WHY GO NOW Equally cosmopolitan, but far more tranquil than Mexico City, Oaxaca is fast becoming the artistic capital of Mexico, drawing artists from around the country while shepherding its own to acclaim. It’s difficult to find a block in the Centro Histórico without an art gallery, many of them showcases for striking abstract and …
How Bee Season lost its sting on the screen The first thing one notices about Richard Gere in his otherwise sensitive performance as Saul Naumann, the domineering patriarch of a Jewish family in existential tailspin in Bee Season, is that he doesn’t seem very Jewish. Neither, for that matter, does Juliette Binoche, the magnificent French …
After the Palestinian intifada began in the fall of 2000, traveling to Israel became a statement of sorts. The Israeli tourism industry came to survive on a demographically narrowed but ideologically committed clientele: Christian pilgrims and American Jews. Leisure travel slowed to a trickle, with the overall number of visitors falling from a high of …
Five Years After Intifada, Leisure Tourists Are Starting to Walk Among the Pilgrims Read More »
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.
Why local musicians dig Europe’s most strife-ridden region It was an eclectic gathering even by New York standards. In one corner, an elegant gentleman in his sixties dressed in jeans and suspenders. To his right, a teenager costumed as a toy soldier. Further on: a woman brandishing a Phantom of the Opera-style mask, a 16-year-old …
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. Thanks to his family’s well-meaning concealments, Eric didn’t know that the man was talking about …
Richard Stern is the best American fiction writer of whom you have never heard. After more than five decades of dogged obscurity — despite nine novels, five story collections, a half-dozen non-fictional “miscellanies,” and a memoir — he has become “famous for not being famous,” in a reviewer’s apt phrase, a “has-been without ever having …
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 economy. Less predictably, it’s also the location of one of Europe’s most innovative Jewish museums. …
In a Corner of Austria, A Curator Plays With a Taboo Read More »
Boris Fishman interviewed Wladimir Kaminer September 3, 2003. Translated by Boris Fishman. Boris Fishman: Did you start writing before emigrating to Germany? What did you do in the Soviet Union? Wladimir Kaminer: In the Soviet Union, I graduated from music school, with a concentration in music for theatre and television. I worked for a year, …
Pell James leaps to stardom with a lead role in “The King.” Her feet tucked beneath her in a plush armchair at New York’s SoHo Grand, 28-year-old actress Pell James could pass for a teenager. In “The King,” a forthcoming drama about an illicit romance between half-siblings in Southern Baptist country, she is riveting as …