Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1 - 19 of 19
LOS ANGELES (JTA) - JJ Harel, newly 14 years old and standing at 6-foot-2, expects to face some tough competition when the Olympics return to Los Angeles in 2028 and the starting pistol for the track and field events sounds off. But his first decision will be whether to march into the Olympic stadium under the American, Australian or Israeli flag. In any other family, such musings would be taken as the fantasies of an over-stimulated adolescent mind. However, to skeptics JJ need only unveil the...
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — The last time we saw Tevye the Milkman on Broadway in “Fiddler on the Roof” was in 2016, escaping Anatevka as a pogrom swept the shtetl. Now, almost five years later, he is resurfacing in a one-man play titled “Tevye in New York,” opening in its world premiere — in Beverly Hills, of all places. It’s the latest radical reimagining of the beloved Sholem Aleichem character, who also saw his “Fiddler” story performed onstage in Yiddish for the first time in Joel Grey’s recen...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-Kirk Douglas, the legendary actor who portrayed legions of tough guys and embraced his Jewish heritage later in life, died at his home in Beverly Hills on Wednesday. He was 103. Over a career that spanned 87 films-including 73 big screen features and 14 on television-the blond, blue-eyed Douglas, dimpled chin thrust forward, was often cast as the toughest guy around, vanquishing hordes of Romans, Vikings and assorted bad guys. Thrice nominated for an Academy Award and a...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-Kurt Waldheim managed an impressive feat: After serving as a soldier and intelligence officer in the Nazi army during World War II, he was twice elected secretary-general of the United Nations before topping off his career as president of his native Austria from 1986 to 1992. How did he do it? Largely by massaging his biography to convince the world that he had been merely an ordinary soldier during the war and was following orders. He also persuaded his fellow countrymen and t...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—Half a century ago, Bob Hope’s films were wildly popular, but the comedian was never nominated for an Academy Award. So when Hope served as host of the 1975 Oscar bash, he opened his monologue with “Welcome to the Academy Awards... or as it’s known in my house, PASSOVER.” At Sunday’s 90th award ceremony, the notable Jewish nominees could largely repeat his punchline. The list of Jewish nominees, all with realistic chances to strike gold, included two for lead actors: Daniel Day-Lewis (in “Phantom Thread”) and Timothee Chalamet...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-With the Academy Awards on the horizon, there is no shortage of high-quality films to see in theaters and on the small screen. Getting a jump on the festivities, here are five of the best Jewish-themed ones to watch this awards season, from Oscar contenders to short gems. "Foxtrot" Directed by Samuel Maoz and starring Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler, "Foxtrot" is a wrenching film about an array of dark topics: parental grief after the death of a soldier son, the joys and...
LOS ANGELES (JTA) – While researching his latest one-man show, "Our Great Tchaikovsky," Hershey Felder-a playwright, actor and composer who has brought the loves, torments and soaring music of some of the world's greatest composers to the stage-faced a moral question. Does towering talent exculpate a composer, or any artist, for a racist or anti-Semitic remark, even at a time and place where such comments were commonplace? The answer isn't simple. "This is a very complicated matter," Felder, 49,...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-When movie star Kirk Douglas married Anne Buydens in Las Vegas, the justice of the peace asked Anne to raise her hand and repeat after him, "I take thee, Kirk, for my lawful husband." Anne, who had recently arrived in the United States from Europe, raised her hand and proudly proclaimed, "I take thee, Kirk, as my AWFUL husband." At the time, the mispronunciation was not too far off the mark. In Hollywood, the handsome, muscular actor was already notorious for his inflated ego...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-There is a remarkable moment in "Maestro," Hershey Felder's one-man show about Leonard Bernstein, when the late famed conductor-composer is shown in an old film clip on a giant screen and the two perform a seamless piano duet from Richard Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde." The tour de force characterizes the fusion between Bernstein, who died in 1990 at 72, and Felder, very much alive and lively at 48. "Maestro" opens off-Broadway (59E59 Theaters) on Sept. 1 for a six-week run and...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-When the German film "Labyrinth of Lies" opens, Hitler's Third Reich was defeated only 13 years earlier. Germany is rising from the ruins, but in 1958 its people are largely in a state of forgetfulness and denial about the recent past. Ask the man in the street about millions of Jews exterminated in SS concentration camps and he'll tell you that's "Greuelpropaganda," horror propaganda, invented by the enemy. Auschwitz? What's that? What about the Nuremberg Trials of war...