LOS ANGELES – Joseph Cedar is on a pretty good run: The Israeli director has made four movies in his 11-year career, and the first three have represented his country at the Academy Awards for best foreign-language film.
Before this week began, one made the cut of five finalists, but a Cedar film has yet to capture a golden statuette. In fact, no Israeli film has ever won an Oscar.
Cedar and many of his countrymen are hoping that will change with his fourth entry, “Footnote,” which was among the five Best Foreign Language Film nominees announced on Tuesday in advance of the 84th Annual Academy Awards.
LOS ANGELES – The June 1967 Six-Day War was a brilliant military victory, a turning point in Israel’s history and, indeed, for the entire Middle East. Similar glory by Americans on the battlefield no doubt would have led to the production of a half-dozen films with John Wayne single-handedly wiping out the Arab armies.
The spectacular July 4, 1976, rescue mission to Entebbe Airport in Uganda inspired three films, one Israeli and two American. Yet neither the Israeli film industry nor anyone else has ever made a feature on the 1967 war. Now two U.S. attorneys are coming forward to remedy the omission.
Their film, tentatively titled “Jerusalem ‘67,” is based on the authoritative book, “The Battle for Jerusalem, June 5-7,” by veteran Jerusalem Post reporter Abraham “Boomie” Rabinovich, who left the United States to cover the war.
LOS ANGELES — Ten months after World War I ended, a 30-year-old German army veteran wrote a two-page letter in which he explained the “Jewish question” on a “rational” and “scientific” basis.
“An anti-Semitism based on reason must lead to a systematic combatting and elimination of the privileges of the Jews,” he wrote. “The ultimate objective must be the irrevocable removal of Jews in general.”
Signed “Respectfully, Adolf Hitler,” the letter received high marks for the author from his superiors in a military propaganda unit bitterly opposed to the newly established Weimar Republic, which they saw as the handiwork of Bolsheviks, Socialists and Jews.
LOS ANGELES – Ask Kirk Douglas for the proudest accomplishment in his 94 years and the iconic actor cites his actions in breaking the infamous Hollywood blacklist.
Douglas did so by giving writer Dalton Trumbo full credit for the script of the movie “Spartacus,” normally a routine acknowledgment. But in 1960, openly employing an accused communist or communist sympathizer was an almost guaranteed career killer, even for one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and required an extraordinary degree of moral courage.
“I was always an impulsive guy and young enough not to pay attention to the possible consequences of openly hiring Trumbo,” Douglas recalls in an interview at his relatively modest, art-filled home in Beverly Hills, Calif.
For Ira Feinberg, what he calls the “pinnacle of my life’s experiences” took place 63 years ago.
Feinberg was a 17-year-old New Yorker when he joined the elite troops of the Palmach force fighting in Israel’s War of Independence.
“No other experience in my life had such meaning as this period serving in the first army to fight for the Jewish people and for the independence of the State of Israel,” he said in an e-mail, adding that “nothing comes close to it.”
For the foreign volunteers like Feinberg who left home to join in the battle, the remembrance of those historic days remains undimmed.
Branko Lustig, 78, two-time Oscar winner for “Schindler’s List” and “Gladiator,” will celebrate his bar mitzvah on May 2 at Auschwitz, in front of barrack No. 24.
He missed his rite of passage as a 13-year-old because at the time he was a prisoner in the very same barrack, having been deported from his Croatian hometown to the death camp when he was 10.
To mark the belated bar mitzvah, Lustig will be accompanied by some 10,000 participants in the March of the Living, nearly all teenagers.
LOS ANGELES – Michael Jackson’s life was full of contradictions, and his relationship with Jews and the Jewish community was no exception.
Jackson asked to be allowed to visit the Museum of Tolerance and its Holocaust exhibit one week before its Los Angeles opening in February 1993 and was crying when he left. But two years later he released a song that included lyrics offensive to some Jews.
In 1999, the King of Pop developed close ties with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. (See page 12.) Six years later, Jackson described two former Jewish business associates as “leeches.” That same year, 2005, he was seen wearing a red string on his wrist that is worn by kabbalah adherents.
Boteach, reached Monday by phone during a family trip in Iceland, reminisced about his “warm relationship” with Jackson, who died June 25 in Los Angeles at the age of 50.
Hold the presses and indignant blogs. There’s a new Number One rabbi on Newsweek’s list of the 50 most influential American rabbis, dethroning the previous champion.
Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism In Washington, D.C., took over the top spot from Rabbi Marvin Hier.
Hier, founder and dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, has led the field since the list first appeared two years ago, but was relegated to runner-up in the 2009 list.
p>There was no clean knockout when New York Times columnist Roger Cohen faced off against some 400 Iranian Jews and Baha’is in Los Angeles, but spectators were treated to some vigorous rhetorical sparring and nimble footwork.
Cohen, a British-born Jewish journalist, wrote a column last month from Iran titled “What Iran’s Jews Say” claiming that Jews in the Islamic Republic were “living, working, and worshipping in relative tranquility.”
Despite Holocaust denials and rants by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about wiping Israel off the map, Cohen wrote from Esfahan, “as a Jew, I have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran.”
State-of-the-art Szyk Haggadah out in limited edition
The latest work by Arthur Szyk is going for $15,000 — it's a Haggadah.
Irvin Ungar, an antiquarian bookseller and Szyk devotee, is publishing a new edition of Szyk's 1940 Haggadah that he calls state-of-the art nearly 57 years after the painter and cartoonist's death.
"No Jewish artist has been more devoted to liberty and social justice than Szyk," said Ungar, the president of the Arthur Szyk Society. "No artist has done more to translate Jewish values into art. His Haggadah is the great book of freedom."
Szyk (pronounced Shick) was a Polish Jew whose works could give new life to ancient traditions or eviscerate a Hitler or Mussolini.
