Archive for 2005

Larry David Died for our Sins

Larry David, the producer-writer-star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has just finished airing the fifth season of his HBO program. Many people find him hilarious. Others find him annoying in the extreme. Both are right, of course, and David builds his humor out of this particular intersection of pain and pleasure. However, this season has been [...]

Crystal Clear (700 Sundays)

Billy Crystal has something he wants to share with you.
Crystal has had a diverse and varied career, with plenty of ups and downs, as a stand-up comic, a TV performer and a movie actor. On the one hand, he starred in “When Harry Met Sally,” a movie that convinced many non-Jewish women to imagine that [...]

The Painted Bird - Revisited

Forty years ago this Oct. 15, Houghton Mifflin published “The Painted Bird” by Jerzy Kosinski. The book was immediately acclaimed as a must-read text on the Holocaust and the nature of human cruelty.
In the years leading up to and following Kosinski’s 1991 suicide, his reputation was tarnished by a series of revelations that the author [...]

The Great Question (Who We Are)

THIS WEEK’S COLUMN WAS A COVER STORY IN THE JEWISH JOURNAL OF LOS ANGELES (and a pretty funny cover — so I thought I’d share it with you).

We’re almost halfway through the first decade of the 21st century. Not a bad time to assess “Who We Are.”

“Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a [...]

In Search of Himself (Bruce Goldsmith’s “When It Comes to Women”)

The High Holidays are always a good time to reflect, and this year, as I was serially sermonized in ways both inspirational and depressing, I was asked to consider that we can always start anew — that, as the dorm posters used to say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
Which [...]

Who’s Your Mummy?

On a day when a hot desert wind whipped through town, I found myself in a darkened chamber contemplating death and the afterlife — not my own, for a change, but rather that of the ancient Egyptians.
Currently the L.A. area is hosting two world-class exhibitions of ancient Egyptian artifacts: King Tut has taken up residence [...]

Wiesenthal The Collector

Simon Wiesenthal died last month at 96 in his sleep at his home in Vienna. This seems particularly fitting, since Wiesenthal spent the last 60 years troubling the sleep of Nazi war criminals, their henchmen, collaborators and supporters.
During the Holocaust, 89 members of Wiesenthal’s extended family were murdered, including his mother who was deported to [...]

Missing New Orleans

I’ve always kept a mental list of places about to disappear, such as the ruins of Angor Wat in Cambodia. Never — ever — was New Orleans on that list.
My first visit to New Orleans was as a college student, driving 36 hours straight from Vermont to attend Mardi Gras. I kept returning — with [...]

More than “Just Legal”

On Monday, Sept. 19, at 9 p.m., the WB will premiere “Just Legal.” Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the current home-run king of TV, this is no “C.S.I.” clone, but rather a one-hour drama with occasional comic moments that is about the beauty, the promise, the reality and the heartbreak that is the American legal system.
“Just [...]

A Nobel Approach to Hungarians

By this point in the summer, I know that my devoted Tommywood readers are all wondering the same thing — be they sitting by the pool at the Sociéte des Bains de Mer in Monte Carlo, on their yachts sailing off the coast of Turkey or schvitzing in their New York apartments or Los Angeles [...]