Anthony Lane (not David Denby, as I mistakenly misremembered) reviewed this film in the New Yorker 21 September 2011 issue.
As with Spielberg’s “Munich,” there is an awkward, irresoluble tension
between the movie’s urge to thrill and the weighty pull of the
historical obligations that it seeks to assume. How much, to be blunt,
should we be enjoying ourselves? What do we owe to “The Debt”? Whatever
the sum, it is more than the film itself, gloomy with unease, seems able
to repay.
It received a 6.9 rating in IMDb.com, and a 76% - 67% rating in RottenTomatoes. I have a calendar entry on 26 August 2011, moved up from earlier. I finally got it yesterday, and watched it last night. I rather liked it.
I liked it quite a bit. The three less renowned, younger, actors do much better work than the older, more renowned actors. All six rather botch the Israeli accent, but, again, the three younger ones do better with it.
A.O. Scott in the Times: The labors of the cast help to make “The Debt” a compact, reasonably
clever and sometimes piquant entertainment, but they also make you aware
that it could have been more.
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Uprising in Egypt Splits U.S Conservatives
I'm not sure if this item belongs in Geopolitics, Politics, Comedy, or psychiatry. Glenn Beck blasts the uprising in Cairo as a threat to our way of life. Michelle Goldberg on how the rebellion is splitting U.S. conservatives—and the fallout for the 2012 presidential campaign.
His logic is, to say the least, interesting; it would be alarming if it weren't so pathetic: "We've shown you tonight that Hamas, Code Pink"—the feminist anti-war group—"and the Muslim Brotherhood are all linked together." With the future bleak, Beck called on his viewers to pray for "our way of life" and for Israel.
And he has more to say.
"This is Saul Alinsky. This is STORM from Van Jones," he warned on Monday, continuing, "The former Soviet Union, everybody, radical Islam, every—this is the story of everyone who has ever plotted to or wanted to fundamentally change or destroy the Western way of life. This isn't about Egypt. Everything is up on the table." It would all end, he warned, with the restoration of a "Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe," along with an expanded China and Russian control of the entire Soviet Union "plus maybe the Netherlands."
And he ain't alone: On Sean Hannity's radio show, Newt Gingrich warned that Egypt "could go the way of Iran."
Now, there is some incisive analysis.
His logic is, to say the least, interesting; it would be alarming if it weren't so pathetic: "We've shown you tonight that Hamas, Code Pink"—the feminist anti-war group—"and the Muslim Brotherhood are all linked together." With the future bleak, Beck called on his viewers to pray for "our way of life" and for Israel.
And he has more to say.
"This is Saul Alinsky. This is STORM from Van Jones," he warned on Monday, continuing, "The former Soviet Union, everybody, radical Islam, every—this is the story of everyone who has ever plotted to or wanted to fundamentally change or destroy the Western way of life. This isn't about Egypt. Everything is up on the table." It would all end, he warned, with the restoration of a "Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe," along with an expanded China and Russian control of the entire Soviet Union "plus maybe the Netherlands."
And he ain't alone: On Sean Hannity's radio show, Newt Gingrich warned that Egypt "could go the way of Iran."
Now, there is some incisive analysis.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
The Hezbollah project
Joe Klein reviews a book about Hizbullah by journalist Thannasis Cambanis.
Created in the early 1980s, Hezbollah was a joint venture of Israel and Iran. Israel inadvertently provided the motivation with its brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon and attempt to establish a pro-Israeli puppet government there — undoubtedly, the worst foreign policy decision the Jewish state ever made. Iran, intoxicated by the euphoria of its 1979 revolution, provided the money, military training and equipment to its fellow Shiites in south Lebanon who, up till then, had been a disdained underclass in Lebanon’s polyglot ethnic mash-up. Israel continued to provide the motivation, by occupying a sliver of southern Lebanon until 2000, and Iran — using its Syrian ally as a go-between — continued to provide money and arms. But along the way, an extraordinary thing happened: Hezbollah developed a successful formula for governing the Shiite districts in southern Lebanon.
Klein is a shrewd observer of US politics, and has written numerous books, including the infamous Primary Colors.
