My friend Garrett Eisler informs me that film director Mike Leigh's new play, Two Thousand Years, which has sold out in London, has come to off-Broadway, and is all about stuff I talk about on this blog: Jewish identity around issues of assimilation and Israel... From Eisler's review in Time Out:
Like Leigh himself, the middle-aged parents hail from a Socialist Zionist background and retain their utopian leftist passion, but have grown disillusioned with Israel. Their cosmopolitan daughter (Natasha Lyonne) makes her parents proud as an international human-rights activist, but their son horrifies them when he turns to Orthodox Judaism for answers. The work crackles with Leigh’s signature humor (a characteristically Jewish sense of tragicomedy, he feels), but underneath it seems to lie, in the laudatory words of Guardian critic Michael Billington, an exploration of “the loss of faith” in “a world in which people have increasingly lost their beliefs in politics, religion and social progress.”
Further evidence that European attitudes towards Israel are invading our shores. Hallelujah!
Who is the hero?
How is the orthodox person portrayed?
I've known a number of formerly radical friends that have turned to orthodoxy.
There is a commitment in it, something known, and not trivial, even as many don't have an angle to understand what orthodox are pursuing.
For me, the most important insight was the first time I held the Torah in the synagogue.
The implied question to me was, "Will you agree to carry the obligation of firm commitment to being a Jew in the full and positive sense of the term, a participant?"
The thing that surprised me was that rather than heady and theoretical, the Torah itself was physical, bodily, a more complete and definitive commitment than my prior moralizing.
Soros bets on US economic collapse — the same Soros who almost bankrupted the UK. Bring this to Broadway!
link to itszone.co.uk
I saw this play. Unfortunately it wasn't all that interesting, some of it was just not credible, and the second act was not particularly Jewish at all (ie. it could represent any family, not just a Jewish one).
*SPOILER (SORT OF) BELOW*
The second act was almost unbearable: it's given over almost entirely to family feuding when a neurotic relative returns. A very boring second half, with almost no relation to the first half, or to any Jewish issues.
I'd wait for it to come out on video!
"The Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Constitution of the USA–light as air, nothing really–let someone else go die for it, for mere paper…"
Orthodox American