With her latest role, Thandie Newton continues her run of intimate, mesmerizing performances. Anyone who saw Thandie Newton in Crash (2005), the race-relations drama thick with A-listers, surely noticed little else. In fifteen minutes of screen time, Newton was by turns taunting, humiliated, livid, beseeching, and manic with fear. She stole the show. The English …
Glasnost grows in Brooklyn One sign that this year’s race for the 46th Assembly District of New York was a little different than usual was the alleged involvement of the Kremlin. Ari Kagan, a 39-year-old journalist running for the state seat from Brooklyn, suggested that Moscow had a man in the race — that is, …
Anna Shternshis reveals how Soviet propaganda forged a new brand of Jewish identity Histories of Soviet Jewry have usually told stories of oppression and resistance. In Soviet and Kosher, Anna Shternshis, a Moscow-born professor of Yiddish language and literature at the University of Toronto, presents a less dispiriting narrative. In researching the book, she interviewed …
On 9/11 and during Hurricane Katrina, I had felt the empathy of a guest in America. Then I was assigned to edit the Senate’s official report on Katrina.
Westerners hardly paid attention when the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky thanked the Russian government for jailing him in the part of Siberia where the Decembrists were exiled, after a failed uprising against the czar in 1825. But Khodorkovsky, who was fishing for public sympathy closer to home, knew exactly what he was doing: there’s no …
Actress Lena Headey brings her irrepressible charm to a romantic comedy with a twist. After four hours of modeling “frock coats and frilly dresses” for a photo shoot, the British actress Lena Headey has returned to her natural state — torn jeans, striped tee, and pigtails — and is working through a piece of chocolate …
A picture of post-Soviet provincial life, both Jewish and gentile In “Roots,” the new film by Pavel Lounguine, a Ukrainian conman named Edik lures several wealthy North Americans on a heritage tour to their ancestral shtetl of Golutvin. The film, which will screen at the New York Jewish Film Festival opening today, could have been …
When Italians fell for klezmer, Francesco Spagnolo tuned them in to the forgotten sounds of their own people. Audio Interview by Boris Fishman. Listen courtesy of Nextbook.
ON wintry nights in Manhattan, little bands of smokers huddle under restaurant awnings, shivering as they struggle to light their cigarettes in the icy wind. You will not find them outside many of the Russian restaurants in Brighton Beach. Here, smokers simply stay inside. They may wait a bit longer before lighting up, and they …
In 1968, Ignacio Gallego, the patriarch of the Spanish Community Party, severed ties with a willful daughter, who had just given birth to a toddler with cerebral palsy in Moscow. The Kremlin covered for Gallego’s callousness and informed his daughter that the boy, who was being held in a special hospital, had died. This illustrious, …