Ricky Jay is to card tricks what Bobby Fischer was to chess — an incomparable performer. Jay, arguably the greatest sleight-of-hand artist working today, will be profiled by PBS in its American Masters series on Friday, Jan. 23 at 9 p.m. Ricky Jay: Deceptive Practice, directed and produced by Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein, is […]
Aomar Boum, a Moroccan ethnographer, has written a rigorous, refreshingly candid account of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Arab world. Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco, published by Stanford University Press, is something of a rarity in this field. As he writes in the introduction,“Although a few scholars have […]
Bolshevik troops seized the Belorussian city of Minsk — a historic Jewish center — in July 1920, ending successive Polish and German occupations and liberating its Jewish population from czarist oppression. By the same token, the new Soviet order banned Jewish political and cultural organizations outside the Communist party, including Zionist groups, and began closing […]
As Two Days, One Night gets under way, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), a mother of two young children, is resting peacefully, her eyes shut. It will be one of her last moments of tranquility for a while. Minutes later, as she removes a hot tart from the oven, she takes a telephone call that will upend her […]
The rise and fall of a major American racist is the subject of Klansville, U.S.A, a searing documentary to be broadcast by the PBS television network on Tuesday, Jan. 13 at 9 p.m as part of its American Experience series. It’s the story of Bob Jones, the grand dragon, or leader, of the United Klans of America, […]
Woody Allen will be 80 next December and is still going strong. Indeed, he’s probably finishing his latest film script or movie as I write these words. For about the past four decades, he’s turned out one movie per year, and like the old-school craftsmen he is, Allen composes his scripts on a yellow pad […]
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 196-minute-long film, Winter Sleep, which opens in Toronto on January 9, focuses on fraying and broken personal relationships. Amid the lunar landscape of Cappodoccia, a rugged region in Anatolia replete with eerie caves and strange rock formations, a wealthy, good-looking man in his fifties struggles to understand the two most important women in his […]
More than 50,000 prisoners perished in the Buchenwald slave labor camp in Germany, and if fortune hadn’t intervened, the death toll would have been 168 higher. In the summer of 1944, in contravention of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, 168 Allied airmen — pilots, gunners, radio operators — were incarcerated […]
Robert Ripley believed there is an infinity of strangeness in the world and capitalized on it to his advantage. Or as he might have told his legion of admirers, paraphrasing the entertainer Al Jolson, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” A newspaper cartoonist who parlayed a child-like sense of wonder and curiosity into a personal fortune, he […]
Noam Chayut was a young officer in the Israeli army who wholeheartedly believed in his nation’s cause and raison d’etre. He was such a model of the Zionist narrative that, upon the completion of his military service, he was sent to Miami, Florida, on a public relations mission on behalf of the Israel Defence Forces […]