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Q & A with MEL BROOKS

JewishJournal.com exclusive audio:
Interview with Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks sings
Mel Brooks is on a hot streak: He was just a Kennedy Center Honoree (along with Dave Brubeck, Robert De Niro, Grace Bumbry and Bruce Springsteen); 20th Century Fox just released “The Mel Brooks Collection” in Blu-ray - a nine-DVD set that includes “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein” and [...]

RETHINKING KASZTNER

“Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis,” a new documentary, portrays filmmaker Gaylen Ross’ attempt to understand why Reszo (Rudolf) Kasztner, a Hungarian Jewish leader who saved more than 1,600 people in war-time Budapest - more than Oskar Schindler - on the so-called Kasztner train, remains so controversial to this day.
In the course of [...]

Silver Judaica is Sign of the Times

“How’s it going?”
As a tough year ended and a new decade began, it seemed a fair question. While The New York Times has looked to bowling alley attendance as a gauge of our nation’s condition, I turned to Jonathan Greenstein and his recent auction of silver Jewish ritual art, or Judaica, to determine the health, [...]

Lessons from the not-so-distant past: How photos of the civil rights movement can inspire us today

History often seems to take place on a stage distant from our own experience - yet the exhibition “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968,” which opened at the Skirball on Nov. 19, reminds us that even our recent past can deliver a strong message for our times.
“Road to Freedom” is a [...]

Shadows of the Sun

When the German forces surrendered to the Allies in May 1945, World War II in Europe ended. However, for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, the trauma of what they endured wasn’t over. For many, the effects lingered on in ways large and small, noticeable and not, often in ways their families came to know.
Rita [...]

The Kraft of Movie Music

“If there’s music in a movie,” said Robert Kraft, president of Fox Music, “whether on screen, or underscore, or someone is playing guitar in a scene, I’m involved.”
That includes the decisions concerning music at every level.
“How it’s paid for, is it creatively appropriate to the film, is it legal, is it focused on selling more [...]

What Survives the Sixties

The summer of 1969 was host to a pair of historic events - the moon landing and the Woodstock festival - that seemed to define the ’60s. As we revisit those events this summer, it is fair to ask: What did they mean, what did they accomplish and what parts of the ’60s have meaning [...]

VIDIOTS

If you believe all the tech pundits, the future of home movie watching will be moving to “the cloud.” We’re already well on the way to where Netflix DVDs will no longer arrive in the mail and sit, unwatched, on an entryway table. Soon all films and many reruns of TV shows will be downloaded [...]

Spies, Celebs, Classics and More — Good Reads are Coming Up

Among the most daunting questions I’m often confronted with is: “What should I read next?”
Recently, I traveled to the depths of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York for BookExpo 2009, the annual American Bookseller’s gathering, where I crisscrossed the convention floor, Indiana Jones-like, to gather publishers’ catalogues and advance-reader copies of so [...]

Design with a “Z” (Lajos Kozma and Szalon)

Lajos Kozma. Photo courtesy Szalon

Can a piece of furniture convey the story of Hungarian Jewry or reveal the genius of a little-known master? The story of a career undercut by anti-Semitism and cut short by death?
This weekend’s “Legends of La Cienega Design Walk” (May 7-9) offers a celebration of design through lectures, panel discussions, book [...]