Nasrallah is an extraordinarily shrewd leader. He lives modestly and has made sacrifices for the cause; he lost his oldest son in the war. He can be funny and self-deprecating in public. He has an “almost erotic” appeal for his followers, many of whom are afflicted by an eschatological delusion (the return of the Mahdi) that is remarkably similar to the Christian Rapture myth. Nasrallah’s rhetoric is fierce and his anti-Semitism flagrant, but, Cambanis writes, he has none of the pomposity that characterizes the family dynasties in the rest of the region. He makes smart decisions — refusing to take vengeance on those who collaborated with the Israelis during their occupation; allowing a looser, more permissive form of Islam to Lebanon’s Mediterranean sunbathers and beer-drinkers than his Iranian sponsors permit. And, most important of all, he is an ingenious marketer, especially in his ability to redefine success: victory is survival.
The ability to define vistory over Israel in any form is a major coup.
He also fails to put Lebanese Hezbollah in the context of Iran’s larger terrorist network — which includes Saudi Hezbollah and a surprisingly active Latin American wing. Who runs those? How does Hezbollah fit into Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force structure?
Hezbollah, sadly, may prove over time to be the strongest indigenous response to the colonial hubris visited upon the Middle East by Western powers since the end of World War I.
Created in the early 1980s, Hezbollah was a joint venture of Israel and Iran. Israel inadvertently provided the motivation with its brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon and attempt to establish a pro-Israeli puppet government there — undoubtedly, the worst foreign policy decision the Jewish state ever made. Iran, intoxicated by the euphoria of its 1979 revolution, provided the money, military training and equipment to its fellow Shiites in south Lebanon who, up till then, had been a disdained underclass in Lebanon’s polyglot ethnic mash-up. Israel continued to provide the motivation, by occupying a sliver of southern Lebanon until 2000, and Iran — using its Syrian ally as a go-between — continued to provide money and arms. But along the way, an extraordinary thing happened: Hezbollah developed a successful formula for governing the Shiite districts in southern Lebanon.
Klein is a shrewd observer of US politics, and has written numerous books, including the infamous Primary Colors.
Nasrallah is an extraordinarily shrewd leader. He lives modestly and has made sacrifices for the cause; he lost his oldest son in the war. He can be funny and self-deprecating in public. He has an “almost erotic” appeal for his followers, many of whom are afflicted by an eschatological delusion (the return of the Mahdi) that is remarkably similar to the Christian Rapture myth. Nasrallah’s rhetoric is fierce and his anti-Semitism flagrant, but, Cambanis writes, he has none of the pomposity that characterizes the family dynasties in the rest of the region. He makes smart decisions — refusing to take vengeance on those who collaborated with the Israelis during their occupation; allowing a looser, more permissive form of Islam to Lebanon’s Mediterranean sunbathers and beer-drinkers than his Iranian sponsors permit. And, most important of all, he is an ingenious marketer, especially in his ability to redefine success: victory is survival.
The ability to define vistory over Israel in any form is a major coup.
He also fails to put Lebanese Hezbollah in the context of Iran’s larger terrorist network — which includes Saudi Hezbollah and a surprisingly active Latin American wing. Who runs those? How does Hezbollah fit into Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force structure?
Hezbollah, sadly, may prove over time to be the strongest indigenous response to the colonial hubris visited upon the Middle East by Western powers since the end of World War I.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
To the end of the land
Colm Toibin gives David Grossman's new book a glowing review. To say this is an antiwar book is to put it too mildly, and in any case such labels do an injustice to its great sweep, the levels of its sympathy. There is a plenitude of felt life in the book. There is a novelist’s notice taken of the sheer complexity not only of the characters but of the legacy of pain and conflict written into the gnarled and beautiful landscape through which Ora and Avram walk. And there is the story itself, unfolded with care and truth, wit and tenderness and rare understanding. This is one of those few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world.
As in other novels of love and loyalty in a time of conflict — Nadine Gordimer’s “Burger’s Daughter,” Michael Ondaatje’s “English Patient” or Shirley Hazzard’s “Great Fire” — there is a palpable urgency here about the carnal and the sexual. The portrait of Ora as a woman alive in her body is one of the triumphs of Grossman’s book.
As in other novels of love and loyalty in a time of conflict — Nadine Gordimer’s “Burger’s Daughter,” Michael Ondaatje’s “English Patient” or Shirley Hazzard’s “Great Fire” — there is a palpable urgency here about the carnal and the sexual. The portrait of Ora as a woman alive in her body is one of the triumphs of Grossman’s book.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
The lemon tree
Tolan, Sandy. (2006). The lemon tree: an Arab, a Jew, and the heart of the Middle East. New York: Bloomsbury Pub. : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers.
