Israeli police officer Benny Herness and Palestinian journalist Adnan Joulani had planned to keep in touch after returning from a joint Israeli-Palestinian peace mission to Japan in 2000 that was the focus of the Israeli documentary film “Sleeping With the Enemy.” But the intifadah erupted a week after the film’s debut and the two lost…
Tag: Israel
Palestinian ‘Paradise Now’ — box office bomb
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There’s “nothing unusual about cinema portraying the psychodrama of real-life events torn from headlines,” Toronto Star writer Rosie Dimanno observed in a January review, noting that many films (such as Monster, In Cold Blood and Silence of the Lambs) traffic “in murder verite and the particular pathology of killers without conscience.” Dimanno was in the…
Film: A Treasure in Auschwitz
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The Polish town of Auschwitz is known primarily as the site of horrific Nazi death camps, and its previous history as a town with a once-thriving Jewish community comes as a surprise. Stirred by an old storekeeper’s eyewitness account and his precisely-drawn map, Israeli Yariv Nornberg mounts an archeological expedition in search of some Torah…
Barenboim confuses music baton for magic baton
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Seven years ago the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and his close friend, Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American intellectual, jointly established an orchestra with talented young classical musicians from Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Unable to meet in their home countries, the participants spent several summers making music in Spain, where the experience…
Avner Mandelman, innovative short-story writer
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“Darkness,” the fourth story in Avner Mandelman’s new collection Cuckoo, tells the story of an Israeli woman who opposes her sister’s romance with a Yemenite Jew and attains a Yemenite black-magic remedy to put an end to the match. Told in the first person by the woman’s young son, this short and simple reminiscence seems…
Genealogy and the Holocaust
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Tombstone carvers often symbolically represent a life cut tragically short, as when a child dies, by a cemetery monument in the shape of a truncated tree trunk. This motif is sometimes also used among Jewish genealogists when drawing charts of families cut down in the Holocaust; shoots are shown growing from the severed trunk when…
Museum projects virtual reconstruction of ancient Temple
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If you were impressed by the highly realistic street scenes of ancient Rome in the movie Gladiator, chances are you’ll be dazzled by the fully interactive, virtual reconstruction of the Jewish Temple and adjacent sections of Old Jerusalem that is on view in the Davidson Center, a museum that opened with little fanfare in Jerusalem…
An Israeli actor prepares
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Israeli actor Amitai Kedar visited family in Toronto last week before beginning an 11-week North American road tour of the popular Gershwin musical My One and Only, in which he plays a Russian impresario, Prince Nikolai. Born in Toronto in 1969, Kedar grew up in Israel where he graduated from Tel Aviv University’s School of…
Grace Paley, Ariel Dorfman, Thomas Keneally at IFOA
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Numerous writers of special interest to the Jewish community appeared recently at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors, Toronto’s pre-eminent literary event. Their presence insured that Jewish themes were well represented. American Jewish writer Grace Paley, interviewed publicly by Toronto newspaper columnist David Lewis Stein, spoke engagingly about art and politics, the two activities to…
Bestseller based on ancient menorah
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The massive golden menorah from the Holy Temple of Jerusalem is the coveted object that fuels the modern-day action-adventure in Saskatchewan-born author David Gibbins’s second novel Crusader Gold, published this year by Headline Press of Britain and available under that imprint in Canada. Gibbins, who appeared at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto in…
