May 23, 2019

In His New Play, Jesse Eisenberg Gives Susan Sarandon Something To Be Happy About

Mediaite

Jesse Eisenberg is a five-tool player on the American cultural ball field, with memorable movie roles — from his Oscar-nominated Mark Zuckerberg to his evil-genius, Superman-nemesis Lex Luthor — to poignant moments on stage, humor pieces for the New Yorker, assorted essays, and a novel. Yet, he is also an accomplished playwright, often starring in his own work, such as The Revisionist, which premiered Off-Broadway in 2013 and co-starred Vanessa Redgrave, and The Spoils, directed by Scott Elliott for The New Group in 2016, which went on to have a successful run in London’s West End, as well.

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August 29, 2018

“‘Operation Finale’ And Israel’s Improbable Transformation”

CNN.com

One advantage to living in polarized times is that it makes spy movies easier to accept on their typically black-and-white terms. Good versus evil is allowed only one natural outcome. The action on the screen is important, for sure — but moral clarity is important, too.

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June 15, 2018

The Jewish Campaign To Establish Global Human Rights After The Holocaust

Washington Post

People seek, or claim to possess, a variety of rights: constitutional, civil, political, economic and cultural. Human rights, which many people believe are guaranteed, are arguably the best known and the least understood.

The notion of human rights began to take shape after the Holocaust, so it is not surprising that Jews played an important role in their emergence. In his enlightening new book, “Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century,” James Loeffler, a historian at the University of Virginia, explores how a small group of Jewish lawyers and activists from around the world inspired the human rights movement and the creation of entities such as the United Nations that, sadly, have failed to fulfill the promises of their ideals.

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March 29, 2018

New Yiddish Rep Brings Hanaoch Levin To Off-broadway

Algemeiner

In what was avant-garde Off-Broadway theater at its finest, the New Yiddish Rep just wrapped up several weekends of repertory performances of The Labor of Life and The Whore from Ohio, two short plays by Hanoch Levin, one of Israel’s most celebrated and controversial playwrights, in both the original Hebrew and in Yiddish, with English supertitles at the Theater at 224 Waverly.

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November 17, 2017

“The Story Of The Jews”: A Tale Of Triumph Amid Persecution

Washington Post

In this multicultural age, when the politics of identity celebrates difference — melting pot be damned — Jews, bizarrely, have ended up less an ethnic group than a subcategory of white privilege. Israel is perceived as a colonial power, and Jews are regarded as blue-blooded patricians with no claim to historical oppression.

This comes as a surprise to Israelis who are the offspring of biblical Jews and who survived many wars initiated by Arabs. And Jews with memories of the Holocaust can recall at least two millennia when Jewish blood was decidedly red and discussed only in the context of blood libels — the surreal accusation that Jews slaughtered Christians to make Passover matzo. (Anyone who has ever eaten the bread of affliction, however, knows that it tastes bad enough without plasma.)

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August 11, 2017

The Stories Of The World Jewish Congress

Huffington Post

For many people whose grasp of history slips out of memory instantly, there was a time, not long ago, before Israel existed as the nation-state of the Jewish people. It may surprise many to know that the realization of the Zionist experiment is only 70 years old—a hiccup of history, but an agonizingly long time for anti-Semites the world over.

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July 23, 2017

Keni Fine’s “endangered”–kid’s Theater For A Musically Sustainable Planet

Huffington Post

Taking children to see a musical that isn’t a Disney tent pole and yet still entertains with the heart and ambition to shape minds is a rare find. Lyricist and librettist Keni Fine, and composer Tony Small, have mounted a real gem at the Davenport Theatre, “Endangered: The Musical”—a production that is both compulsively entertaining and ecologically friendly, set in New York City with all the emerald splendor of a zoological Oz.

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July 3, 2017

JFK And MLK, Wonderfully Revisited In “Kennedy And King”

Huffington Post

In the annals of assassinated political figures, presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and pastor Martin Luther King, Jr., comprise the Mount Rushmore of tragic endings to America’s favorite sons.

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April 10, 2017

Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s Plea For A Better Built World

Huffington Post

Rarely does a book come along where its very premise is to stop you in your tracks, compel you to look around, take account of where you are standing, why you are there, and how taking another step in one direction or another may make you feel.

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February 19, 2017

Wallace Shawn’s “Evening At The Talk House”

Huffington Post

In a political culture that patronizes and confuses by design, talk has become less than cheap—it’s downright irrelevant and deceitful. Political campaigns now have all the elegance and elocution of mosh pits—pep rallies short on ideas, but fueled with pepper. Words of wisdom are chiseled to 140 characters—not entirely for the sake of economy, but rather inattention and emptiness. Snapchat and other tokens of modern culture disappear from both screen and mind. Talk is nothing but the white noise of television—repetitive and tedious, inanity masquerading as insight.

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January 19, 2017

A Jewish Wanderer Moving From Place To Place In Hopes Of Repairing The World

Washington Post

For many years, Bernard-Henri Lévy has been one of Europe’s leading public intellectuals. But he has been even more ubiquitous, and curious, as the world’s foremost wandering Jew.

