Jewish culture
Veronica Lee
For those not of Jewish heritage and who may not know the significance of the title, Friday-night dinner is the hub of a Jewish family’s week, when they gather together for a special dinner and prayers. It’s a (very) rough cultural equivalent of a Sunday roast or the Thanksgiving meal, and even for many non-religious Jews who dispense with the traditional menu and prayers, there’s a three-line whip on attendance.Creator and writer Robert Popper grew up in a non-religious north-London Jewish family and freely admits Friday Night Dinner is about his family, if a little exaggerated for comic Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some of you will know that Wagner and I haven't been seeing eye to eye of late. Last year's Tannhäuser I believed was the end of the road for the two of us. Not quite. With one of the most celebrated Wagner productions of the past two decades returning to the English National Opera last night - Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Parsifal - I decided to give him a final chance. My whole mind, body and soul was primed to repel it, yet I came out almost blubbing.The revelation didn't come immediately - nothing in Wagner comes immediately - though it didn't take long for the music to start having its Read more ...
neil.smith
Canadian writer Mordecai Richler’s eclectic contribution to film includes uncredited work on Room at the Top, the screenplay for Fun with Dick and Jane and the original book behind Richard Dreyfuss’s early success The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Like that 1959 novel, his final tome, Barney’s Version, dealt with the colourful history of a Montreal Jew. Where Richler was alive to see the 1974 film of Kravitz, however, his 2001 death makes this adaptation of Barney something of a memorial to an author one suspects would be better known had he been born on the other side of the world’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We are in Brooklyn in 1938 and Sylvia Gellburg, a middle-class Jewish housewife, is paralysed from the waist down. It’s a hysterical paralysis brought on by the shock of seeing newspaper pictures of the cruelty meted out to German Jews during the horrors of Kristallnacht (or the night of broken glass). She becomes obsessed with a picture of two elderly Jews forced to clean the pavement with toothbrushes - events several thousand miles away have caused the sudden numbing of her limbs. Or is it something else?In Arthur Miller’s play (written in 1994), Sylvia (Lucy Cohu) is married to Phillip ( Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes you get the impression the Beeb wishes religion would quietly go away. You see it in the gradual transformation of the Sunday morning slot from the lightweight Heaven and Earth Show to Nicky Campbell’s lighter-weight Big Questions and now the heroically worldly Sunday Morning Live. General Synod noticed it earlier this year when complaints were made about the lack of religious programming. And the secular society noticed it when they rushed to the Beeb’s defence commending its secular and rationalist output. From last night it seems that the secular agenda is even at work in the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the second part of this historic career overview interview with the unique British impresarios, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser talk about their razor-edged relations with Soviet apparatchiks and the pressures they came under to prevent artist defections. Victor (who is a very engaging raconteur) reveals the lengths the Russians tried to go to stop Pierre Boulez conducting Berg in the USSR - liver-busting ceremonial vodka sessions, and a solution of Lewis Carrollian ludicrousness. "I hated them," he says, "but we needed each other."Following on from last week's revelations about their Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Let me lay a friendly fiver that many critics will rubbish this film, for the following reasons. It’s a romcom, and a Hollywood one at that, the lowest form of cinematic life for many (most often male) critics; it stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose career has gone from British television mediocrity to Hollywood royalty, a heinous crime for some; and its story, about a 40-year-old mother of two who falls in love with a guy 15 years her junior, is a reverse parallel of Zeta-Jones’s own personal life (her husband, Michael Douglas, is 25 years older than she). Just listen to those knives being Read more ...
graeme.thomson
American television's desire to upgrade the BBC’s Who do You Think You Are? into a prime piece of emotional real estate was never likely to meet any serious resistance. Even stripped of the stridently Hollywood voiceover that teed up the US version of the show when it first aired on NBC back in March - “To know who you are, you have to know where you came from”, it boomed over a slo-mo montage of Olympian hugging - last night’s tweaked version, with a new, subdued British narration, told us more about US TV and America’s relationship with its own history than it ever did about its subject, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there anywhere Stephen Fry will not go? I mean in documentaries. We’ve had Fry on depression and Fry on America, Fry on HIV and Fry on endangered species. Movingly, we’ve had Fry on who he thinks he is, an odyssey in which he discovered that much of his family fetched up in the gas ovens. Fry on Wagner? Admit it, you weren’t surprised. You didn't think, not another bloody comedian investigating, in pursuit of ratings, a subject of which he knows next to nothing. Fry, as everyone knows, knows everything. “My love affair with Wagner”, he began, “began when I was a child.” Of course it did, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Great excitement at the Artes Mundi Awards in Cardiff’s National Museum last night as the UK’s largest cash prize for the winner of any UK contemporary art competition - a staggering £40,000 - was presented to the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. Two hours before the announcement, the judges were still undecided but the white smoke moment saw Bartana’s two films (part of an ongoing trilogy) land the cheque.Like many of the 500 contenders, Bartana works with documentary film. She applies it to interesting challenges to the meaning of Zionism today and plays with the idea of returning Polish Jews Read more ...
james.woodall
Tonight at the Barbican's Pit, kicking off a run of ten performances, a rather unusual piece of theatre opens. It's not a big play, it probably won't make great waves and it does involve reading surtitles. Called Iram, it's an Israeli adaptation, in Hebrew, of the stories of the Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem. Outside Israel - excluding, at a pinch, bookish circles in transatlantic Jewish communities (Aleichem emigrated from the Ukraine to the US before the First World War) - this prolific chronicler of late 19th-century shtetl life will grace few home libraries. The word "shtetl" might also Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Something decidedly odd happened at one of last year’s Proms. In a night celebrating the golden age of the MGM musicals, one of the performers was Seth MacFarlane. The average Prommer wouldn’t have known MacFarlane from a poached egg. And even his devotees wouldn’t necessarily be too familiar with the face. But when in the course of the evening he started singing in a voice for which he is better known, the picture became clear. To some of the audience, anyway: MacFarlane is the genius behind Stewie Griffin.Family Guy needs no introduction. Or if it does, it won’t be getting one here. After a Read more ...