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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… -
A World of Music
A few weeks ago, the Paris-based world music ensemble Les Yeux Noirs performed at Royce Hall as part of UCLA Live. Led by brothers Olivier and Eric Slabiak, violin virtuosos who are the Paris-born grandchildren of Polish Jewish immigrants, Les Yeux Noirs played improvisations on Russian, Yiddish, Romanian and Roma songs, as well as their own eclectic compositions (including one that puts Baudelaire's poem "Invitation au Voyage" to music.). What a trip it was! This concert just confirmed a feeling… -
The Sayings of Chairman Levine
"When is a dirty bathroom a broken window?" This is the question that opens Michael Levine's recently published business tome, "Broken Windows, Broken Business" (Warner Business Books). Levine is a successful Hollywood publicist. I am indebted to him forever for one of my most memorable Tommywood moments -- a séance with Hollywood's evergreen legend, Robert Evans, at his home, and on his bed (see "The Kid Still Stays in the Picture," March 2004). Levine, like many a Hollywood success story,… -
COMEDY MATTERS (Albert Brooks)
"After 9/11, all I did was sit around and be scared," Albert Brooks told me recently. "After a year and a half," Brooks now says, "I just got tired of it." He wondered, "Why isn't this being processed? Do we never mention it?" Looking at what Hollywood was releasing to the public, he concluded that "most of the [current] movies take place in the past -- or are teenage sex comedies." Brooks decided to do something about it. His response,… -
Fight of the Century
Joe Louis' boxing match against Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in 1938 remains one of the great sporting events of the 20th century -- even though the fight in front of nearly 70,000 spectators lasted all of two minutes and four seconds. Some 67 years after that fateful night of fisticuffs, David Margolick, a Vanity Fair contributing editor and former New York Times staffer, has written the authoritative account of a time when the fate of nations seemed to hang… -
Larry David Died for our Sinsw
Larry David, the producer-writer-star of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has just finished airing the fifth season of his HBO program. Many people find him hilarious. Others find him annoying in the extreme. Both are right, of course, and David builds his humor out of this particular intersection of pain and pleasure. However, this season has been more than usually provocative, focusing on matters of identity -- Jewish identity. "Curb" has managed to offend all manner of Jews, from the observant to… -
Crystal Clear (700 Sundays)
Billy Crystal has something he wants to share with you. Crystal has had a diverse and varied career, with plenty of ups and downs, as a stand-up comic, a TV performer and a movie actor. On the one hand, he starred in "When Harry Met Sally," a movie that convinced many non-Jewish women to imagine that they were Meg Ryan and that they could find true happiness by sleeping with a short, funny Jew (we owe you big). On the… -
The Painted Bird - Revisited
Forty years ago this Oct. 15, Houghton Mifflin published "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinski. The book was immediately acclaimed as a must-read text on the Holocaust and the nature of human cruelty. In the years leading up to and following Kosinski's 1991 suicide, his reputation was tarnished by a series of revelations that the author employed uncredited editors and associates to produce his novels, and that much of Kosinski's personal history was fabricated. Nonetheless, the reputation of "The Painted… -
The Great Question (Who We Are)
THIS WEEK'S COLUMN WAS A COVER STORY IN THE JEWISH JOURNAL OF LOS ANGELES (and a pretty funny cover -- so I thought I'd share it with you). We're almost halfway through the first decade of the 21st century. Not a bad time to assess "Who We Are." "Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer," edited by Derek Rubin (Schocken Books, 2005), an Israeli-born professor who teaches in the Netherlands, collects 29 essays by Jewish… -
In Search of Himself (Bruce Goldsmith's "When It Comes to Women")
The High Holidays are always a good time to reflect, and this year, as I was serially sermonized in ways both inspirational and depressing, I was asked to consider that we can always start anew — that, as the dorm posters used to say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.†Which reminds me of what Reb Jackie Mason said on the subject: “If we live every day like it’s the last day of our lives…