The Jewish Mother of Modern Acting

by Sheana Ochoa for Jewniverse

 Legendary actor and acting teacher Stella Adler was put onstage as soon as she could walk and never left. The newly released first biography of Adler (written by yours truly) explores how the daughter of Yiddish theater pioneers Jacob and Sara Adler grew up to star in and produce Hollywood films, while remaining identified with her parents' Russian Jewish roots and the social justice their plays promulgated. During WWII, she even ran guns for the Irgun, a militant group that helped establish the state of Israel.

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Scrolling Through a Mysterious Polish Shtetl

by Zachary Solomon for Jewinverse

Looking to get away but don't want to deal with the logistics of flights, or well, traveling? Luckily for you, you can now transport yourself to an old, mysterious shtetl named Radzyn hidden deep in the forests of Poland, via a brand-new serialized, gorgeously illustrated e-story.

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New Studies, Old Hatreds

Is anti-Semitism just another hatred, or is it unique? A new academic study tries, with mixed results, to answer the question.

By Alex Joffe in Mosaic Magazine

Studying anything having to do with Jews is at once conventional and sedate and potentially perilous. In 2010, a project at Yale University gathered experts from a number of different countries and disciplines to examine the peculiarly modern forms taken by the world’s oldest hatred. The resulting conference, titled “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity,” included considerations of anti-Semitism in places as disparate as Francoist Spain, Brazil under the Dutch, post-apartheid South Africa, and contemporary settings too numerous to list.

But what drew widespread media attention to the gathering was the treatment of only a single topic, namely, anti-Semitism in the contemporary Islamic world. In fact, the sessions devoted to this phenomenon set off a firestorm of controversy so fierce as to result in the eventual ouster from Yale of the conference organizer, the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA). Although the university’s official reason for shuttering YIISA was the program’s alleged failure “to meet high standards for research and instruction,” there was not the slightest doubt that the real reason lay in the vociferous charges of “anti-Arab extremism and hate-mongering” lodged against the conveners by Arab and pro-Palestinian groups and their faculty supporters. By 2011, YIISA was no more.

Now, the conference proceedings have been published in five slender volumes. They appear under the imprint of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), of which YIISA was originally a project. Headed by the sociologist Charles Asher Small, ISGAP is the largest research unit of its kind in North America; its mission is altogether respectable: to study anti-Semitism “in a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework from an array of approaches and perspectives.” Ironically enough, one might say that the very comprehensiveness of ISGAP’s approach—which necessarily mandates the inclusion of Islamic anti-Semitism, today’s single deadliest form of the phenomenon under examination—is what proved YIISA’s undoing. In this respect, publication of the conference volumes affords an opportunity not only to consider the merits of Yale’s conduct but to reflect more generally on the academic study of anti-Semitism today.

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Italian Pentateuch From 1482 Sells For $3.87 Million At Paris Auction

It’s the most expensive Hebrew language book ever sold.

By Elissa Goldstein for Jewcy

An Italian Torah book from 1482 has sold for $3.87 million in Paris, JTA reports. Auction house Christie’s says that the volume “represents the very first appearance in print of all five books of the Pentateuch as well as the first to which vocalization and cantillation marks have been added.” It also contains commentary by the medieval French Torah scholar, Rashi. We’re talking Gutenberg-style status here, folks. This is one of the most rare, valuable Jewish texts of all time.

The sale price—estimated at $2.08 million prior to auction—broke the record for the most expensive Hebrew language book ever sold. Apparently, a fierce ten-minute bidding war broke out between telephone bidders and buyers in the room. No word yet as to whether we’ll get to see it on display in a museum any time soon, but here’s hoping the anonymous buyer is feeling generous.

The Jewish Conductor and the Polish Pope

How two men used music to bridge religious differences and historical hatreds.

By MATTHEW KAMINSKI in Mosaic Magazine
One February day in 1988, Gilbert Levine was summoned to the Vatican's Bronze Gate. "Where is that?" he asked. The Brooklyn-born Jewish conductor had no idea that the Portone di Bronzo was the principal entrance to the Apostolic Palace. He had met his first Catholic priest only months earlier.

At the palace, Pope John Paul II, vigorous at 67, welcomed Mr. Levine to his private library. The pope had asked to meet the American who had recently taken over the philharmonic in Kraków, the Polish pontiff's hometown. This was still the Cold War, and Mr. Levine was the first Westerner to lead a major musical institution in the Soviet sphere. "How are you treating my orchestra?" the pope asked with a twinkle in his eye. Turning serious, "How is my orchestra treating you? You know, maestro, they are not much fun for conductors."

"A crazy conversation ensues," says Mr. Levine, who's now 66, recalling that first meeting. The two men discussed music, Kraków and Mr. Levine's family. The conductor's father's parents emigrated to America from prewar Poland. His mother-in-law survived Auschwitz; some 40 relatives perished in the Holocaust. As a child, Karol Wojtyła had played soccer and gone to school with Jews. He told Mr. Levine that he had lost many close Jewish friends in the war.