Born in Algeria, and a fixture in France as both an author and a media personality, Lévy’s reputation as a globetrotter — an honorary citizen of hot spots around the world — has never had anything to do with exodus or exile, the traditional reasons that Jews, for millennia, have been on the move.

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November 1, 2016

Jazz At Lincoln Center Swings With The Jazz Age

Huffington Post

No cultural institution, anywhere, does a better job recalling the Jazz Age and its inseparable link with New York than Jazz at Lincoln Center. After all, New York largely came of age during the Age of Jazz. Without the seasoning it received from the many cultural influences of jazz, post-World War I New York might have just been a larger, slightly less dangerous, Five Points.

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September 13, 2016

Oliver Stone’s “Snowden”

Huffington Post

Oliver Stone has never met an American fiasco he didn’t like, lament, and, with any luck, lambaste in one of his films.

Whether it was America’s involvement in Vietnam (a trilogy of films that brought him two Best Director Oscars for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July), the corruptions of Wall Street, the damaged psyches of two American presidents and the conspiracy surrounding the murder of a third, the politics of America’s favorite pastime—the NFL, and the violence glorified by the mass media in Natural Born Killers, Stone is America’s most renowned socially-conscious, politically promiscuous film director.

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August 11, 2016

Shakespeare’s Trojan War In Central Park

Huffington Post

Be careful venturing into Central Park at night during the next few weeks. The overall crime rate is still low, but don’t be surprised if a war is going on, and a Trojan Horse appears suddenly and blocks the bridle path. The hallowed outdoor stage of the Delacorte Theater will be home to ancient Greeks uniformed in camouflage fatigues, sporting crew cuts and running about to the booming sounds of heavy artillery and overhead choppers.

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July 25, 2016

BWAC Art Show Adds Local Color To Red Hook

Huffington Post

Red Hook is fast becoming worthy of its surname, with many attractions that have hooked New Yorkers and tourists alike to this historic Brooklyn seaside enclave. The neighborhood has the feel of a rusty Montauk, bathed by the waters of the lower bay and vistas of low-slung factories, cobble stone streets and docks that stretch out nearly close enough to grasp the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty.

Ancient fishermen still cast their lines with the durability of rent-controlled tenants. Longshoremen long for better days. IKEA and Fairway serve as tent pole merchants beside all those beachy bars and seafaring watering holes. The water taxi makes a pit stop in the sweet spot between Governor’s Island, Red Hook and the Statue of Liberty herself.

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June 29, 2016

Theater Of War–and Everything Else

Huffington Post

Some of the most compelling theater being performed globally, starring some of the biggest names in Hollywood, actors such as Paul Giamatti, Jesse Eisenberg, Elizabeth Marvel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Frances McDormand, Amy Ryan, John Turturro, Lily Taylor and David Strathairn, has less to do with entertaining the audience than it does with healing the world.

Bryan Doerries, co-founder and artistic director of the theater company, Outside the Wire, is the Joseph Papp of social impact, deploying ancient Greek dramatists, along with the occasional Shakespeare and O’Neil, to give self-selected audiences the freedom to speak to their pain, and to connect with audiences across time who were also suffering from feelings of loss, betrayal and heartache.

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June 17, 2016

Just How Deep Is The Divide Over Israel Among American Jews?

Washington Post

Nothing sells papers or glues eyes to screens like a community in crisis — the indiscreet infighting that exposes the fallibility of a family.

A family feud seems to be the central preoccupation of Dov Waxman’s “Trouble in the Tribe.” For many decades, a majority of Americans have supported and sympathized with Israel over its geographic predicament in the Middle East. One Jewish state the size of Rhode Island with a mere 8 million citizens is somehow too much for the Arab world to tolerate as a neighbor — despite its immense land mass and 300 million Muslims. One would assume that tiny Israel would be too inconsequential to matter.

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May 6, 2016

An Intolerant Teen With A Gun And A Transgender Schoolmate Add Up To Violence

Washington Post

With a story about homophobia, gun violence and a disputed hate crime, Ken Corbett, a clinical psychologist, stumbled upon a tragic tale that, improbably, involved many of the social ills that define our modern age.

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March 15, 2016

Woody Allen Biography Is Superb

Huffington Post

David Evanier could have probably picked an easier subject than Woody Allen for his next book project. A novelist, bestselling nonfiction writer and a former editor of The Paris Review, Evanier was the perfect polymath to take on Allen’s own repertoire of artistic talents and bag of tricks — director, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, actor, stand-up comic, jazz musician, and magician.

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February 1, 2016

Jazz At Lincoln Center Performs Night Of Gershwin

Huffington Post

The rhythm was absolutely fascinating at the Rose Theater over this past weekend as the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra led by its virtuoso artistic director Wynton Marsalis–the Pied-Piper trumpeter of America’s signature musical art form–reinvigorated the George Gershwin songbook with all its ragtime and stride-piano splendor.

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