The Arts

‘The Messenger,” the critically acclaimed film now playing nationally, follows two U.S. Army casualty notification officers as they visit families to inform them that their loved ones have been killed in combat. Clearly, it is a subject ripe with political possibilities, but it is one director and co-screenwriter Oren Moverman knows well.

In every age and throughout every attempt to annihilate the Jewish people, what the Prophet Isaiah called the “saving remnant” has kept Judaism alive. Now comes Seth Rozin’s new comedy at the New Jersey Rep, “Two Jews Walk Into a War...,” in which the two last Jews in Afghanistan, members of a community that was almost destroyed during the Soviet invasion and the subsequent rise of the Taliban, need to work through mutual animosity to preserve the Jewish heritage.

It was the early 1960s, and in the working-class Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn a group of young Jewish boys lived and breathed basketball.
Every moment they could, these adolescents (many first-generation Americans and the children of Holocaust survivors) would pull on their white Converse canvas sneakers and race from their cramped apartments under the elevated subway line to their fenced concrete kingdom, the 2nd Street Park.

Mel Gibson has won the hearts and admiration of millions of fans for his swashbuckling performances in such blockbusters as "Lethal Weapon" and the Oscar-winning "Braveheart."
But his next film project already has some people sitting on the edge of their seats: and not in a good way.

A new take on the oldest Jewish book — a woman’s perspective — is the Jewish Book Council’s pick of the year.

“The Torah: A Women’s Commentary” (URJ Press), edited by Tamara Eskenazi and Rabbi Andrea Weiss, was announced this week as winner of the Everett Family Foundation’s Jewish Book of the Year Award.

He is a headhunter in the securities industry by vocation and environmental photographer by avocation. He is a Jew who grew up in New Jersey and studies Islam’s Sufi mystical tradition. Norman Gershman came here from his home in Colorado five years ago in search of some people to photograph — and found a mission.
In Midtown Manhattan he discovered Albania.

When two Jewish songwriters teamed up with a former “Shabbos goy” in 1956, it helped change the face of popular music.
The “Shabbos goy” was Elvis Presley (who died 24 years ago last week).
When Elvis covered “Hound Dog,” a rhythm-and-blues song composed by Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber — originally recorded in 1953 by Big Mama Thornton — it propelled the young Presley’s career to new heights.
But perhaps equally as important, it brought Leiber and Stoller to the attention of top music executives.

‘Now Mount Sinai was altogether in smoke, for the Lord had come down upon it in fire.’ Exodus 19:18
It’s not every millennium that God descends onto a mountain for a chat with one of his creations.
In fact, according to Jewish tradition, it’s only happened once, about 3,250 years ago, on a modest mountain sometimes called Sinai.

George Kalinsky was seething inside.
A fervently Orthodox rabbi told him that he wasn’t a real Jew.
Never mind that Kalinsky’s parents were Jewish and that he put on tefillin every morning.
Kalinsky, the longtime photographer extraordinaire for Madison Square Garden, who captured the magic of the Willis Reed/Walt Frazier-era championship Knick teams and who took the last photo of John Lennon performing live, apparently wasn’t observing rituals to the Agudath Israel rabbi’s standards.