RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Count the derogatory characteristics stereotypically applied to Jews and confirmed by this scathing film: pushy, two-faced, greedy, power-hungry, untrustworthy, social-climbing, controlling, puppet-masters of the government – there are more but let’s start with these. Under the guise of being a soft-spoken, gentle schlemiel – the kind of man who knows how to manipulate an invite to a billionaire’s dinner party but shows up wearing a newsboy’s cap that signals why he doesn’t belong – Richard Gere plays Norman, a man who lives by connecting people to other people who can do them important favors. By tailing an Israeli minister as he meanders back to his NY hotel after an important meeting, Norman eventually introduces himself in an elegant men’s shop and promises to get the minister an invitation to the billionaire’s dinner that night. To establish his credibility, he insists on paying for the minister’s exorbitantly expensive shoes – previously tried on and rejected for their extravagance. The greedy minister accepts the offer, and if adjusted for inflation, probably sells out for less than Judas did. Jews have always loved both shekels and beautiful menswear – think of Joseph and that rainbow coat.

There’s a lot more plot concerning a potty-mouthed rabbi who needs to raise money to save his temple (Steve Buscemi); a successful lawyer/nephew who needs a rabbi who will marry him to his Korean love (Michael Sheen); an Israeli prime-minister who needs to get his son accepted to Harvard (Lior Ashkenazi) – a chad gadya of the interlocking needs and wants of Israeli and American Jewry. And there are the un-subtle references to names and types to arouse a nod and smile from viewers who pick up on them – a Korean rabbi at Central Synagogue, the names Alfred Taub and Henry Kavisch. There’s the brief scene showing Norman eating pickled herring from a jar while miles away, the prime-minister is slurping oysters and the soundtrack of glorious cantorial chanting of prayers offers the spirituality that Judaism used to represent. As a movie for home-consumption in Israel, one could make the argument that Norman is an over-extended SNL sketch that skewers its leaders, movers and shakers. As a film sent out for international distribution to an increasingly anti-semitic world, its a misguided attempt at satire that will only re-enforce and inflame existing prejudice.

https://www.aish.com/jw/me/Our-Boys-The-HBO-Series-Uses-a-Jewish-Tragedy-to-Condemn-Israeli-Society.html

It’s a despicable misrepresentation of truth.

Whoever had any part in producing the new HBO 10 part series teasingly titled “Our Boys” should be profoundly ashamed – and whoever is misled into believing that they will have an opportunity to see a fair re-creation of the events in 2014 that began with the kidnapping and murders of three Israeli teenagers leading up to the Gaza war of that horrible summer deserves a fair warning: This is perhaps one of the most outrageous and deceitful distortions of a historically significant moment in the story of Israel’s struggle with barbaric acts of terrorism.

The way the story played out in fact begins with three 16-year-old religious Israelis, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, (full disclosure: Naftali was my cousin) deciding to hitchhike at Alon Shvut in Gush Etzion. Picked up by Arabs, they almost immediately realized they were being kidnapped and one of them was able surreptitiously to call the police. The police heard gunshots but didn’t know anymore. The entire country joined in a paroxysm of fear, prayer and hope. The mood of Israel was perhaps the finest example of its potential for unity, total and complete caring and sharing as one national family.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-dreyfus-affair-the-story-behind-polanskis-film/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2019-08-30&utm_medium=email
Mark Twain also attended the trial and wrote of it….rsk

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org › mark-twain-and-the-jews
Jewish French army captain convicted — and later exonerated — of spying for the Germans in late 19th century; case famously exposed anti-Semitism in France at the time.

The Dreyfus affair, subject of the new Roman Polanski film which is premiering at the Venice Film Festival, triggered a national crisis over anti-Semitism in France in the late 19th century.

Here is an account of the scandal, which had wide international repercussions.

Alfred Dreyfus was a 36-year-old Jewish French army captain, from the Alsace region of eastern France which was at the time occupied by Germany.

He was accused in October 1894 of passing secret information on new artillery equipment to the German military attache.

The accusation was based on a comparison of handwriting on a document found in the German’s waste paper basket in Paris.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/miles-davis-documentary-birth-of-the-cool/As the new documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool makes clear, Davis was not a nice man. But his talent for the trumpet was magical.

How delightful it is to learn that Miles Davis, as a boy, used to take his trumpet out into the woods, listen to the animals, and imitate them on his horn. Later, in New York, he was already working as a professional musician when he decided to go to Juilliard to learn classical technique — a risk in his world, where the best musicians feared “sounding white.”

Many were the influences that went into Davis’s music, as we learn in Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, a beguiling new documentary full of strange details, some unnerving, some wonderful. Backed by Davis’s resplendent music, it’s frequently hypnotic, even heartbreaking. The usual talking-head interviews — experts, fellow musicians, and family members appear on camera — intermingle with the reflections of Davis himself, read by the actor Carl Lumbly in Davis’s signature gravelly tone.

Davis was an angry man, often a loner, and one source of his hot temper was racism. Born into affluence in 1926 — his father, a dentist, is described as the “second-richest” black man in Illinois — he went off to Paris in 1949 and found himself not only welcome but the toast of its swells. Via his girlfriend, the actress Juliette Gréco (neither spoke the other’s language), he joined a circle of creative people that included Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. Returning home, he said, “It was hard for me to come back to the bullsh** white people put black people through in this country. . . . Before I knew it I had a heroin habit, which meant getting and shooting heroin all day and all night.”

