the jewish week

George Eliot and Umberto Eco were smitten with Isaac Casaubon, perhaps Renaissance Europe's leading man of letters, both writing novels inspired by him. It's obvious why: he was a bibliophile whose love for the classics, literature and art were matched only by the influence he once held: a revered scholar in France, an advisor to King James in England. 

When Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half hour epic "Shoah" debuted in 1985, much of Europe was aghast, infuriated, ashamed -- and profoundly moved. No film to date had captured the devolution of humanity that the Holocaust required -- and, years later, the sublimated memory and even outright denial that bystanders, Nazis and even victims still maintained.  

Dear Readers,

I'm on vacation this week, so this is the last post you'll read till I'm back on Monday, Jan. 3.  So an early happy new year!

This week I wrote a review of the Hannah Senesh exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.  A  wealthy Jewish girl from Hungary, Senesh immigrated to Palestine in 1939, when she was 17.  After a few years there, however, she felt isolated from world events: put simply, the war in Europe.  So when the British organized a Jewish brigade in Palestine to help them rescue Allied forces caught behind enemy lines, she signed on.  

This week, I wrote about the retirement of The Jewish Museum's director Joan Rosenbaum, who's led the museum for 30 years.  But the story of her career raises a few fundamental questions that The Jewish Museum, and indeed all ethnic museums, must grapple with: Should ethnic museums advance the consensus opinions of their constituent group, or should they challenge those beliefs?  And if the latter, where do you draw the line?

There was a lot of hype when the documentary "Budrus," about a nascent non-violent protest movement in the West Bank, opened earlier this year.  But it died down quickly.  Well hats off to Michelle Goldberg, who in today's issue of Tablet, puts the spotlight on a Budrus non-violent activist who's been denied his release from an Israel prison.

With all do respect to Claude Lanzmann, the director of the revered Holocaust documentary "Shoah," which gets re-released this Friday, I don't like his attitude these days.  In an interview with The New York Times published today, Lanzmann criticized mainstream Holocaust movies like "Schindler's List" and "Life is Beautiful."  And on Spielberg's decidely un-populist project t

It looks like the New York Times' Steve Martin 92nd Street Y comedy of manners story has turned into something bigger.  Today, Martin published an Op-Ed explaining himself more fully, and all last week's papers seemed to have something to say.  

Virtually no commentators, left or right, have defended Glenn Beck's vicious attack on George Soros.  Commentary called Beck's tirade "marred by ignorance and offensive innuendo"; the ADL's Abe Foxman called them "horrific" and "over the top"; and this week, The New Yorker's