A patron called for this book; it has also been made into a film.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Fortune's Ambassador
By Abigail Green
Belknap/Harvard, 540 pages, $35
Moses Montefiore, a world-renowned figure in the 19th century, was virtually forgotten by the 20th and is remembered today, at times, simply by the resonance of his name. A hospital in the Bronx is named for him, another in Pittsburgh, and a Jewish quarter in Jerusalem just outside the Old City. The accomplishments of some of Montefiore's descendants—including a pugnacious Anglican bishop—may remind us the progenitor's renown, but his story certainly needs to be retold. It is a remarkable one.
Not a perfect being, perhaps a philanderer, he was materially successful, married into the Rothschild family, knighted at 51, he lived to be 101.
It is a little hard for us to imagine Montefiore's public role, since there is no equivalent today. He was roving foreign minister and emissary of a people without a state. In many places they called him "sar"—a Hebrew word for minister, a person of great influence. People attributed to him almost magical powers.
But he wasn't a magician. He did, though, accomplish many things.
That Montefiore had been received for an audience by Czar Nicholas I, not known as a philo-Semite, did matter. The czar had given orders, on the occasion of Montefiore's visit to the Russian capital, that the guard in front of his palace be constituted of Jewish soldiers, whom he praised as being as brave as the ancient Maccabeans.
Nicholas I: (Russian: Николай I Павлович, Nikolaj I Pavlovič), (6 July [O.S. 25 June] 1796 – 2 March [O.S. 18 February] 1855), was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855, known as one of the most reactionary of the Russian monarchs. On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its historical zenith spanning over 20 million square kilometers. In his capacity as the emperor he was also the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Finland.
Ms. Green writes deftly and tells Montefiore's story with a admirable thoroughness. (She is herself a professional historian.) "Moses Montefiore" is mercifully free of academic theory. It is exactly what a good biography should be—fair and illuminating without ever descending to hagiography. Still, it is clear that Montefiore was a genuinely good man. Their number in history is not substantial, and praise should be given where it is due.
A fascinating story; sounds to be a good read. The reviewer, Walter Laqueur is the author, most recently of "Best of Times, Worst of Times: Memoirs of a Political Education" (University of New England Press, 2010).
Monday, February 8, 2010
World chronicler looks inward
“Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?”
A link to a video of Mr. Judt's Oct. 19 lecture.
"The Trials of Tony Judt," The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Night," The New York Review of Books
February 8, 2010
A Chronicler of the World Now Looks Inward
By PATRICIA COHEN
In one of the short personal reminiscences that the historian Tony Judt has been writing for The New York Review of Books he mentions that he was part of the “lucky generation” born in the affluent West after World War II, free to indulge in daydreams and passions.
Mr. Judt’s world, sadly, has contracted considerably. Now 62, he learned about 16 months ago that he has a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and since then he has lost the ability to move nearly every muscle in his body, including those that help him breathe and swallow. As he unsentimentally detailed in the first of these reminiscences published last month: “I cannot scratch an itch, adjust my spectacles, remove food particles from my teeth, or anything else that — as a moment’s reflection will confirm — we all do dozens of times a day.”
In the current and forthcoming issues Mr. Judt has followed up with further autobiographical sketches — on the overboiled English food and Indian tikkas from his youth, the subtle and complex class relations among Cambridge students and their housekeepers, and his naïve revolutionary consciousness during the ’60s — that offer a window into Mr. Judt’s sensibility and the evolution of his views.
The reflections are partly a result of his constricted circumstances. Night is by far the hardest time to bear. Mr. Judt, who has two teenage children and is married to the dance critic Jennifer Homans, has a nurse to help him through the laborious process of getting ready for and into bed. From then on, he lies motionless “like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts,” he writes.
His survival technique has been to scroll through his life and imagination to divert his mind from his body. “This cockroach-like existence,” he writes, referring to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” “is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable.”
Some of these remembrances, captured by his increasingly keen memory, have been dictated to an assistant. Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, had the idea of publishing them. “I asked to see them,” he said, “and then they came one after another, two and three at a time.” Writing them is “heroic, an incomparable act of courage,” said Mr. Silvers, who has been editing Mr. Judt for 17 years. The vignettes are a link to Mr. Judt’s past as well as to the world outside of his spacious Greenwich Village apartment.
