Politics so comprehensively saturates Israeli life that even the most apolitical Israeli film ends up invoking it, if only by assiduous omission. In “The Syrian Bride,” opening November 16 in New York, Israeli director Eran Riklis not only acknowledges the elephant in the room but also gives it central billing. Ironically, he ends up with one of the most apolitical Israeli films in recent years.
As a teenager at a boarding school, journalist Eric Konigsberg came across a groundskeeper who once had worked the mob beat as a New York cop. The man asked Eric if he was related to infamous mob hitman Harold Konigsberg.…
The far-western Austrian market town of Hohenems (population 14,000) is a good place to take in a chamber orchestra during one of many regional summer music festivals or to learn about water-driven mill technology, once a mainstay of the town’s…
Israeli musicians Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan want you to get up, walk over to your CD rack, pull out the world-music samplers — yes, that “Putumayo Presents: Music From the Chocolate Lands” — and pitch them into the trash.…
Nico loves Lupita, his classmate at an exclusive Mexican boarding school. Joel and Yoli, Nico’s parents, disapprove. Nico has dumped Karen to be with Lupita, and Yoli worries that Joel’s business partnership with Karen’s father will suffer. The stress drives…
At a recent festival of Russian culture, some of the art stayed in the closet.
Several images slated for exhibit during the Russian Nights Festival, which passed through New York last month, were removed by proprietors of the exhibition space, a…
For novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose family fled Soviet antisemitism for the United States in 1979, the problem with American Judaism came down to one thing: salami.
“One of my most moving memories from childhood is going to Hebrew school in Queens,…
A year ago, Max Berlin was planning on becoming a journalist after graduating from Hunter College in New York City. A thoughtful young man who had emigrated from Odessa, Ukraine, in 1992, Berlin, 21, had founded a newspaper at Hunter…
PARIS — On Tuesday, French President Jacques Chirac inaugurated France’s official Holocaust Memorial and “renew[ed] our country’s promise never to forget what it proved unable to avoid.” The memorial’s patrons — the French government, a supporting foundation and…
Last year, a friend and I visited the Jewish cemetery in Fez during a trip to Morocco. The place had the serenity of a shrine, and it was:…