Salman Rushdie is at Disney Hall, addressing a near-capacity audience as part of the Music Center\’s 2006 Speaker Series. He has come this March 1 evening to talk about politics and art, truth and tyranny, free and forbidden speech. He has come, also, to promote his newest book.
Natalie Portman has probably populated more fanboy fantasies than anyone this side of Jessica Alba.
Besides presiding over the recent \”Star Wars\” films as Queen Amidala, she plays a bald, beautiful and badass revolutionary in \”V For Vendetta,\” opening March 17, the latest film from \”Matrix\” masterminds Andy and Larry Wachowski. As the missing link between the universes of George Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers, Portman holds a unique place in geek-movie history
\”The Five\” is a novel set in Odessa at the dawn of the 20th century, unfolding the story of a colorful upper-middle-class Jewish family and its path of assimilation. An autobiographical tale, it\’s also a romantic portrait of the cosmopolitan city Jabotinsky loved and a life that is no more.
Writing is said to be a lonely business, solitary in the task to fill up so many empty pages. And before I decided to try my hand at writing my autobiographical novel, \”The Other Shulman,\” I\’ll confess I had fears about such an undertaking.
While some admirers have envisioned Wiesenthal as a Jewish John Wayne or James Bond, the diminutive Kingsley, who has played numerous Jewish characters in his film career, including Meyer Lansky in \”Bugsy\” and Fagin in the current \”Oliver Twist,\” depicts him as a much more modest man, frail after the camps, dedicated to his work, not given to swagger or seduction.
\”The Modern Jewish Girl\’s Guide to Guilt\” edited by Ruth Andrew Ellenson (Dutton, $24.95).
When Ruth Andrew Ellenson achieved the writer\’s milestone of selling her first book, her father responded in classic Jewish parental fashion.
\”He was thrilled and said, \’Honey, that\’s wonderful.\’ Then there was a long pause,\” Ellenson recalled. \”And he said, \’I guess this means I have to wait longer for grandchildren.\’\”
As the editor of the newly released \”The Modern Jewish Girl\’s Guide to Guilt,\” Ellenson now has both the professional and personal credentials to speak on behalf of any Jewish woman who struggles with the notion of \”letting my people down. I\’ve always been interested in what\’s complicated about being Jewish and how you balance the different parts of life,\” said the 31-year-old freelance journalist. \”Jewish women have been given opportunities they never had before. We live in a time of choice and so there are myriad new ways to feel guilty.\”
Nineteen-year-old Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was off duty when Hamas operatives kidnapped him in October 1994.
Israel Prize laureate Ehud Manor passed away in April but his beloved songs live on in the hearts of Israelis.
Masterfully, Krauss ties together the stories of Gursky and the young Alma as each searches for clues about \”The History of Love.\”
One of the pleasures of reading \”Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,\” Jonathan Safran Foer\’s absorbing new novel, is that the experience helped me understand why I was so incapable of enjoying Foer\’s first book, the into-30-languages-translated, into-major-motion-picture-being-made \”Everything Is Illuminated\” — or why (to take the blame off myself) that last book, published in 2002, was so ill suited to being enjoyed by me. I\’m even thinking of making a peace offering to \”Everything Is Illuminated,\” trying to reach some sort of détente, maybe seeing if we\’d prefer each other\’s company the second time around.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.