COLIN FIRTH AS JEWISH GUERILLA

In the new British film The Promised Land set in 1940s Mandate Palestine, Colin Firth is to play Avraham Stern of the underground Zionist Stern Gang. Colin Firth has recently won a Bafta award for his role in A Single Man.


GWYNETH PALTROW AS MARLENE DIETRICH

Gwyneth Paltrow will need all her acting ability for her latest role, that is how several film critics reacted when they have heard that the ethereal and beautiful actress is going to play the Hollywood legend Marlene Dietrich. Paltrow is vegetarian and leads a healthy existence, while Dietrich was known for her nightclub lifestyle and her dependence on drink and drugs. While Paltrow is happily married to Christ Martin of Coldplay, Dietrich had a string of affairs, among others with Sinatra, Yul Brunner and John Wayne.
Critics also point out that Paltrow has a thin voice and is best known for light romantic acting, compared to Dietrich’s husky voice.
However, Dietrich was also a staunch opponent of Nazi anti-Semitism and Paltrow, who has Jewish roots on her father’s side, has long admired her.
This BBC-drama, written by Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice) and produced by Paltrow, will start at the time of The Blue Angel, Dietrich’s breakthrough film in 1930 that brought her a Hollywood contract and a new life in America. After Dietrich left Germany, she became a vocal critic of Nazi anti-Semitism. Paltrow’s father, Bruce, came from a family of Russian Jewish émigrés.


HARRY POTTER’S AUTHOR IS ACCUSED OF STEALING PLOT

JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books is sued by the estate of a bankrupt Jewish author who died in London in a home for elderly Jews. The lawyers of the estate say that JK Rowling’s fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from 2000 has the same plot line that is in Willy the Wizard from 1987, written by the late Adrian Jacobs. This is a billion dollar copyright case. Rowling’s lawyers deny the allegations.

HOW NAZISM SHAPED ISLAMISM

Jeffrey Herf, professor of modern European and German history at the University of Maryland has written a book about Nazi propaganda in the Arab world. In his book he describes how high ranking Nazis, among them also Hitler, met Arab and Muslim Nazi sympathizers like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Rashid Ali Kilani, the former head of a short-lived Iraqui regime. The Nazis also sent short-wave Arabic-language radio broadcasts to the Middle East.
Jeffrey Herf: Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Yale University Press


JEWISH LONDON

The Jewish Museum has reopened in London, after being under reconstruction for several years. The new museum explores Jewish British life in four new galleries. Among the beautiful displays there is the recreation of an East End tailor’s sweatshop, a photographer’s studio in which the visitors can pose in period wedding outfits. Another display is Freud’s couch in the copy of his consultation room. Visitors can also see the 13th century mikveh, on show for the first time since its discovery in London in 2001.
Probably the most popular feature will be the Yiddish karaoke booth where you can practice your Yiddish insults…
http://www.jewishmuseum.org.uk/


EXODUS ’56

The Israeli rabbi and novelist, Haim Sabato’s new book From the Four Winds is both a memoir and a novel. The book opens by recounting his own early memories as a young immigrant to Jerusalem in the late 1950s.
In a kind of modern-day Exodus, the Jews of Egypt were expelled after the 1956 Sinai War, and they made their way to Israel by roundabout stages, passing through Italy and Greece along the way.

The hardships of the Mizrahi immigrants to Israel are more widely known today than they once were. However, the early history of the Jewish state is still more often viewed through the eyes of Eastern European pioneers.


New Kosher Shop Is a Prague Pioneer
On the eve of the Passover holiday in March, the Günsbergers opened King Solomon’s Bakery and Deli, the first kosher shop in Prague since World War II.
The shop (V Kolkovne 4; kosherfoodonline.cz) is located in the city’s Jewish Quarter, around the corner from the brothers’ other King Solomon, Prague’s only white-tablecloth kosher restaurant.
As only a few thousand Jews currently live in Prague, the store initially targeted temporary residents who struggled to find Passover staples like matzoh and gefilte fish. But now the Günsbergers want their deli to be a hot spot for anyone seeking a taste of something Jewish, like rugelach (stuffed and rolled pastries), babka (cakes filled with chocolate, cinnamon-nut or almond paste) and kishka (beef intestine stuffed with matzo meal).
“We are especially popular with kids going to schools in New York who are spending a few months here,” said Michal. “They don’t care about the kosher part, but they love that we have Israeli cookies and huge pickles.”
Among the wine for sale is the Günsbergers’ own label, priced at 310 koruna (about $14.75) a bottle. Any of the six kinds of hummus goes for .75 koruna a container and German and French beef sausages are about 210 koruna. (In keeping with kosher rules separating meat and milk, meat products can only be purchased to go.)

