Новости за 12.04.2018

There are two kinds of art that exist in context of the Holocaust. The first kind treats the events as a backdrop in order to tell a moralizing story, ultimately cheapening not just the tragedy but the power of the stories rooted in this history. The second kind offers us a way to reckon with the strangest and darkest period of modern human history and gives us a vocabulary to make sense of the world during and since. Yom Hashoah is a time for the latter. Here are a few films that have succeeded in doing this. Читать дальше...

Last May, at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan, film director Slava Tsukerman presented a special screening of his 1982 cult classic Liquid Sky, a post-punk sci-fi sex comedy. (“My films never belong to any genre,” Tsukerman explained to me in an interview last week.) The 35mm film being shown was his own print, which he described as “very close to falling apart,” and that evening would mark its last public viewing.

Mitzi Shore, the impresario and owner of L.A.’s legendary club The Comedy Store, where comics like David Letterman, Jay Leno, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Andy Kaufman, Richard Lewis and pretty much everyone else you can think of launched their careers and cultivated their material over the years, died Wednesday, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. She was 87.

The music of Meek Mill was the unofficial soundtrack of the Philadelphia Eagles’s victory over the New England Patriots in this year’s Super Bowl, yet the losing team’s owner, Robert Kraft, showed up earlier this week at the Chester, Pennsylvania facility where Mill is currently incarcerated to visit the rapper and speak out about his condition and about the urgent need for criminal justice reform.

Some years ago, on a visit back to Edmonton, where I grew up, I hosted a “Soviet dinner” for a group of 1970s-era Soviet-Jewish émigrés. When the invites went out, I got a lot of jokes asking about sosiski and kartochka (wieners and potatoes). Even though my guests had been Canadian citizens for nearly three decades, their mouths watered at the memory of these simple childhood meals.

Thirty years ago, Alfred Wetzler died in his native Slovakia. He and his friend, Rudolf Vrba, risked their lives and escaped Auschwitz so they could warn other Jews and the world in precise detail what was happening behind the fences and gates of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp. Although they were not successful in their attempt to save Hungary’s Jews from marching to their deaths at Auschwitz, Vrba and Wetzler did succeed in saving some Jews as well as compiling and publicizing... Читать дальше...

This past winter here in Vilnius, the charming capital of Lithuania, was much like any other. During long solid weeks of subzero temperatures, as the flow of tourists and roots-seekers slowed to a trickle, I adjusted the route of my daily walk to pass by up to a dozen top tourist sights. Day after day, there was one constant: The most popular, winter-defying “must-visit” for foreigners is “The Museum of Genocide Victims.” Perhaps there is something grotesquely sexy about “genocide.” Maybe the... Читать дальше...

On a Friday evening of February last year, Ruben Shimonov was waiting in his friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Everything was ready for the traditional Shabbat dinner to begin: The table was set, the food ready to be served. Now, it was time for the guests to come in.