In Where’d You Go Bernadette, Cate Blanchett plays a woman who has lost her personal mission in life after becoming a mother.  Although she was formerly a super-star architect who won a MacArthur Genius Award, she has slipped into becoming, over the years, her teenage daughter’s “‘best friend” and chauffeur in a baffling relationship that will be unfamiliar to 99% of today’s mothers.  Making this even more difficult to fathom is the slavish imitation of Anna Wintour in Ms. Blanchett’s hairdo, sunglasses and even the name Bea for her daughter.  We look at Bernadette thru the lens of that other highly successful career woman and wonder what the director had in mind.  Did he think the screenplay was insufficient to remind us of whom Bernadette was meant to be without showing us an image of one of the most photographed working women in the world?

This is a bewildering movie directed by Richard Linklater whose previous films, including “Before Sunrise”,  showed great sensitivity to the subtle nuances of male/female relationships.  In this film, we are meant to believe that a highly creative man in his own right never noticed that his highly creative wife had stopped doing anything for at least 14 years.  Though we see or are told that she seldom leaves her house, has no friends, doesn’t sleep, alienates people (including her husband) and has refused any sort of help, we are also supposed to accept that all she needed to finally recharge her batteries was an aha moment along with the miraculous good fortune of meeting the right person at the right time while paddling through the waters of Antarctica.  

So this is essentially a fairy tale not about Saint Bernadette who had 18 visions, but about a fairy queen struck by a magic wand that eclipsed all distances and unlikely occurrences to restore her royal crown.  And since this is a fairy tale, the abusive neighbor next door, played reliably by Kristen Wiig, becomes the tunnel to freedom that Bernadette needed  for her escape to wholeness so that all would be right in the kingdom of Utopia, a word that literally means nowhere.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/jihadi-john-documentary-review/

A new documentary raises important questions about the journey of the Kuwait-born British terrorist to ISIS.

On August 19, 2014, a masked man with a London accent appeared on a video, boasting that he was a soldier for ISIS, and proceeded to behead American journalist James Foley. Security services almost immediately identified the murderer as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwait-born British man of 26. His captives, noticing the British accents with which he and three other captors spoke, referred to the four as John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Emwazi’s media nickname became “Jihadi John.”

Built around interviews with MI5 and CIA officials, leading soldiers such as General David Richards of the U.K. and General David Petraeus of the U.S., and survivors of Syrian hostage camps from the era, director Anthony Wonke’s penetrating HBO documentary Unmasking Jihadi John: Anatomy of a Terrorist makes unfortunate, distracting use of cheesy dramatic reenactments in telling this awful story. But it also raises important questions about Emwazi’s journey to terrorism. The documentary is tinged with a sense of regret that the spooks could have done more to give Emwazi an exit ramp from evil.

As a boy, Emwazi immigrated to England at age six, his family winning asylum because they had been, in Kuwait, members of a persecuted minority, the Bedoon. Emwazi attended a Church of England school in London and seemed well-adjusted. As an adolescent, he began to disengage, to seem “slightly strange” in the words of one of his teachers. Footage of his youth shows him constantly covering his mouth; apparently the other boys liked to tease him about his breath. As a teen, he took up drinking and marijuana, but in college he started adopting Islamic dress and habits. Such faith “gives structure where there was none,” says one observer interviewed in the doc.

Online jihadist recruitment tools began to catch Emwazi’s eye, and he went to Somalia and Tanzania for indoctrination in Islamism. In the latter country he was locked up, beaten, and questioned. On the way back to London, he was stopped again in Amsterdam and again in Dover. British spies tried to steer him to be a double agent and threatened to make life difficult for him if he didn’t cooperate. “Whether we contributed to his further radicalization . . . by stopping him from travel is an interesting question,” notes Commander Richard Walton, Scotland Yard head of counterterrorism.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4995776/
Coming Soon Release Date: July 31 Israel’s Mossad agents attempt to rescue Ethiopian Jewish refugees in Sudan in 1977.
Director:  Gideon Raff

Writer: Gideon Raff

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For moviegoers old enough to remember the sickeningly grotesque details of the Manson family’s massacre of Sharon Tate, her unborn child and the other victims in her house, it will be hard to believe that the alternate massacre in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is greeted with gales of laughter throughout that sequence. The theater was full at the 4pm weekday screening, and I was shocked to see how many of the viewers were at least middle aged and could be expected to have at least read about this shocking mass murder that took place in 1969.

At two hours and 40 minutes, notwithstanding constant background music from the sixties, fast moving cars and two excellent performances by Brad Pitt and Leonard DeCaprio, the movie lacks directorial pace. The scene where Brad Pitt as a movie stuntman comes to the Manson community populated by strung-out young hippies, lingers far too long on pointless dialogue before descending into extreme violence in Tarantino’s signature style. The scene with Sharon Tate kvelling at her own performance in a movie is similarly too protracted and frankly, one inducing a queasy feeling of disrespect for a young pregnant actress who was butchered by what can only be called monsters, some of whom have been released from jail.