movies – From Under the Fig Tree

Take two

joselitJuly 23, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Over the past half century or so, Israel has been associated in the public mind with lots of things, but movie-making has not been among them – at least not until recently. As the Forward observed only last week, that’s about to change. Israel now harbors high hopes of becoming a major production center.

Israel's Ma'ale School of Television, Film and the Arts. Flickr/zeevveez

It’s not the first time. As The New York Times reported way back in May 1960, when Otto Preminger and a crew of 150 actors and technicians descended en masse on Israel to film Exodus, “the experience has immensely stimulated the exalted hopes and plans of many government people and enterprising citizens for the further production of film production here.”

Likened to a “national happening,” the making of the film took the country by storm. Thousands of ordinary citizens eagerly sought out Paul Newman and his co-star Eva Marie Saint for their autographs, took party in a national lottery to serve as extras and consulted their newspapers on a daily basis for information about what scene was being filmed where. Exodus, concluded the Times, was “probably the most publicized entertainment project that has come to this country since its founding.”

In the spotlight – and for reasons having to do with culture rather than geopolitics – Israel warmed to the idea of becoming an alternative to Hollywood. After all, it had much in common with the West Coast, from the availability of dramatic and varied scenery to the prospect of generous financial incentives. These factors, coupled with a reputation for being “the most avid moviegoing nation in the world,” made Israel a natural.

While it’s taken 40 biblical years – and then some – for this possibility to bear fruit, how heartening to see that Israel, someday soon, may be known for its movie magic.

Chosen-ness

joselitMarch 21, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

There aren’t too many novels that can lay claim to a second, much less a third, lease on life as both a film and a play, especially when the subject at hand has to do with religion and faith. But The Chosen, Chaim Potok’s novel of Orthodox Jewish life in Brooklyn during the waning years of the 1940s, has, of late, scored a home run.

These days, it takes the form of a critically acclaimed play which, thanks to a creative partnership between Theater J and Arena Stage, can be seen at the latter’s 800-seat Fichandler Theatre downtown.

Nearly 30 years earlier, The Chosen, its palette awash in brown and ochre, was brought to the silver screen, where the likes of Maximillian Schell and Rod Steiger inhabited the roles of a modern Orthodox Jew and a Hasidic rebbe, respectively. The film’s opening scene -- a baseball game between yeshiva boys and their Hasidic counterparts -- remains as powerful today as it first did a generation ago.

And before that, the novel made its debut in 1967. Initial reviews were lukewarm and tepid.

Eliot Fremont-Smith, writing in The New York Times, called the book “thematically overstuffed and dramatically undernourished,” adding, snippily, that its dramatic arc had been reached by page 37. (He subsequently changed his mind about the book, admitting that his initial judgment had been too hasty.)

But the reading public took to The Chosen with great and immediate relish and within a few months’ time, this revelatory coming of age story had become a runaway best-seller, first in cloth and then in paperback. The novel, related its publisher with unbridled glee, “is one of the happiest phenomena in recent publishing history,” noting that it “rings just as true in Iowa as in Brooklyn.”

An exercise in de-mystification, a study in friendship, a tale of fathers and sons – all these are possible explanations for the book’s hold on the American imagination. Whatever the reason, The Chosen is well worth another look.

But hurry: the play, followed by a talk-back between yours truly and Ari Roth, the artistic director of Theater J, is scheduled to close next Sunday.

True grit

joselitJanuary 19, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

The Coen Brothers' recently released cinematic homage to the cowboys and gunslingers of the Old West places squarely within our sights the centrality of masculinity to the making of modern America.

Boxing gloves — Flickr: Kristin Wall/ KWDesigns.

The pursuit of masculinity also loomed large within the precincts of the modern Jewish experience. Eager to supplant their traditional braininess with brawn, growing numbers of Jewish men in both the Old World and the New of the late 19th and 20th centuries forsook the yeshiva for the boxing ring and the baseball diamond.

Occasioning lots of commentary over the years, the transformation of the Jewish male has also been the subject of several hard-hitting contemporary documentaries. Over the course of the next few months GW's Program in Judaic Studies will partner with American University's Program in Jewish Studies to showcase three films that explore the relationship among brain, brawn and the Jewish male.

"Tough Guys," as we're calling the series, commences on Jan. 25 at 7 p.m., with a screening at American University of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (event details here). This profile of the legendary baseball player will be followed a few weeks later on Feb. 23 at 7 p.m. at American Unversity by a salute to prize-fighter Dmitriy Salita, whose boxing prowess along with his religiosity is explored in Orthodox Stance.

The series culminates on April 4 at 7 p.m. on GW's campus (Room 310, School of Media and Public Affairs) with a screening of Disturbing the Universe, an in-depth look at the career of legal tiger and brawler, William Kunstler, who had a fierce and fighting way with words.

Baseball, boxing, the law and Jewish men: Who can resist?

Show biz

joselitJanuary 2, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Much has been written of late about the ways in which celebrated American musicals such as "Oklahoma" or "South Pacific" carry considerable Jewish freight. While most audiences come away humming rather than thinking, the American musical, many scholars suggest, is actually where American Jewish playwrights, lyricists, choreographers and designers set to rights their relationship to America.

muses — Muses Dancing with Apollo, by Baldassare Peruzzi. Source: Wikipedia.

But what of those on the other side of the footlights: the audience? I've always wondered what accounted for the longstanding affinity that so many American Jews, as well as their European counterparts, have had for the theater and the arts in general. Was this an accident of history? An artifact of demography? Or a deliberate strategy of modernization?

A recent article in the real estate section of The New York Times provides something of an answer.

Training its sights on 466 Grand Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side, it focused on what was once known as the Neighborhood Playhouse but is now the Louis Abrons Arts for Living Center.

Whatever its name, the organization was first established in 1915 by two of the great unsung heroines of modern New York: Alice and Irene Lewisohn. The nieces of Adolph Lewisohn, himself a great benefactor of Jewish institutions, among them the Hebrew Technical School for Girls, they introduced the residents of the immigrant Jewish neighborhood to the magic of the performing arts.

Joining forces with Lillian Wald, another indomitable American Jewish woman of the early 20th century who founded the Henry Street Settlement, the "misses Lewisohn," as they were called, sought to enlarge the imaginative capacity of America's newest citizens through an active program of theater, dance, pageantry and a better, more wholesome, class of movies.

After about a decade, the Lewisohns decided to close the Neighborhood Playhouse, explaining, somewhat cryptically, that "in view of our geography and the psychology of our audience, our present system is not conducive to the further development of creative expression." What they meant by that is anyone's guess. In fact, if there are any students out there looking for an exciting research paper, this could be it.

Fortunately, the Henry Street Settlement continued to support what developed over time into one of the city's most accessible and lively cultural venues. Under its aegis, thousands of Jewish children -- my mother, among them -- cultivated an appetite for the arts, or what Alice Lewisohn called the "stirring of their emotional inheritance."

I grew up on my mother's adventure stories of travelling all by herself, week after week, from the far reaches of Brooklyn to the Lower East Side to take a class in tap dancing, of all things. Somewhere, I even have a picture of my teenage mother, her tap shoes glistening, her body encased in a satiny costume and her face aglow, as she tap, tap, taps her way into history.