn’s Washington Cemetery also was damaged when crews from the Sanitation Department dumped the snow into the cemetery over New Year’s weekend, the New York Post reported Wednesday.

The damage was discovered Sunday. Family members of some relatives buried in the cemetery have visited in recent days to check on the graves.

Several cars parked next to the cemetery also were buried; some were damaged.

The cemetery reportedly will file a claim with the city.

The blizzard that hit the New York metropolitan area Dec. 26-27 dropped 2 feet or more of snow in some spots.

Snow dumping topples headstones in Brooklyn cemetery Read More »

Lebanon takes natural resources dispute to U.N.

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

Lebanon has asked the United Nations to make sure that Israel does not encroach on energy resources in its territorial waters.

In a letter sent Tuesday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Lebanon Foreign Minister Ali al-Shami called on the international body to ensure that “Israel does not exploit Lebanon’s marine and oil wealth, which lies within its exclusive economic zone,” Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported.

The letter follows an announcement last week by the Houston, Texas-based Noble Energy that a natural gas field dubbed Leviathan discovered in Israel’s territorial waters contains an estimated 16 trillion cubic feet of the natural resource.

Lebanon has said that some of the deposits extend into its territorial waters, which Israel disputes.

The Lebanese government in August approved a law to allow offshore oil and gas exploration for the first time.

Lebanon and Israel do not have an agreed-upon maritime border and remain in a state of war.

Lebanon takes natural resources dispute to U.N. Read More »

Holocaust era ignored by 2011 Oscar contenders

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Oscars /

In the half century that this reporter has been writing about Hollywood, the Oscars and domestic and foreign films, not a year has gone by without prominent movies and documentaries focusing on the Holocaust, the Nazi era or World War II.

And with each roundup, critics have regularly announced the end of this particular genre, only to be proven wrong the following year.

Well, 2010 has passed, contenders for the 2011 Academy Awards are polishing their spontaneous acceptance remarks, but not a single entry anywhere deals with the historic horror of the 1930s and 1940s.

A mere year ago, Jewish GIs were wiping out Hitler and his minions in “Inglourious Basterds,” and the year before we fed on German guilt and anti-Nazi resistance in “The Reader,” “Defiance” and “Valkyrie.”

One year’s film output does not necessarily mark a trend. Still, it may be even more significant that among the 65 submitted foreign-language films, which often reflect the present moods and concerns of their respective countries, none touches on the Holocaust era.

By contrast, a year ago, films from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Norway, Slovenia and Holland centered on World War II, and, in most instances, on the fate of the country’s Jews under German occupation.

Checking the current list of foreign entries, ranging from Albania to Venezuela, many deal instead with such timeless favorites as romance, comedy, teenage agonies, sports and so forth.

And while others touch on themes of war, oppression and resistance, the time frame has shifted from World War II to the postwar communists and other dictatorships, and to recent genocides.

Examples are Belgium’s “Illegal,” about an undocumented foreign worker; Bulgaria’s “Eastern Plays,” about a neo-Nazi gang; Croatia’s “The Blacks,” about a fascist death squad in the Bosnian fighting; and Iran’s “Farewell Baghdad,” about the first U.S. war in Iraq.

Also, Poland’s “All That I Love,” set against the 1980s background of the Solidarity movement; and South Africa’s “Life, Above All,” which examines AIDS, alcoholism and child prostitution in a rural area. The Soviet regime’s oppression of artists is the theme of “The Concert,” a French movie listed among the Golden Globes’ five foreign film finalists (though not an Oscar candidate).

In the early 1980s, Andrei Filipov (Alexei Guskov), the conductor of the renowned Bolshoi Orchestra, was summarily fired during an anti-Semitic purge by the Kremlin for his refusal to fire his Jewish musicians. Jewish Romanian director Radu Mihaileanu tells the story with much humor and unexpected twists, with glamour provided by Melanie Laurent, the fierce Jewish heroine of “Inglourious Basterds.”