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-Conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East now appears a permanent condition, but it didn't have to be that way, according to a one-hour PBS special premiering on June 30. "1913: The Seeds of Conflict" traces the relationship between the two Semitic tribes at a time when the Ottoman Empire ruled over what was later designated as Palestine, and then, Israel. The film starts out in 1913, one year before the start of World War I, which led to the defeat of Turkey as an...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—In May 1948, I was walking down Market Street in San Francisco when I passed a small movie theater with a marquee that announced “The Jews Fight for Their State.” For the first time, it fully hit me that the Jews—by the gentile consensus of the time, mainly cowards and draft dodgers—were actually taking on five vastly superior armies. I took the train back to Berkeley but had a hard time focusing on my studies at the University of California. With the school year nearing its end, I decided to go join the fight. I was among som...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-Kirk Douglas, born Issur Danielovitch, the son of an immigrant Russian Jewish ragman, marked his 98th birthday on Dec. 9 by launching his 11th book. The legendary star of 87 movies (who can forget "Spartacus"?) can look back, in happiness and grief, on countless one-night stands with filmdom's most beautiful women, a helicopter crash in which he was the only survivor, a stroke, two bar mitzvahs and the death of a son. He has written about these and many other parts of his life...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-Ambitious girls of yore looking for role models among successful and accomplished women might turn to scientist Marie Curie, aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart or first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a social justice champion. And then there was Altina Schinasi, the subject of a new documentary feature, "Altina," directed by her filmmaker grandson Peter Sanders. "Tina" grew up among the opulent splendor of a New York mansion, became a painter and innovative sculptor, then an...
LOS ANGELES (JTA) - It was 6 a.m. on Aug. 19, 1964 when the phone rang in the Los Angeles apartment of Ivor Davis, the young West Coast correspondent for London's Daily Express, circulation 4 million. On the other end was the paper's foreign editor, who told Davis to drive to the airport and catch the 11 a.m. flight to San Francisco. His assignment was to cover that evening's gig at the Cow Palace by a hot British pop group called the Beatles. For Davis and the band, it would be the start of a...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)-In her 110 years, Alice Herz-Sommer has been an accomplished concert pianist and teacher, a wife and mother-and a prisoner in Theresienstadt. Now she is the star of an Oscar-nominated documentary showing her indomitable optimism, cheerfulness and vitality despite all the upheavals and horrors she faced in the 20th century. "The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life," a 38-minute film up for best short documentary at the Academy Awards to be handed out next month, begins in her...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—Movie mavens may have to come up with a new genre to classify “Hannah Arendt,” the biopic of the German-Jewish philosopher. New York Times critic A.O. Scott suggests it is an action film—albeit one in which the weapons are ideas and theories are volleyed on a battlefield where a questionable hypothesis can turn lifelong friends into bitter enemies. Director Margarethe von Trotta, who has dealt previously with complex Jewish women (“Rosa Luxemburg”) and the Nazi era (“Rosenstra...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—Some 65 years after a band of foreign volunteers took to the skies to ensure Israel’s birth and survival, filmmakers are racing to bring their exploits to the screen before the last of the breed passes away. Among the competing producers and their financial backers are such famous names as Spielberg and Lansky. And though their budgets fall well short of Hollywood blockbuster standards, their competitive spirits are just as intense. Nancy Spielberg, the youngest of Steven Spielberg’s three sisters, is the producer of “Abov...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—It’s hard to imagine two more divergent perspectives on Israeli-Palestinian relations: that of a Palestinian farmer whose village is resisting the encroachment of a nearby Jewish settlement and of the security service chiefs responsible for maintaining order in the Palestinian territories. Surprisingly, however, these protagonists in two documentaries vying for an Academy Award in the best documentary feature category come to much the same conclusion: that military force alo...