“I would say that about one-quarter of the essays so far constitute self-explanation for curious outsiders,” Mr. Judt wrote in an e-mail message. “The rest are somewhere between self-indulgence, self-interrogation and an attempt to work in a rather different literary form, blending autobiography, history and social commentary.”
His last public appearance was in October, when he delivered a lecture on social democracy before an audience of 700 at New York University, where he is a professor of European history and the director of the Remarque Institute. Wrapped in a blanket and seated in a wheelchair with a breathing device attached to his nose, Mr. Judt started off by “shooting the elephant in the house.” Some of his American friends advised that seeing him talk about A.L.S. would be uplifting, he told the audience, taking a breath after every few words, but as Mr. Judt explained, “I’m English, and we don’t do ‘uplifting.’ ”
At the moment he is turning that lecture into a small book, “Ill Fares the Land.”
Mr. Judt no longer feels up to giving interviews, but he did respond to questions by e-mail, writing that, since his illness, “my priorities are slightly reordered: the things I write about are the things that seem to me more urgent, given not just my own reduced life expectancy but a sharper appreciation of which of our contemporary dilemmas and challenges matters most.”
He added that he’s had a lot more conversations with friends about life and death: “I’m not sure I’ve learned anything new about life; but I’ve had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.”
Mr. Judt has written nine books and scores of essays. His 878-page 2005 book, “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. But he is probably most famous — or notorious, depending on your point of view — for his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A 2003 essay in The Review of Books in which he advocated a single binational state that Israelis and Arabs would share as equal citizens thrust him into the public eye and excited often vitriolic debates. His defense of others who have been attacked for criticizing Israel has only heightened his profile among its vocal defenders.
When The Chronicle of Higher Education published a long and moving profile of Mr. Judt last month, the online comments were dominated by a bitter back and forth about the one-state solution to the Mideast conflict.
“I feel that a lot of the reading of the work has been imprecise and unfair,” ignoring the differences between short-term objectives and long-term solutions, Mr. Silvers said.
Mr. Judt was a committed left-wing Zionist as a teenager. He spent summers in Israel on a kibbutz and was active in the Jewish youth movement. But he later soured on the Zionists’ utopian vision. As he recounts of the time he spent with young soldiers, “the insouciance with which they anticipated their future occupation and domination of Arab lands terrified me even then.”
Though still a leftist, he said that his brush with Labour Zionism turned him into a lifelong skeptic of the identity politics and left-wing -isms that seduced his contemporaries. Zealous and impractical idealism draws his rancor as much as expedient politics.
He nonetheless engages in a bit of both in the book he’s writing on social democracy. “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” he asked in his October talk. From his perspective, the problem is that the United States and the West in general have become so obsessed with efficiency and productivity that they have forgotten the importance of other moral considerations, like justice, fairness and individuals’ well-being.
At the same time he recognizes that the far better world one might imagine can lead to the terrifying disasters of the past century. In this age of insecurity, he argued in his talk, a “social democracy of fear” is all one can aim for. “Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.”
It is an observation that can serve not only as Mr. Judt’s prescription for America, but as a daily watchword for himself.
A link to a video of Mr. Judt's Oct. 19 lecture.
"The Trials of Tony Judt," The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Night," The New York Review of Books
February 8, 2010
A Chronicler of the World Now Looks Inward
By PATRICIA COHEN
In one of the short personal reminiscences that the historian Tony Judt has been writing for The New York Review of Books he mentions that he was part of the “lucky generation” born in the affluent West after World War II, free to indulge in daydreams and passions.
In the current and forthcoming issues Mr. Judt has followed up with further autobiographical sketches — on the overboiled English food and Indian tikkas from his youth, the subtle and complex class relations among Cambridge students and their housekeepers, and his naïve revolutionary consciousness during the ’60s — that offer a window into Mr. Judt’s sensibility and the evolution of his views.
The reflections are partly a result of his constricted circumstances. Night is by far the hardest time to bear. Mr. Judt, who has two teenage children and is married to the dance critic Jennifer Homans, has a nurse to help him through the laborious process of getting ready for and into bed. From then on, he lies motionless “like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts,” he writes.
His survival technique has been to scroll through his life and imagination to divert his mind from his body. “This cockroach-like existence,” he writes, referring to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” “is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable.”
