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Walk Like A Mom/Rockstar (Susanna Hoffs)
"Hannah Montana," a Disney Channel program I watch on occasion with my daughter, features a 14-year-old girl with a secret identity: she's actually a rock star. This is an absurd fantasy. In real life, the rock star at my daughter's school is a mom. Although she leads a double life, it is no secret. Her name is Susanna Hoffs, her band The Bangles has a long history (hits, breakup, back together again), and she also has a very enjoyable new… -
Hate the Game, Love The Player (Michael Tolkin and "The Return of The Player")
The fall season is upon us, with new books, movies and TV programs all vying for our attention as palliatives to the news of war, terrorism and melting ice caps. Even as the days get shorter and our own day of judgment looms imminent, we wonder: Is there a hero out there who can set us back on the path of reason, on a course of love, someone to heal us and show us the way -- someone, who is,… -
Kaplan's Collage
Here's Marty Kaplan blogging on Huffington Post about suggested treatments for Mel Gibson's "problem": "'Jew Like Me' is another strategy. Walk a mile in my shoes. Gain 10 pounds at my table. Wait two hours after lunch before swimming. Laugh that ironic meta-laugh right along with us when Jon Stewart says, 'Jewey.' Sensitize yourself to code like 'New York Times' and 'neocon.' Defend Likud. Like halvah. Who knows -- you might even get a development deal out of it. 'Gentleman's… -
The Mad Adventures of Gerard Oury
"The King of popular comedy is dead," proclaimed Le Figaro after Gerard Oury, one of France's most successful directors (if not its most successful) died on Thursday, July 20, at his home in St. Tropez. I know Oury's work because as a teenager I went with my mother to New York's 68th Street Playhouse, an art house, to see a film called "The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob." A French comedy about a rabbi? Seemed like a contradiction in terms.… -
Life vs. Death
In college, I wrote the same literature essay over and over again. Regardless of the novel, its plot or its country of origin, I found that I could always work up four pages on the subject of "Life vs. Death." My ideas on this subject were not particularly original. In a high school English class, some intellectually precocious seniors had made impassioned references to Norman O. Brown's "Life Against Death" and Freud's discussion of the life force vs. the death… -
A Little Respect (for Jewish journalism)
For the 20th anniversary issue of The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, it was suggested that I write a column about Jewish journalism. Herewith the result: Jewish journalism is a much-maligned enterprise -- it cries out like the late Rodney Dangerfield for respect. No one really admits to reading a Jewish newspaper. "It comes to my home," is what most people tell me. Or they claim to read it only when they can't get their hands on anything else. "I… -
Schimmel's Summer School (Paul Schimmel & MOCA)
Paul Schimmel, the Museum of Contemporary Art"s (MOCA) chief curator, wants us to spend our summer looking back -- 50 or so years to around the time of his birth, and to the city where he grew up, New York, to focus on the remarkable work of a young, poor and not-yet-famous Robert Rauschenberg, who was gathering junk and detritus from his life (clothes, family photos, fabric) and incorporating them into paintings that then became three-dimensional constructs, which Rauschenberg called… -
Great Scott: Scott Steindorff's Excellent Adventure in Hollywood
Scott Steindorff is a happy man. A successful movie and TV producer, his NBC series, "Las Vegas," just got picked up for another season; he won a Golden Globe for the HBO miniseries, "Empire Falls," starring Paul Newman, and produced the feature film of Philip Roth's "The Human Stain" with Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. Upcoming on Steindorff's slate are adaptations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," TC Boyle's "The Tortilla Curtain," Michael Connolly's "The Lincoln… -
Zade's Road
How does an idea come to life? How is it that someone has an idea -- an idea that he or she believes will help change the world -- and it actually takes flight? I'm not sure anyone really knows how that process occurs, only that it does. Just ask Zade. Zade Dirani, 26, is a composer and musician who created the International Musicians Assembly, an internationally diverse group of musicians and future leaders from conflict-ridden countries who have recently… -
A Graham of Rock
Here's a strange coincidence: Both my doctor and my rabbi share the same leisure pursuit: They are passionate about attending rock concerts. U2, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen -- If they perform, my good doctors of the body and the soul will attend. They both say it's their way of relaxing from the stress of their respective jobs (and let's face it, being in charge of my physical and spiritual well-being is some daunting task). It's not that I… -
Remembering Rudolf Vrba's 5 per cent
On April 7, 1944, Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz, one of very few to do so; he died recently at age 81, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Vancouver, British Columbia. Vrba once said that he spent 95 percent of his life on science and 5 percent on the Holocaust. It is worth considering the importance of that 5 percent and the controversy it engendered, which resonates to this day. Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg in 1924 and… -
Grossman's Fate
The recent publication of "A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman With the Red Army, 1941-1945" (Pantheon) brings attention to a writer who deserves to be better known and whose personal story illuminates the tragic dimension of Russian Jewry during the Communist era. Grossman (1905-1964) was a journalist as well as the author of short stories and novels, most notably "Life and Fate," which is to be reissued this spring by New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics. His reporting during…