Happy birthday to the Israel Museum! The country’s national museum turns 50 this year — middle age for most of us, but quite young in museum years. The museum is celebrating the occasion with a year of special exhibits, loans and gifts, adding to its encyclopedic collection covering Middle East archaeology, Jewish life, and modern […]

On my most recent visit to Jerusalem this past June, I spent a few hours in heaven: touring the collections of the National Library of Israel and previewing plans for its new state-of-the-art building to be built on a beautiful site near the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the Israel Museum. Reimagining the library for […]

A portrait of Picasso. Photos by Ervin Marton Courtesy Stephen Cohen Gallery “It is not enough to have talent,” photographer Robert Capa once said, turning an old saying on its head. “You also have to be Hungarian.” By which he meant Hungarian-Jewish. This point is reinforced in an exhibition of post-World War II Paris photographs […]

Let me indulge in some hyperbole: When Moses spoke after he came down from the mountain, when Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount, I don’t believe their audience could have been any more stunned than I or the other 3000 attendees were at Friday night’s Grammy week MusiCares charity event when Bob Dylan, this […]

“Once upon a time” is a phrase we use for fairy tales and fables. Yet most Jews carry with them another time, another land, another city. It could be the Pale of Settlement or Vilnius, Krakow or Lvov or, in more recent times, the Lower East Side, the Bronx, Tehran, Moscow, Buenos Aires or even […]

The Shout! Factory release of “The Marx Brothers TV Collection,” an omnibus of the Brothers Marx’s post-film career TV appearances, is occasion enough to celebrate once more the irrepressible talents of Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx. I suppose there may be some readers who have never heard of the Marx Brothers, but I doubt it. […]

Published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: The following essay/book review was just published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/liar-four-personas-adolf-eichmann The Liar: The Four Personas of Adolf Eichmann April 19, 2015 By Tom Teicholz Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer By Bettina Stangneth (Knopf). LIKE A FOSSIL preserved […]

Stories of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s and ’50s are, by now, well known. Many books, articles and documentaries exist about the lives of actors, screenwriters and directors who the studios deemed unemployable because of their association — real or alleged — with the Communist Party. Also familiar are the stories of many who […]

Rarely do we see singular artworks that, even as they represent an exact moment of transition between art historical movements, are also masterpieces in their own right. Yet that is exactly what can be seen now at the Getty Museum, which, until June 1, is showcasing abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock’s pivotal, 8-foot-high and 20-foot-wide […]

From left: Herb Alpert in the studio with Lou Adler in 1970. Photo courtesy of Herb Alpert Presents About a mile north of Duke’s in Malibu, a right turn takes you up to a bluff with its own driveway, which leads to a large parking lot. There, on the day I visited, a tour bus […]