The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center kicked off the 21st annual New York Jewish Film Festival at the Film Society's Walter Reade Theater and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center on January 11, 2012, with screenings that run through January 26. The festival...

Days after the Casey Anthony verdict, the drumbeat against America's jury system has swelled to an angry Greek chorus: "What were the jurors thinking--the mother partied for a whole month when her daughter was presumably missing?"

Many of these same confounded citizens also threw up their hands with the...

With the assassination of an unarmed Osama bin Laden and questions arising whether he should have been abducted and brought to the United States to stand trial, the distinctions between justice and revenge once more confuse and confound the law abiding.

Fifty years ago Israel's spy network kidnapped Hitler's most...

Sidney Lumet died this past weekend. By now, with news cycles spinning like centrifuges, Lumet's death will soon be old news. That would be a shame. This is one of those losses that should linger for a little while longer, and surely not be forgotten.

This is actually my second...

Passover arrived early in Egypt. The modern day Egyptians didn't wait for a Prince of Egypt to liberate them from President Hosni Mubarak. Who needs Moses when there's social media? Without plagues or the parting of the Red Sea, Mubarak finally just let his people go.

Actually, weeks after...

Oscar nominations were announced this week and the biggest surprise was the Academy's lavish support for True Grit, the Coen brothers' remake of the 1970 film, which itself was an adaptation from a Charles Portis novel.

True Grit received ten nominations, including one for best picture, best director, and...

More treasured than baseball and apple pie, more admired than George Washington and even the winners of American Idol, America's greatest love may be the First Amendment. Among all the amendments to the Constitution, it is by far the best known. And despite its relative brevity, it seems to embody...

The AVP NIVEA Tour (pro beach volleyball) comes to Belmar, New Jersey this weekend with qualifying matches beginning on Friday leading up to Sunday's men's and women's final.

Professional volleyball is one of the most fan-friendly and entertaining sports in America. There's the beach and the bodies...

One thing is undeniably true about the law: It's better to be a spectator than a participant. There are few winners in courtrooms, even among those who win. The losers, of course, are forever lost. At least those who merely watch end up being entertained if not forewarned about the...

President Obama is the first American president to host a Passover Seder in the White House--second year in a row, third overall (the first was held in a hotel during the presidential campaign).

If symbolism was all that mattered to American Jews, then the president's annual observance of the...

Broadway ironies abound at the Duke on 42nd Street, where Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, presented by the Theatre for a New Audience, is playing until March 14.

One of its stars, Elisabeth Waterston, is truly splendid in the role of Isabella, who, like Portia in The Merchant of Venice, makes...

Never before has so much depended on the success of a 10" LED backlit screen. With the economy in shambles and the media a mess, newspapers, magazines and book publishers are suddenly forced to look to Steven Jobs to save their jobs. No longer just Silicon Valley's best-known visionary, Jobs...

On Christmas Eve, a New Jersey resident with a Jewish surname, David Goldman, was finally reunited with his 9-year-old son, Sean, who had been living in Brazil for the past five years, the object of a grotesque custody battle that would have made even Franz Kafka cringe.

In 2004, Sean,...

For a playwright very much identified with urban life, David Mamet never hesitates in sending sacred cows out to pasture. His hustlers and con men, ruthless salesmen and sleazy filmmakers -- and all those for whom sexual perversity and a potty mouth are signs of true cultural refinement -- have...

Tevye the Milkman, the working stiff Jewish Everyman from the shtetls of Russia, may not be one of Broadway's sexiest characters, but he certainly has been one of its most enduring. And one actor more than any other has embodied the role of the tradition-bound, world-weary, rich-man obsessed song and...

To the great regret of humanitarians--not to mention actual victims--genocide is both a word for mass murder and an instant conversation killer. The sheer grotesqueness of gas chambers, killing fields, death marches, ditches scattered with bones and blood, and hacked and bulleted bodies, is so grave, its gravity so unspeakably...

For a city that votes solidly for the Democratic Party (except, of course, when it comes to mayor), New York City's connection to Abraham Lincoln -- Republican icon and father of the GOP -- is a political and cultural curiosity. It is also the subject of Lincoln and New York,...

Let's face it: Lunatics and tyrants like Bernard Madoff and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad give clowns a bad name. We're so used to the unending variety of jokers who cause us harm (and who, without makeup or masks, are really scary, too) that it's easy to forget that when the circus comes...

Steely Dan wraps up its series of New York concerts (the Rent Party '09 Tour) at the Beacon Theatre this week proving that Reelin' In The Years takes a lot longer with the passage of time.

These sparkling performances served as a time capsule for those who came of...

Life in New York City usually doesn't call to mind a day at the beach. Yet, Manhattan is an island bordered by rivers with easy passageways to the Atlantic Ocean. Queens is an extension of the beaches of Long Island. And for four consecutive summers the AVP Crocs Tour has...