Nothing Sacred

Weekend at Jerry's
The weekend-long Heeb Film Fest, which describes itself as "treading the line between the holy and the profane," opens tomorrow night in downtown Manhattan. Among the features is the New York City premiere of My Mother's Garden, Cynthia Lester's fascinating-sounding documentary about her mother, Eugenia, an Auschwitz survivor who hoards trash in her California home. Also in the lineup are My Mexican Shiva, a goofy comedy-drama that I kind of enjoyed;...

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Making Peace
NPR speaks with journalist Barbara Sofer and others about Sixty Years, Sixty Voices, a collection of Israeli and Palestinian women’s thoughts on the decades since Israel's establishment.

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Sleeping with Fishes
The New York Times covers the death of Yaakov Alperon, often called the Israeli Tony Soprano: “Had Don Corleone been Jewish, his shiva would probably have looked something like this.”

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Broken Dreamboats
Enjoy 2009 with Ira, Zev, Noah, and nine other “Nice Jewish Guys” who appear in an only slightly tongue-in-cheek pin-up calendar variant of one featuring Paris Hilton.

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Missing the Great Books
Sanford Pinsker laments that “the audience that made the Jewish-American renaissance possible—and that were informed readers of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and the early Philip Roth—has largely disappeared,” leading to a correlated decline in the quality of what's being written.

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Dance Party
Balkan Beat Box, which mixes klezmer, hip-hop, dance, and Gypsy influences into “urban immigrant club music,” is featured on Al Jazeera.

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Just Like Gwyneth
“It seems like Maimonides was the first macrobiotic person,” was the takeaway lesson of a Manhattan nutrition course based on the great thinker’s teachings. The Jewish food expert who taught the course also mixed in some yoga moves, because “Maimonides talks about flexing, bending and moving the spine.”

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Man's Best Friend
You've seen the typographical stylings of Oded Ezer, now see his dog.

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