Jewish culture
Veronica Lee
Well, here’s an interesting endeavour. The 2,000 Year Old Man was a series of improvised sketches performed in the 1960s by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. Brooks played the old guy, talking about all the great names in history – Jesus, Joan of Arc, Napoleon and many more – he has known in his long and eventful life. Reiner was the straight man, lobbing the questions that Brooks would then riff on. What started as two comedy mates having a laugh become television sketches and five albums-worth of recorded material.The humour, which is Yiddish, world-weary and overly dramatic – I am a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Pawel Pawlikowski took a leap into the unknown with Ida. The reasons for advance box office scepticism were clear: the film was black and white, made in an old-fashioned ratio, in Polish (until then the director had only worked in English), and more than bleak in subject. But the risks have more than paid off: as the highest grossing Polish-language film in the US ever, Ida has proved his most commercially successful work to date.And critically, too, a category I suspect Pawlikowski is much more concerned with. It’s on the shortlist for next month’s European Film Awards in both best film and Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Everyone else, like me, or in Kiefer’s case his long-suffering assistant Tony, not to mention poor old Alan Yentob, has to trot along behind, barely able to keep up with the barrage of ideas, questions and orders, let alone judge whether any of it is any good.Early on, Yentob was struggling to keep abreast of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Alan Yentob’s culture programme, Imagine, returned for its autumn season with a two-part examination of one of the most potently disturbing episodes in the history of art, let alone culture. Even before the programme’s title, masterpieces by such as Kirchner, Beckmann and Klimt flashed before our eyes. Thus began an exploration into how Hitler – a failed art student -– acted out his hatred of the great art of the 20th-century avant garde, which he thought to be as sickly and degenerate as the Jews he was also determined to destroy.Yet it was German Jews who in the main collected and supported Read more ...
David Nice
Saleem (born 1976), having dropped the "Abboud" from his name, is one of the world’s most individual top pianists: his recent disc of Mendelssohn concertos with Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester is bound to make my “best of year” list. Nabeel, his brother and junior by two years, has served for some years as a violinist in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, first-rate peacemaking brainchild of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. Yet the siblings would surely agree that the bigger picture established by Nabeel, which Saleem has been part of for the past year or so, means more Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Janet McTeer has admitted that she had to read Hugo Blick's screenplay for The Honourable Woman three times before she could understand what was going on. Therefore anybody hoping to drop into this as a casual viewer can expect to find the learning curve slippery and featuring a pronounced adverse camber.McTeer wasn't in this first episode, but there were still plenty of stellar names to be going on with. Stephen Rea (pictured below right) plays the world-weary Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle, the outgoing head of MI6 and a man reduced to microwaving himself solitary suppers in his apartment by Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s usually documentary cinema that takes us inside societies of which we know little, revealing their structures and rituals. Occasionally feature films achieve something similar, and Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void is one such, telling its story from inside the world of Israel’s Orthodox Hasidic community, specifically the Haredim.So it might seem surprising that one of the first comparisons critics have been making has been with the fiction of Jane Austen (Burshtein herself has acknowledged such resemblances, too). On reflection, it's nothing of the sort: both the film and the novels show Read more ...
simon.broughton
The Ghetto Heroes Square in the Muranow district of Warsaw is a bleak place surrounded by drab apartment blocks. But at its centre there’s now a new building that attracted over 15,000 visitors in the first two days of its opening on 20 and 21 April, the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. It’s particularly remarkable as the building doesn’t yet have any exhibits on show. But Daniel Libeskind’s extension for the Jewish Museum in Berlin also opened so people could experience the building itself before the exhibition was installed – and reveals a country that is coming to Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born just a year apart in the 1950s and having both clocked up almost 40 years' work in their respective scenes, it's surprising that it's taken quite so long for fellow trailblazers Pat Metheny and John Zorn to work together. It's certainly been worth the wait, as this collection is a real barn-burner.Apart from his frequent collaborator, drummer Antonio Sanchez, guitarist Metheny is responsible for every other sound you hear on his contribution to John Zorn's gargantuan Masada songbook project: bass, keyboards, bandonéon, percussion, flugelhorn and much more. All six richly detailed Read more ...
judith.flanders
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.” In one of the most famous opening lines in literature, Franz Kafka gives birth to a startling hallucinogenic premise. And Arthur Pita’s very clever dance drama produces something of a similar jolt in its precision and strangeness.Simon Daw’s sparely elegant set presents the two halves of the Samsa household – on one side Gregor’s clinical white bedroom, looking like the “before” picture in a German Expressionist film of an insane asylum; on the other, the Samsas’ kitchen Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Five male Filipinos in Tel Aviv live double lives. By day, they care for dying Orthodox Jews; by night, they are a drag act, the Paper Dolls. Based on real life, this play tells an incredible story that must be heard. Unfortunately, this production is not necessarily the one to tell it.The story conveys how connections can be forged between clashing cultures. Elderly Jewish men and young Filipino transsexuals can have the same values; the same need for a sense of home; the same longing for companionship. Somewhere here is a heartbreaking, poignant play, focusing on one of this drama's many Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Why do you want to go to Greece?” After watching the numbing Dead Europe and the journey of its protagonist Isaac the question asked might, more pertinently, have been “do you know the Greece you’re going to visit?” This relentlessly dark film paints Greece – in common with the other countries seen – as a place of barely hidden agonies, characterised by shadows. No wonder Isaac’s mother gives him a talisman to ward off the evil eye before he sets off from Australia.Isaac (Ewen Leslie) is a photographer of Greek heritage, born in Australia. His father commits suicide by crashing his car so, Read more ...