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 […]
New Frontier: Pell James Read More »
A destination restaurant in West Philadelphia? It’s true — though you might miss it if your cabbie is driving too fast. Marigold Kitchen occupies the ground floor of a three-story Victorian that looks like every other house on the street (in fact, the place still boards lodgers). But the relative anonymity has helped turn Marigold
Earlier this year, as England marked Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan. 27, an advertisement appeared on the Labour Party Web site likening Michael Howard, the Jewish leader of the opposition Conservative Party, to Fagin, the iconic stereotype of the miserly, conniving Jew in Charles Dickens’s ”Oliver Twist.” For the Anglo-Jewish community, it was a familiar
The Anti-Collector Read More »
The battle for Iraqi hearts and minds continues, and, several weeks ago, the battlefield was a conference room in New York at the Institute of International Education (IIE), which administers the Fulbright grant program. After a 14-year interruption, exchanges with Iraq resumed in early 2004; the second annual class of Iraqi grant recipients had just
New York Diarist: Ambassadors At Large Read More »
The bar or bat mitzvah is a religious ceremony that initiates a Jewish boy or girl into adulthood. But you already knew that. You watched Krusty the Klown have a belated bar mitzvah on ”The Simpsons,” and you remember that Samantha arranged a bat mitzvah after-party on ”Sex and the City.” B’nai mitzvah — the
Coming of Age in the Burbs Read More »
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. Don’t sit just yet. They have a replacement suggestion: Balkan Beat Box, their New York-based
Brave New World Music Read More »
Dovid Bergelson’s skepticism served him poorly in life but sublimely in art In 1907, a 23-year-old writer from Kiev named Dovid Bergelson decided to send fragments of his latest work, an impressionistic account of shtetl life titled “At the Depot,” to I.L. Peretz, the eminence grise of Yiddish letters. Peretz did not respond, so Bergelson
Back From the Shadows Read More »
FOR those lacking cab-ride entertainment since television screens were discontinued in taxis in 2003, there is hope. It comes in the form of Oleg Roitman, aka the Human Computer, an immigrant cabdriver from Ukraine who regales fares with a flashy sleight of mind: Give Mr. Roitman any date – say, your birthday – and within
Is it possible to skillfully fictionalize a tragedy like the 9/11 attacks before its wounds have healed? How to dramatize an event whose facts are so unyielding, and whose details have been worked over by an unprecedented number of media outlets with unprecedented access to your attention? How to say something fresh when your audience
Made of Provocations Read More »
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 Joel to a heart attack. Soon after his recovery, Nico brings Lupita home. The encounter
Mexican Soap Brings Out Tribe Long Hidden Read More »