On the flight back from a recent trip to Italy, I took a slight flight risk and decided to watch Madonna’s critically maligned movie “W.E.” Since I had not heard a single positive thing about it (save for Andrea Riseborough’s performance as Wallis Simpson) I was not particularly excited about my choice.
In Jill Rappaport\’s book, \”Mazel Tov: Celebrities\’ Bar and Bat Mitzvah Memories\” she interviews 21 celebrities as they describe how the b\’nai mitzvah experience brought them to where they are today. With the photographic help of her sister, Linda Solomon, Rappaport provides a joyfully contrasting image of the celebrities and their familiar adolescent counterparts.
Early in the last century, when film was a newer medium, many artists were intrigued by its kinetic visual possibilities, and for a fantasist like Dali, the opportunities must have seemed especially rich.
In Studs Terkel\’s newest book, \”And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey\” (The New Press, 2005), America\’s preeminent oral historian once again collects his conversations with celebrated people, as he did in his 1999 book, \”The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With the People Who Make Them.\”
Anyone can choose Jewishness at any point along a life path, and many, many people do. That means institutions that reach out in different ways at different life-cycle moments –preschools, synagogues, camps, mortuaries — must be able to welcome, educate and retain members of the tribe who possess only a vague sense of Jewishness. At the same time, people are coming to Judaism outside institutions, in new, unusual and, sometimes, unrecognizable ways
In the days of communism\’s fierce grip on the Soviet Union, there lived a Chasidic Jew named Reb Mendel Futerfas. Reb Mendel repeatedly put his life at risk with his efforts to promote Jewish education behind the Iron Curtain and for some 14 years was incarcerated in prisons and labor camps for his \”crime\” of teaching Torah.
We know that Adar is a month of great joy. But there is one day, the 7th of Adar, which falls this year on March 18, when we take a small break from joy.
There\’s nothing inherently wrong with reading celebrity gossip magazines. If you can do it in moderation, I applaud you (and please let me know if Lindsay Lohan\’s dad ever gets his act together). In my case, however, I was a problem reader and I had to put the magazines down.
I was headed into a pizza joint for a slice when I noticed a guy whose face looked eerily familiar. I couldn\’t place him but he gave me a subtle nod, frat-boy style.
Just as I snapped my head back to make sure it actually was the dude from \”Average Joe,\” he was craning his head back, too.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.