(The American Cinematheque and Hollywood Foreign Press Association will screen “The Concert” on Jan. 12 at 7:30 p.m. at Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre.)

Israel’s entry this year to the Oscar competition is “The Human Resources Manager,” which the Israeli/Jewish rooting section carrying the blue-and-white banner hopes might finally add an Oscar to its Olympic gold medal.

After a 23-year drought, during which no Israeli film came close enough to make the five finalists list, the greatly improved Tel Aviv-based film industry has dramatically picked up its stride.

In each of the last three years, the Israeli entry placed among the final five short list, with “Ajami,” about Arab-Jewish tensions in Jaffa, in 2010, “Waltz With Bashir” in 2009, and “Beaufort” in 2008.

The latter two dealt with the wars in Lebanon, and “Waltz,” a highly original animated feature and Golden Globe winner, seemed so close to the top prize that the corks were almost halfway out of the champagne bottles.

“The Human Resources Manager” is based on A.B. Yehoshua’s novel “A Woman in Jerusalem,” centered around an otherwise unnamed title character (played by Mark Ivanir). It tells the story of his transformation from detached bureaucrat in the country’s largest industrial bakery to an involved human being, as he accompanies the body of an employee, a Christian foreign worker killed in a suicide bombing, to her native Romanian village for burial.

Under Eran Riklis’ direction, the manager represents a kind of everyman, forced to face a dissolving marriage, incompetent Israeli and Romanian officials, and paralyzing snowstorms.

During a visit to Los Angeles by Riklis and Ivanir, the director summarized his film as “basically the story of a man who travels with death in order to rediscover his own life.”

On another level, the film asks, “How do we treat the ger, the stranger in our midst? Do we show respect for our foreign workers?” Riklis added.

“Resources Manager” was panned by Variety, the show-business journal, but has otherwise been well received. The Los Angeles Times listed the film among the front-runners for an Oscar nomination.

In any case, the Israeli entry will face some heavy competition, particularly from Mexico’s “Biutiful,” France’s “Of Gods and Men,” Russia’s “The Edge” and Thailand’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.”

Israel has a strong contender in the documentary features category with “Precious Life,” which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has short-listed among the 15 semi-finalists.

Holocaust era ignored by 2011 Oscar contenders Read More »

Knesset approves probe of left-wing groups

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Israel’s Knesset voted to form a parliamentary committee to investigate left-wing Israeli organizations that criticize the Israeli military’s actions.

The initiative, proposed by the Yisrael Beiteinu Party, passed Wednesday by a vote of 47 to 16.

The committee will be charged with determining if the groups are funded by foreign countries or by other groups with links to terrorism.

Israeli human rights groups have criticized the initiative.

State Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein ruled in the summer that organizations cannot be investigated for criticizing the Israel Defense Forces activities.

Some of the organizations singled out during the discussion included Yesh Din, Machsom Watch, B’tselem, Adallah and Breaking the Silence,

“Investigate us all, we have nothing to hide,” read an open letter signed by 16 Israeli human rights organizations that was excerpted in Haaretz. “You are invited to read our reports and our publications. We will be happy if for a change you relate in a germane way to our questions instead of trying to besmirch us. It did not work in the past and it will not work this time.”

Knesset approves probe of left-wing groups Read More »

N.J. kosher poultry plant fowls out

Leave a Comment / United States /

Money woes apparently have caused the shutdown of the Vineland Kosher Poultry plant in southern New Jersey.

A union official representing 160 workers at the plant told the Daily Journal newspaper that the factory halted production Dec. 30.

Plant management did not return a reporter’s phone calls.

Financial troubles are believed to be behind the closure. In October, the company warned the city it might lay off 50 workers, or 25 percent of its workforce, by the end of the year. Plant owners also had looked to sell the company.

One rumor is the plant will shift to non-kosher poultry.

Vineland Kosher was founded in 1968 and produces millions of kosher chickens, ducks and turkeys annually.

N.J. kosher poultry plant fowls out Read More »