"Something came over me in the midst of this," says Mr. Levine. "I really thought this was such a rare opportunity that would never come again, that in any case I was meant to be there for some reason and that six million people had died and I said to him, 'I believe God put you on this Earth to make things better between your people and mine.' I said those words to the pope. And he stopped talking. And he looked down." He never replied directly.

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The Secret Jewish History of William Shakespeare

450 Years Later, Bard Remains a Man of Infinite Jewishness

By Seth Rogovoy for The Jewish Daily Forward

Had William Shakespeare never died, he would be turning 450 years old this month, which would put him in biblical territory for longevity. As it turns out, that’s not necessarily such an unusual place for him to be. While little is known about the historical Shakespeare, there is much to suggest in his work and in what we know of his life and times that he just may well have been familiar with the Torah — and perhaps even engaged with Jewish thought.

The search for Shakespeare’s true identity has long fueled a cottage industry of books, doctoral theses and crazy theories. Wikipedia lists no fewer than 84 possible “Shakespeare authorship candidates” — historical figures whom scholars have proposed are the actual authors of the Bard’s plays and poetry. Among the better-known candidates, including Francis Bacon and playwright Christopher Marlowe, is Amelia Bassano Lanier, a crypto-Jew born in 1569 into a family of Venetian Jews who were court musicians to Queen Elizabeth I. A creative and independent figure on the cultural scene who had an affair with Marlowe, Lanier was the first woman to publish a book of original poetry. In his new book, “Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier — The Woman Behind Shakespeare’s Plays?” author John Hudson proposed that it was Lanier herself who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. Hudson points to Lanier’s cosmopolitan upbringing and familiarity with the many literary, geographic, religious and factual touchstones in Shakespeare’s work, to which a country bumpkin from Stratford-on-Avon would presumably not have had access. (In fact, an entire theater company in Manhattan called The Dark Lady Players is devoted to performing Shakespeare’s works as the biblical allegories its members believe Lanier embedded in them, as religious parodies that were then brought to the public by a theater owner and impresario named William Shakespeare.)

It doesn’t end there. Author Ghislain Muller has suggested that Shakespeare himself was a crypto-Jew with a grandfather named Shapiro in “Was Shakespeare a Jew?: Uncovering the Marrano Influences in His Life and Writing.” And in “Shylock Is Shakespeare,” author Kenneth Gross argues that the key to understanding the character of Shakespeare’s most notorious Jewish character is to view him as the voice of the playwright himself.

One of the key characters in Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” is named Ariel, a spirit rescued, controlled and eventually freed by the play’s hero, the magician Prospero. Ariel serves as Prospero’s eyes and ears throughout the play, using his own supernatural powers to cause the tempest of the title and to fend off plots to bring down Prospero. Ariel, of course, is a Hebrew name meaning lion of God, which poetically suggests that Ariel was a defender of righteousness.

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Hollywood’s Greatest Masterpieces Get Religion, Unlike Schlocky Biblical Dramas

Forget ‘Noah’ or ‘Son of God’; to engage religious viewers, Hollywood should make more films like ‘Groundhog Day’ or ’2001′

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine

Although it doesn’t open for another month, you can already tell that Noah, Darren Aronofsky’s action-packed account of the Bible’s original beastmaster, is going to be harrowing, and not only because it features an 11-foot wingless fallen angel voiced by Nick Nolte: Without a single screening the film has unleashed a small torrent of articles asking the inevitable question, namely whether God could make it in Hollywood.

The Heavenly Father will certainly have his fair share of screen time this year, with Son of God, a biopic about you-know-who, opening this week, and Exodus, a Ridley Scott extravaganza with Christian Bale as Charlton Heston as Moses, coming in December. But, our pundits have already taken to asking, is Hollywood capable of spinning a good religious yarn? Or is it too greedy, too shallow, and too impious to make anything that appeals to the faithful?

As is often the case when we strive to talk seriously about popular entertainment, we’re asking all the wrong questions. Rather than fretting about whether Hollywood gets religion—it does, gloriously so, and to great effect—we should wonder why, given its stratospheric success with religious-themed films, is Hollywood so reluctant to give its audiences what they so clearly desire.

This, first and foremost, is a question of definitions. Who’s a religious person? And what kind of film might he like? To hear marketers, in Hollywood and beyond, tell it, a religious person is someone whose cultural horizon begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation, some sort of sniggering simpleton who grows suspicious unless his entertainment features swords, sandals, and the heroes he’d read about in Sunday School. This lazy and skewed approach is no less offensive than the efforts to market products to women simply by slapping on pink packaging, and no less ineffective: Women, like religious people and members of minority groups and the young and the old and people with terrible nut allergies and anyone else who was blessed with the breath of life, are complex and nuanced people whose tastes and predilections run far deeper than a single, simple note.

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