Boris Fishman » Forward

Wedding the Personal and Political

Boris — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 17:44:23 +0000

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.

Airing the Family’s (Blood-stained) Laundry

Boris — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 17:49:25 +0000

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.…

In a Corner of Austria, A Curator Plays With a Taboo

Boris — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 18:01:32 +0000

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…

Brave New World Music

Boris — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 05:45:02 +0000

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.…

Mexican Soap Brings Out Tribe Long Hidden

Boris — Fri, 13 May 2005 05:40:59 +0000

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…

Dustup Offers Rare Peek At Trade in Hate Art

Boris — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 05:30:22 +0000

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…

The Ancestral Faith, With a Side of Salami

Boris — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 06:26:27 +0000

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,…

The Return

Boris — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 05:20:09 +0000

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…

Letter from Paris: Holocaust Memorial Performs a Strained Balancing Act

Boris — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 05:38:28 +0000

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 the Jewish…

The Flaunted Necklace

Boris — Fri, 28 Nov 2003 17:29:32 +0000

How Tolerance and Terror Marked the Evolving Fate of Jews Under Muslim Rule

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:…