Quentin Tarantino shows love for Israeli film

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

 by Jana Banin, JTA

Director Quentin Tarantino has a new addition to his recently posted list of 2013′s top films, and this one’s an Israeli import.

After a recent screening of Aharon Keshales’ and Navot Papushado’s “Big Bad Wolves” at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea, the man behind “Pulp Fiction” and “Inglourious Basterds” called it “not only the best film of Busan” but the “best film of the year,” The Jersusalem Post reports.

In the thriller, a series of child murders brings together three men: a victim’s father, a vigilante cop and the suspect, a religious studies teacher.

Check out the seriously dark, seriously engaging trailer here:

Three films with Israeli ties angling for Oscar

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

Submissions for nomination in the Best Foreign Language category include an Israeli film, a Palestinian film and a Filipino film about Israeli migrants

By Debra Kamin for The Times of Israel
Three of the films in the running for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this year have ties to Israel. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Tuesday announced the full list of nations that had submitted a movie for consideration in the category. Seventy-six applicants, including 73 countries, plus Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Palestinian Territories, are angling for the honor. A shortlist of five official nominees will be announced in January.

Three of the films in the running for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this year have ties to Israel.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Tuesday announced the full list of nations that had submitted a movie for consideration in the category. Seventy-six applicants, including 73 countries, plus Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Palestinian Territories, are angling for the honor. A shortlist of five official nominees will be announced in January.

Israel, which has secured 10 nominations for Best Foreign Language film in its history but has never had a win, is trying its luck again this year with Yuval Adler’s “Bethlehem,” which explores a difficult relationship between a Shin Bet agent and a Palestinian teenager. The gritty political drama has done well at film festivals around the world, and nabbed trophies for Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Director and Best Screenplay at Israel’s own version of the Oscars, the Ophir Awards.

Hany Abu-Assad, a Nazareth-born director who holds an Israeli passport but identifies himself as a Palestinian, has also earned honors for his sweeping love story “Omar,” which is competing as the Palestinian entry for nomination. The Palestinian Ministry of Culture has submitted films for consideration in the category under the Palestinian flag since 2003, with Abu-Assad’s first film, “Paradise Now,” making it onto the shortlist of official nominees in 2005. Like Israel, no film from “Palestine” has ever won the coveted gold statue.

Continue reading.

'Jewtopia' - shtick, stereotypes and all

The film rehashes familiar territory: Jews are loud, overbearing and uninhibited, and the goyim can’t get enough of it.

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

By Malina Saval for Haaretz

What do Chinese waitresses, vaginoplasty and hunting rifles have in common? They all figure into plot points in "Jewtopia," a romantic comedy in which a Jew helps his gentile friend pretend to be a member of the tribe so he can land the local rabbi's hot daughter.

The film is loosely based on writer-director-producer Bryan Fogel's hit off-Broadway play of the same name (both were cowritten by Sam Wolfson). The cinematic version draws on the play's general premise — Jewish guy who likes to chase Asian skirts pimps out gentile best friend on JDate — but with some twists. Here the gentile blue-collar laborer wants the sassy, confident Jewish girl while the neurotic nebbish with a toehold in the family embroidery business feels suffocated by his pushy Jewish fiancée, a top-rated gynecologist.

“In the movie, we realized the JDate thing is done, that dressing up as a Hasidic Jew and all this absurdist comedy that worked so well on the stage, as a movie would be a farce,” explains Fogel, who starred in the original stage version but preferred to stay behind the camera for the film. “About 20 percent of the play is the movie, and the rest was a reimagining of how to take that concept and the cultural aspect and turn it into something that would work for the big screen.”

Continue reading.

These Mean Streets Are In Beirut

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays.  Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

Eran Riklis’ ‘Zaytoun’ is an homage to Martin Scorsese.

by George Robinson, Special to the Jewish Week

It would not surprise me if the daily reviews for “Zaytoun,” Eran Riklis’ new film which opens on Sept. 20, chide the Israeli filmmaker for sentimentalizing the film’s central relationship. The movie traces the slowly growing friendship between Yoni (Stephen Dorff), a downed Israeli flyer, and his erstwhile captor Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee who helps him escape captivity during the first Lebanon War. As the pair move from open enmity to tough love and eventually to mutual respect, it would be easy to overlook the intelligent emotional distance with which Riklis treats them, to mistake the film for an easy celebration of the Rodney King-can’t-we-all-get-along school of ineffectual good will.

In reality, Riklis treats the material with enough detachment and wry humor to keep it from becoming a runny treacle bun of a movie. He starts in the very first moment, a vertiginous and lengthy tracking shot that immediately establishes the universe in which Fahed lives: the shattered streets of Beirut, the kaleidoscope of street vendors, scruffy kids and men with guns that is his environment. Riklis keeps both the camera and his cast moving, never letting us settle into a single viewpoint for more than a few seconds.

“I wanted to do two things with that shot,” Riklis said in an interview last month. “I wanted to grab you and take you into this world. And I wanted to open with a big, energetic statement of style, to say, ‘Hey, you’re entering the cinema!’”

The result is a more expansive visual style than is seen in much of his other work; that shot is an homage, he says, to early Martin Scorsese films like “Mean Streets.”

The bravura entrance also reflects Riklis’ image of Beirut in the early ’80s.

“That kind of energy has a lot to do with Beirut in those days,” he said. “It’s also important that in the first 12 minutes of so of the film there would be all this activity, because after that the film is basically a two-man show.”

Or one-man-and-a-boy show.

