Jewish History & Culture
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Laud the Life of Sid Grauman, Hollywood's Gold Standard
Ever wonder how the movie industry went from five-cent nickelodeons in New York to the glamour of Hollywood with red carpet premieres and the highest of artistic aspirations? Or why a certain pagoda-like Hollywood movie theater in whose courtyard rest footprints of actors is one of the most beloved and frequented tourist sites on the […]
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Zap! Pow! Bam!
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s two Jewish kids from Cleveland! The fact that Superman, the defender of truth, justice and the American way, as created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was not so much from Krypton as, in the words of cartoon artist Jules Feiffer, “from Planet […]
Holocaust Movies: Winners & Losers
“The Reader” Are Holocaust movies good for the Jews? Or even, for that matter, for society at large? This year’s offerings include “Defiance,” a story of a group of Jews who were heroic resistance fighters; “The Reader,” a story of post-war revelation about a Nazi woman who beds down with a German boy; “Good,” about […]
Tom is.... (facebook and my generation)
Tommywood is … Tom is … on Facebook. Aren’t you? If you read this column online and are not on Facebook, you will soon be. The Facebook wave has now washed over my generation, the “late baby boomers.” In the last two months, the number of people in my crowd who have just joined or […]
"Breakdowns" & The "Maus" that roared (or Art Spiegelman through the looking glass)
Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist whose graphic memoir, “Maus,” won a Pulitzer Prize, was in town recently to promote a reissue of “Breakdowns,” a collection of his underground comics work first published in 1978. As Spiegelman pointed out to me, his name in German means “Mirror Man” (mine means “Pond-wood”) — and revisiting “Breakdowns,” now subtitled, […]
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The Grammy Museum: The Culture We Keep
The Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, the Venus de Milo, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Pete Seeger’s banjo, the handwritten lyrics to Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message.” You might wonder what all these cultural artifacts have in common. But as of Dec. 6, they can all be seen in museums — the last […]