Maury Wills, Milton Berle, Jimmy Piersall and Willie Mays in a salute to baseball on the television program The Hollywood Palace in 1967. (photo from ABC Television via Wikimedia Commons) Today’s comedy superstars, especially those whose careers are driven by…
Cecilia Peck, left, and Linor Abargil in Princeton, N.J. (photo by Motty Reif) Former Israeli beauty queen and international cover girl Linor Abargil is a sharply intelligent woman with a cause: survivors of rape. Empathetic yet unsentimental, highly visible but…
Zoe Kazan and Daniel Radcliffe on the red carpet in New York City. (photo from facebook.com/thewhatifmovie/photos_stream) When Elan Mastai’s father said hello to a pretty stranger in a Jerusalem café some four decades ago, it was the only English word…
Zach Braff, left, and Jim Parsons at the première for Wish I Was Here. (photo from facebook.com/wishiwasherefilm/photos_stream) Zach Braff is unabashedly and proudly Jewish. One might not deduce that, though, from the caustic attitude toward organized Judaism expressed at the…
Director Alan Zweig, right, and Marc Maron. (photo from Sudden Storm Entertainment) When Jews Were Funny is a seemingly straightforward title that promises both less and more than Alan Zweig’s unexpectedly provocative documentary delivers. The Toronto filmmaker’s stab at closing…
Woody Allen, left, and John Turturro in Fading Gigolo. (photo from Millennium Entertainment) “My big thing was to not have him wear khaki pants and an army coat,” said John Turturro with a broad smile. “And I got him out…
Dancing in Jaffa follows dance instructor Pierre Dulaine as he teaches 11-year-old Israelis and Palestinians. (photo from Tiara Blu Films) Going back at least as far as 2001’s Promises, most recent documentaries that have opted for an optimistic slant on…
Carl Sagan with Viking. (photo by Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Carl Sagan fans old and new have been gazing at their televisions in awe as host Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson’s resurrection of the science epic Cosmos takes them on a journey from…
Russel Crowe is Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s latest film. (photo from Paramount Pictures) An earnest amalgam of free-association Bible story, dire disaster movie and family melodrama, Noah is a more thoughtful and provocative movie than one has any right to…
A still from the movie Voices from El Sayed. When one is a Bedouin living in southern Israel, ironies seem to multiply with regularity. Two relatively recent Israeli-made films bring this incongruous life into sharp focus. In the first, Voices…