Some of these remembrances, captured by his increasingly keen memory, have been dictated to an assistant. Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, had the idea of publishing them. “I asked to see them,” he said, “and then they came one after another, two and three at a time.” Writing them is “heroic, an incomparable act of courage,” said Mr. Silvers, who has been editing Mr. Judt for 17 years. The vignettes are a link to Mr. Judt’s past as well as to the world outside of his spacious Greenwich Village apartment.
“I would say that about one-quarter of the essays so far constitute self-explanation for curious outsiders,” Mr. Judt wrote in an e-mail message. “The rest are somewhere between self-indulgence, self-interrogation and an attempt to work in a rather different literary form, blending autobiography, history and social commentary.”
His last public appearance was in October, when he delivered a lecture on social democracy before an audience of 700 at New York University, where he is a professor of European history and the director of the Remarque Institute. Wrapped in a blanket and seated in a wheelchair with a breathing device attached to his nose, Mr. Judt started off by “shooting the elephant in the house.” Some of his American friends advised that seeing him talk about A.L.S. would be uplifting, he told the audience, taking a breath after every few words, but as Mr. Judt explained, “I’m English, and we don’t do ‘uplifting.’ ”
At the moment he is turning that lecture into a small book, “Ill Fares the Land.”
Mr. Judt no longer feels up to giving interviews, but he did respond to questions by e-mail, writing that, since his illness, “my priorities are slightly reordered: the things I write about are the things that seem to me more urgent, given not just my own reduced life expectancy but a sharper appreciation of which of our contemporary dilemmas and challenges matters most.”
He added that he’s had a lot more conversations with friends about life and death: “I’m not sure I’ve learned anything new about life; but I’ve had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.”
Mr. Judt has written nine books and scores of essays. His 878-page 2005 book, “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. But he is probably most famous — or notorious, depending on your point of view — for his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A 2003 essay in The Review of Books in which he advocated a single binational state that Israelis and Arabs would share as equal citizens thrust him into the public eye and excited often vitriolic debates. His defense of others who have been attacked for criticizing Israel has only heightened his profile among its vocal defenders.
When The Chronicle of Higher Education published a long and moving profile of Mr. Judt last month, the online comments were dominated by a bitter back and forth about the one-state solution to the Mideast conflict.
“I feel that a lot of the reading of the work has been imprecise and unfair,” ignoring the differences between short-term objectives and long-term solutions, Mr. Silvers said.
Mr. Judt was a committed left-wing Zionist as a teenager. He spent summers in Israel on a kibbutz and was active in the Jewish youth movement. But he later soured on the Zionists’ utopian vision. As he recounts of the time he spent with young soldiers, “the insouciance with which they anticipated their future occupation and domination of Arab lands terrified me even then.”
Though still a leftist, he said that his brush with Labour Zionism turned him into a lifelong skeptic of the identity politics and left-wing -isms that seduced his contemporaries. Zealous and impractical idealism draws his rancor as much as expedient politics.
He nonetheless engages in a bit of both in the book he’s writing on social democracy. “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” he asked in his October talk. From his perspective, the problem is that the United States and the West in general have become so obsessed with efficiency and productivity that they have forgotten the importance of other moral considerations, like justice, fairness and individuals’ well-being.
At the same time he recognizes that the far better world one might imagine can lead to the terrifying disasters of the past century. In this age of insecurity, he argued in his talk, a “social democracy of fear” is all one can aim for. “Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.”
It is an observation that can serve not only as Mr. Judt’s prescription for America, but as a daily watchword for himself.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Defiance
Based on the real-life Bielski brothers. A Hollywood version of a real life group of Jews who did not submit to Nazi oppression, but fought back. Of course there has been criticism of it, yet it, for me, was very moving.
Daniel Craig and Leiv Schreiber do magnificent work.
Allan Corduner plays Shamon Haretz, the old school teacher of the brothers. He played Monty Woolley in DeLovely.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Start-up nation
Senor, Dan.(2009). Start-up nation: the story of Israel's economic miracle. New York : Twelve, 2009.956.9405 S
Saw ad in today's Journal. HWPL, among other libraries, owns it.
From a Kirkus review, this phrase caught my eye: A pair of savvy policy wonks investigate how Israel has generated some notable economic wonders.In the face of the pervasive, virulent hostility of surrounding regimes, the young nation of Israel produces, per capita, more scientific papers than any other country. Amid frequent acts of terrorism, the Jewish state leads the world in percentage of GDP invested in research and development.
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