Super Sad True Love Story
Gary Shteyngart’s wonderful new novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance — a book that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality. It’s a novel that gives us a cutting comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings.

“Super Sad” takes as its Romeo and Juliet, its Tristan and Iseult, a middle-aged sad sack named Lenny Abramov and a much younger beauty named Eunice Park. He is the son of Russian immigrants, she the daughter of Korean immigrants, and for all their differences, both are afflicted by a lack of self-esteem — insecurities manifested in Lenny’s self-deprecating humor, his compulsive need to try to make others like him, and in Eunice’s bouts of anger and self-loathing, her fear that nothing she cares about can really last. Both are burdened with their striving parents’ unbearable expectations, and both are plagued by unlucky experiences in love. Slowly, haltingly, nervously, they begin to forge a partnership they hope will keep them safe in an unsafe world.
But while Mr. Shteyngart’s descriptions of America have a darkly satiric edge, his descriptions of New York are infused with a deep affection for the city that is partly nostalgia for a vanished metropolis (in other words, Gotham as we know it today) and partly an immigrant’s awestruck love for a place mythologized by books and songs and movies

In recounting the story of Lenny and Eunice in his antic, supercaffeinated prose, Mr. Shteyngart gives us his most powerful and heartfelt novel yet — a novel that performs the delightful feat of mashing up an apocalyptic satire with a genuine supersad true love story.

Hungary Sued in Holocaust Art Claim
For more than two decades the heirs of a world-renowned Jewish collector have been petitioning the Hungarian government to return more than $100 million worth of art, most of which has been hanging in Hungarian museums, where it was left for safekeeping during World War II or placed after being stolen by the Nazis and later returned to Hungary.

The requests have been rebuffed, as have appeals to the government from current and former United States senators, including the Democrats Christopher J. Dodd, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Edward M. Kennedy. Finally, in 2008, a Hungarian court ruled that the government was not required to return the art.
Now, in what experts say is the world’s largest unresolved Holocaust art claim, the heirs of the Hungarian banker Baron Mor Lipot Herzog have filed a lawsuit in United States District Court in Washington demanding the return of the art collection they say is rightfully theirs. The lawsuit has been filed against Hungary and several museums that it oversees.

The suit, filed on Tuesday, includes an unprecedented twist: in addition to the more than 40 artworks explicitly identified in the filing — including paintings, sculptures and other works by masters like El Greco, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Zurbarán, van Dyck, Velázquez and Monet — lawyers are also asking the Hungarian government for an accounting of all art from the Herzog family in its possession.
“It’s a very emotional subject,” David de Csepel, a great-grandson of Baron Herzog who lives in Los Angeles, said of the collection’s fate in a telephone interview. Mr. de Csepel, who said he was speaking on behalf of about a dozen relatives, explained that this lawsuit had come after decades of frustration with the Hungarian government. “I want to see justice done. My great-grandfather was one of the most famous collectors in all of Europe. His passion and love of art is well known.”

Mr. de Csepel, 44, remembers hearing about the art from his grandmother when he was a boy growing up just outside of New York. “It was something she held dear to her,” he said. “She got a hold of a book of the collection from one of the museums, cut out the pictures and hung them around her apartment.”
Michael S. Shuster, a lawyer for the Herzog family, said that Hungary had been “one of the countries that has been the most recalcitrant” about returning looted art.
“While other countries have cooperated,” he said, “Hungary has been bucking that trend.”

Gabor Foldvari, Hungary’s deputy consul general in New York, said in a telephone interview that it was not a question of Hungary’s refusing to cooperate but that, in the case of the Herzog heirs, “it was not the government’s decision, but the court’s decision” to keep the art.

Hungary is not the only country with looted Herzog art. Over the years the family has made legal claims in Poland, Russia and Germany, seeking the return of art and objects seized during and after World War II. This year the German government returned three works: an 18th-century snuffbox said to have belonged to Frederick the Great; a painting by Zeitblom, a 15th-century German artist; and a 1545 portrait by Georg Pencz, which the Herzogs sold at Christie’s in London this month for $8.5 million. That money is being used to support the heirs’ litigation, according to Mr. Shuster and Charles A. Goldstein, counsel to the Commission for Art Recovery, a 13-year-old nonprofit organization that helps victims of Nazi art thefts. (Asked if the Herzog heirs were planning to auction some or all of the collection if art were returned, as many families in similar situations have done, both Mr. Shuster and Mr. Goldstein said nothing had been decided.)

