As in 2012, the biggest winners of this year’s Jerusalem Film Festival were debuts by two young and promising directors. Tom Shoval’s Youth received The Haggiag Awards for Israeli Cinema for Full Length Film, and Maya Dreifuss’ She Is Coming Home received the Pirchi Family Award for Best Debut. (More…)
Non-fiction is too narrow. That is, if you believe that the only narrative for progressive publishing is investigative journalism. Emphasize the first person, or adopt a memoir-like approach, and you become untouchable, the stuff of trade publishing, and public radio confessionals. Literary non-fiction? Too bourgeois. Poetry? It’s feminist, right? (More…)
The slogan sounds so good that it’s hard, at first, to register its strangeness: “We are all Edward Snowden.” Consider how many people had access to the same information he did, whether at the NSA or the private contractor where he was employed. But only he made it public. (More…)
The consensus is clear. Middle Eastern equals conservative. So Westerners have come to assume after decades of politically over-determined news coverage, and militaristic foreign policy posturing, by the United States and its allies following the Iranian Revolution. The assumption is universal. Even Israel is subject to this distortion, albeit for different reasons, stemming from its conflict with the Palestinians. (More…)
The criticisms were familiar. If you didn’t know the article was published in Der Spiegel, you’d have thought it was The Economist. All the same themes were present: Italy is approaching failed state status. Government policies are mired in the past. Businesses are eschewing manufacturing for services. Corruption is rampant. Mario Monti is the country’s only hope. (More…)
English used to be synonymous with tourism. Visit any European city, and the chances were, if you saw something written in English, it was aimed at foreigners. Or, depending on where you were, American forces stationed in the area. Particularly in Germany, which boasted amongst the largest concentrations of US forces stationed abroad during the Cold War. (More…)
If only we could blame Berlusconi. In the most widely-reported incident of an Italian politician making racist remarks since Il Cavaliere called Obama “suntanned,” Roberto Calderoli, vice president of Italy’s Senate, likened Cécile Kyenge, the country’s first black cabinet minister, to an orangutan. As many newspapers have reported, it’s not the first time that a legislator from the Lega Nord has made such a remark. (More…)
In the part of the Tucson metro area where I live — the same part where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was nearly assassinated in 2011 — anti-Obama sentiment has been strong since he first became a viable Presidential candidate. I take it for granted that I’m going to hear people disparaging him on a daily basis. (More…)
A clip from a 2012 interview with Dustin Hoffman has gone viral. As a potential antidote to the casual and furious misogyny unleashed during Wimbledon, where women were invisible or too ugly, one can see why. In the video, Dustin Hoffman describes his experience preparing for the title role of Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982) and the revelation it yielded. (More…)
Bluntness can be a masquerade. The declaration here is unequivocal: “Henry Ford was an anti-Semite.” And the supporting evidence laid out below is hard to argue with. Ford did publish The International Jew, a pernicious slander that won the admiration of the future Führer. These are facts. But what does it mean to share them in this manner? (More…)
The solidarity flyer seemed apropos. A stone’s throw from the Mole Antonelliana, the 19th century tower dominates Turin’s skyline, evocative, in some ways, of the Dome of the Rock. Originally conceived as a synagogue, it’s difficult to disconnect the Mole from its religious intent, despite the fact that it was never used as such. (More…)
Don’t let his pro-Palestinian rhetoric fool you. Recep Tayyip Erdogan remains a close ally of the United States. The head of a socially conservative Islamic political party, the Turkish Premier nonetheless believes Turkey to be an integral part of the west, no less deserving of EU membership, for example, than decidedly secular, northern European states such as Germany. (More…)