 Continue reading.

Waiting for G-dot

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays.  Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

Posted by Kelsey Osgood for Mosaic

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to ask a nineteen-year-old Satmar girl, equally conversant in English and Yiddish, how she decides which language to use at any given moment.

“Yiddish just sounds better for some things,” she responded. “Like when you are yelling at your brothers to get out of bed, you could say ‘Get up!’ But in Yiddish, ‘Shtay-OOF!’ It just sounds more …”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew precisely what she meant. Full of lamenting diphthongs and expressive opportunities to spit on the listener, Yiddish is to dissatisfaction what Italian is to romance. For many people, the word “Yiddish” immediately evokes comedic cliches: Woody Allen as the lone Hasid at a dinner table full of Wasps, or Henny Youngman begging someone to please take his wife. But the language also has strains of tragedy—it is, after all, the true language of goles, or exile. Whereas Hebrew has a home to return to, Yiddish—a stew of German phrases, Slavic vocabulary, and Biblical parallelisms—was born out of exile itself. Its very essence is wandering and alienation. In his entertaining linguistic history “Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods,” Michael Wex writes, “Rooted as it is in the long wait for a Messiah who’s in no hurry to get here, Yiddish sometimes approaches fulfillment but never quite achieves it; until the Messiah comes and the Temple is rebuilt, there isn’t much apart from pining and dissatisafaction.”

It’s fitting, then, that Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece of alienation, “Waiting for Godot,” will be performed for the first time in Yiddish in a production of zeal and intelligence by the New Yiddish Rep and staged at the Castillo Theatre on West Forty-second Street. It opens on Friday and runs through October 13th. Vladimir—the more alert of the two tramps—is played by Shane Baker, a tall vaudevillian who also wrote the translation. Baker is an oddity even in the oddball-ridden world of Yiddish theatre: a goy from the Midwest who was raised Episcopalian. As a child, he first heard Yiddish from Groucho Marx, and when he moved to New York he befriended the accomplished Yiddish theatre actors Mina Bern and Luba Kadison, with whom he spent most of his time, speaking exclusively Yiddish and absorbing the language and the culture. Now, he’s such a luminary in the world of Yiddish that he is the executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture and reads yearly at the yahrzeit (death anniversary) of Sholem Aleichem. Onstage, he manages to be both burlesque and deadpan at once, the latter especially in comparison to his counterpart, David Mandelbaum, who plays Gogo.

Continue reading.

Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah 101

An overview of the traditions and customs of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah

The holiday of Sukkot is followed by an independent holiday called Shemini Atzeret. In Israel, this is a one-day holiday; in the Diaspora it is a two-day holiday, and the second day is known as Simchat Torah. This holiday is characterized by utterly unbridled joy, which surpasses even the joy of Sukkot. The joy reaches its climax on Simchat Torah, when we celebrate the conclusion—and restart—of the annual Torah-reading cycle.

These two days constitute a major holiday, when most forms of work are prohibited. On the preceding nights, women and girls light candles, reciting the appropriate blessings, and we enjoy nightly and daily festive meals, accompanied by kiddush. We don’t go to work, drive, write, or switch on or off electric devices. We are permitted to cook and to carry outdoors (unless it is also Shabbat).

The first day, Shemini Atzeret, features the prayer for rain, officially commemorating the start of the Mediterranean (i.e., Israeli) rainy season, and the Yizkor (prayer supplicating G‑d to remember the souls of the departed).

We no longer take the Four Kinds, and we no longer mention Sukkot in the day’s prayers; in the Diaspora, however, we do still eat in the sukkah (but without reciting the blessing on it).

The highlight of the second day, Simchat Torah (“The Joy of the Torah”), is the hakafot, held on both the eve and the morning of Simchat Torah, in which we march and dance with the Torah scrolls around the reading table in the synagogue. (In many synagogues, hakafot are conducted also on the eve of Shemini Atzeret.)

On this joyous day when we conclude the Torah, it is customary for every man to take part in the celebration by receiving an aliyah. The children, too, receive an aliyah!

After the final aliyah of the Torah, we immediately begin a new cycle from the beginning of Genesis (from a second Torah scroll); this is because as soon as we conclude studying the Torah, G‑d’s infinite wisdom, on one level, we immediately start again, this time to discover new and loftier interpretations.

(In the Land of Israel and Reform Judaism, the celebration and customs of these two days are compressed into one day.)

Sukkot What it's all about

The holiday of Sukkot is named after the booths or huts in which Jews are supposed to live during this week-long festival. The huts are supposed to remind us of the flimsy houses our ancestors lived in as they traveled through the desert heading towards Israel.

Eating and living in a temporary structure--called a sukkah--forces you to think about the important things in life, separating you from material possessions. But because Sukkot is also a harvest festival, it is considered an especially happy and festive time.

In ancient times, when the Temple in Jerusalem still stood, Sukkot was one of the three major pilgrimage festivals (along with Passover and Shavuot). Sukkot begins five days after Yom Kippur.

At Home
Now the fun part: building a sukkah! According to Jewish law a sukkah is a temporary structure with at least three sides and a roof made out of thatch or branches. The roof should provide some shade or protection from the sun, but still allow you to see the stars at night. You can build a sukkah out of wood, fabric, tarps, metal, or anything else you happen to have lying around the house. Traditionally the sukkah is decorated with everything from posters to gourds to paper chains. Meals are eaten in the sukkah (weather permitting) and many people choose to sleep there, too.

Continue reading.