Part of the family’s frustration, Mr. Shuster said — and one reason the lawsuit requests a Hungarian inventory — is that it appears impossible to know just how much art is actually missing. Russia, for example, where some family members filed a lawsuit in 1999 that is still pending, is believed to have a number of works by artists including El Greco, Goya and Renoir that were stolen by the Nazis and then seized by the Soviets in Germany. Those works may be just a small segment of what was lost.
And in Hungary, the Herzogs believe, there may be many more than the works named in the suit, which are valued at a total of about $100 million. (That figure was arrived at after asking dealers and auction-house experts to value the property from photographs and visits to some of the museums.)

“About 12 years ago I was put in touch with one of the Herzog heirs through friends,” said George Wachter, who runs Sotheby’s old master paintings department worldwide. “And I was asked to go to Budapest to meet with their lawyer and look at” several paintings. Mr. Wachter took the trip and described the art he saw as “good, solid, quality pictures,” adding, “I can understand why Hungary wouldn’t let them go.”
Before this latest lawsuit, the heirs tried to compromise with the Hungarian museums. “Fifteen years ago the family offered to split the paintings with the government, and they turned them down,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Germany and Austria have come to terms with this issue, but Hungary has not. They have refused to take responsibility.”

El Judío Maravilloso
From Jewish Roots in Brooklyn, a Sizzling Salsa Star at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival

Little in Larry Harlow’s lineage suggested that he would someday become one of the most important figures in the history of salsa. But for more than 40 years now, Mr. Harlow has been affectionately known in the Latin music world as “El Judío Maravilloso” (“the marvelous Jew”), a pianist, songwriter, producer and arranger with an unerring feeling for clave, Latin music’s five-stroke beat, and an ear for hits.

Mr. Harlow helped create the Fania Records sound that came to define salsa and also discovered and shaped the careers of many of the genre’s top stars, like the singer Ismael Miranda. His own work for the label ranges from snappy dance numbers like “La Cartera,” “Señor Sereno” and “Abran Paso,” to an ambitious suite called “La Raza Latina,” which was recorded in 1977 and will be performed live for the first time on Saturday night by a 40-piece orchestra as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival.

“Larry is a gringo with clave, who understands and respects our music, but also knows how to be innovative,” said the singer and actor Rubén Blades, who early in his career sang with Mr. Harlow’s band and will be the featured singer in Saturday’s free show. “Most of the people at Fania, no matter what their age, could be very conservative. But Larry came in with an open mind and renovated the format, adding new ingredients, new chords, new instruments, and that created enthusiasm and led to tremendous success for a lot of people, including me.”

Born Lawrence Ira Kahn, Mr. Harlow, 71, comes from a family of musicians with roots in Brooklyn. His mother, Rose Sherman, was an opera singer; a grandfather played piano for silent films and in the Yiddish theater; and his father, a vaudevillian and orchestra leader who used the stage name Buddy Harlowe, for many years led the house band at the Latin Quarter nightclub, run by Barbara Walters’s father, Lou.
“I was brought up backstage there,” said Mr. Harlow, who adopted his father’s stage name in a slightly altered form. “When I was a kid, 10 or 11 years old, Barbara and I used to sit in the booth next to the spotlight, and we saw every show that came in there, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Joe E. Brown, Sophie Tucker.”

When he was about 5, he began studying piano. But Mr. Harlow says his fascination with Latin music began as a teenager, when he would “hear this strange music coming out of the bodegas and the mom-and-pop record stores and the bars” as he walked to his classes at the High School of Music and Art on West 135th Street in Hamilton Heights.

From there it was just a short step to joining Latin dance bands that played the five boroughs during the school year and the Catskills mambo circuit in the summer. He enrolled at Brooklyn College but eventually took off for Havana, where he attended music classes by day and hung out in clubs and dance halls at night.
During that sojourn in the late 1950s, “I became salsified, totally absorbed into the Latin culture,” he said. “The music wasn’t called salsa yet, but I became an Afro-Cuban nut, just studying the history and the old photographs and going to see Beny Moré, Orquesta Riverside and all those people in person.”

Returning to New York just as Fidel Castro came to power, he resumed playing as a sideman until forming his own orchestra, which had a distinctively brassy sound that paired trumpets and trombones with his percussive piano. When Fania Records was founded in 1964, the Dominican bandleader Johnny Pacheco, the label’s co-founder, was searching for new talent, saw Mr. Harlow’s band and immediately signed him to a contract.

“The first thing I noticed was that he really knew how to play Latin music,” Mr. Pacheco recalled this week. “He had the band set up, and they were pretty tight, but when he took a solo, that’s when he really got me. He used to take incredible solos. You could tell he had really listened to Peruchín and all those guys in Cuba. The scales he used to play, I was flabbergasted. He really was El Judío Maravilloso.”

During his years at Fania Mr. Harlow made more than 40 albums under his own name and produced about 200 more for other artists signed to the label. He and Mr. Pacheco played together in the Fania All-Stars supergroup, at sites as large as Yankee Stadium, and also oversaw the making of “Our Latin Thing,” the 1972 documentary film that took Fania-style salsa to a global audience.

“He became a pillar,” Mr. Pacheco said. “He was very good in the studio. He had the knowledge of the music, he could write, he worked fast, and he knew how to sit behind the controls and get the best out of guys, even if they didn’t have experience and had never recorded before.”
With a “salsa opera” called “Hommy,” Mr. Harlow helped revive the career of the singer Celia Cruz. He also led campaigns for musicians’ rights, paying for an audit of Fania’s books when he suspected that he was being cheated of royalties, and for Latin music to be given greater recognition at the Grammy Awards, which resulted in his receiving a lifetime achievement award from the organization in 2008.

“More than anyone else, Larry Harlow is responsible for the Latin Grammy” awards, said Aurora Flores, who covered the salsa scene for Billboard magazine at the height of the Fania era, wrote the liner notes for Mr. Harlow’s “Greatest Hits” CD and now leads the salsa band Zon del Barrio. “Because of his persistence and his tenacity, our music was no longer relegated to the general ethnic category, where we were competing with Eskimos.”

Mr. Harlow’s fascination with all things Cuban also led to his immersion in the religion known in English as Santeria. He has been a santero, or Santeria priest, for many years, and though he plays down its importance, joking that his mother used to say that dressing in the all-white vestments of that office made him “look like Mister Softee,” it gives him credibility and perhaps even inspires a certain apprehension among his colleagues.

But esteem for Mr. Harlow may be highest among the musicians who continue to play salsa. Bobby Sanabria, the percussionist and music educator who will be playing drums at Saturday’s show, is 18 years younger than Mr. Harlow and remembers that when he was in high school in the early 1970s, the talk in the lunchroom often turned to Mr. Harlow’s latest record.
“Larry’s music and influence are still all over the place,” he said. “Whenever you see albums that say ‘produced by Larry Harlow,’ you know they are going to sound pristine and powerful, with clarity in the voice and horns and the percussion up front. That’s the prototypical New York sound, and that’s because of Larry.”


The King of Klezmer Dave Tarras

Hailed as "The Benny Goodman of klezmer," Dave Tarras is considered the most influential klezmer musician of the Twentieth Century. Scion of a musical family in Ternovke, Ukraine, Tarras played at weddings for Jews and non-Jews − even playing in the Czarist army − up to World War One. He immigrated to America and after a brief stint as a furrier, began to make a living with his clarinet. From 1925 until his death in 1989, Dave Tarras set the standard for klezmer musicianship and virtuosity. Even the great be-bop artists Charlie Parker and Miles Davis travelled to the Catskills to study the technique of this complex and compelling virtuoso.
Author Yale Strom spent months interviewing the people who knew Tarras best: his musical collaborators and family members. The first biography authorized by the Tarras family, this book includes newly discovered personal and historical facts about Dave Tarras and the world in which he lived and played, and priceless photographs from the family archives.

Twenty-eight of Tarras' melodies as written by Tarras and discovered in his manuscripts are presented in arrangements for C and B-Flat instruments. An essential book for anyone interested in klezmer or Jewish cultural history.

Yale Strom is an internationally recognized authority on klezmer. Through more than 25 years and 75 research expeditions, Strom has become one of the world's leading ethnographer artists of klezmer culture. His books include The Absolutely Complete Klezmer Songbook (Transcontinental), The Book of Klezmer: The History, The Music, The Folklore – From the 14th Century to the 21st (A Cappella Books), and the children’s book The Wedding That Saved a Town (Kar-Ben Publishers). With his band Hot Pstromi he has released 13 globally acclaimed recordings. Currently, Strom is artist-in-residence in the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University.

OR-TAV Music Publications is Israel’s leading independent publisher of music and books on music.

Dave Tarras – The King of Klezmer may be ordered directly from the publisher (contact information above), or from our international distributors:
North America: Worldwide Music Services, Chicago, Tel. (312) 854-8427, fax (312) 376-3567, www.worldwidemusicservices.com