Staying Real in Israel
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The Marty Roberts Perspective…

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World's Most Influential Jew?

The Jerusalem Post has published their list of most influential Jews just in time for the Shavuot Holiday. The list IS a bit thin in places, but quite interesting, nevertheless.

Leaders of nations, international economic leaders, philanthropists, artists, jurists, you name it, the Jews are leading the world at it.

International conspiracy? I don’t think so. Really smart Jewish People? You betcha…

You’ve come a long way, Jew-Boy (and -Girl) Marty Roberts dissects the list…

(We apologize for the technical problems with audio quality in today’s podcast)

Reprinted from Jpost.com Steve Linde…Click to read article

Israel is becoming a popular stop on the concert tour of most major pop-music acts.

If you’re going to be in Israel this July, you might want to catch Seals’ show.

If you STILL need an excuse to get on that plane to Israel…

Seal...On His Way to Israel?

Seal to perform in Israel

Soul and R&B singer announces concert in Raanana on July 21st

Reprinted from YnetNews.com Or Barnea

British singer Seal will arrive in Israel and hold a single concert in the Raanana Amphitheatre on July 21st, his official website reported Sunday.

No confirmation has yet been received from Israeli producers.

The singer will arrive in the Jewish state after visiting Turkey as part of his July European Tour. It has not yet been reported whether he will be accompanied in Israel by his wife, German supermodel and TV presenter Heidi Klum.

Seal, 47, is best known for two chart-topping hits from the 1990s: “Crazy” and “Kiss from a Rose”. He has won multiple Grammy awards over the years for his achievements in music.

The singer has three children with Klum and has also adopted her daughter from a previous marriage.

His latest album, “Soul,” a collection of renditions of famous soul classics, was released two years ago. Last year he released a hits compilation as well as a DVD documenting one of his live shows in New York.

Will he be the next American Idol?…

And…Ricky Martin changed his mind…He WILL be appearing in Israel next month, even if only 300 people show up at his concert…Hope he doesn’t wear his “Jerusalem is Ours” Arab kaffiyeh this time…

But you’d be better off going to the “Sting” concert the next week…Matisyahu will be the opening act…Listen to Matisyahu…Then you can go home…

Also…A new rap duo called “Holocost” in, where else, France…They can’t even spell it right…Isn’t that cute…

Plus…Fatah on the death of American teen Daniel Wultz…”a gift from Allah”…The religion of peace speaks again…
All this and MORE…

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It’s official…

He IS Jewish!!!

I KNEW it!!

And he sings great, too…

Will he be the next American Idol?

Reggae, rap, rock and Chassidic music…

What a combo!

He’s opening for Sting in israel next month…

Don’t miss it…

He IS coming to Israel next month after all…

Even if only 300 people show up at his concert…

He says he doesn’t care…

And why was he photographed wearing a kaffiyeh with “Jerusalem is Ours” written on it, alongside a mosque…

Guess he is identifying with Israel and the Jews…

At least he isn’t trying to solve the Israeli-palestinian conflict…

More cheap de-legitimization of the Jewish tragedy…

What better place than Paris, France…

…and Egypt is a country that is at PEACE with Israel!!! They won’t even let a film made by an Israeli director be shown at a festival in Cairo. The film has nothing to do, whatsoever, with Israel, Jews or Judaism, but the fact that an Israeli was involved in making it is enough to ban it from Egypt. It’s about a 12-year-old boy searching for his birthday, for crying out loud!
Intellectual freedom at its best…
A true international exchange of culture…
If there is such hatred present in countries with whom Israel is at peace…can you imagine the depth of this evil in Israel’s enemies?

Cairo

Israeli film removed from Egypt festival

‘Almost Normal’ deprogrammed from film festival organized by French Cultural Center in Cairo, after Egyptian jury member protests against fact that director is Israeli

Reprinted from Ynetnews.com /

According to Ennahar Online, a short film has been deprogrammed from a film festival in Cairo after an Egyptian jury member protested against the fact that the director is Israeli.

The short film, directed by Keren Ben Rafael, is titled “Almost Normal” and tells the story of a 12-year-old boy searching for his birthday.

It was to be shown in a film festival organized by the French Cultural Center in Cairo and the National Center for Egyptian Cinema, but withdrawn after Egyptian director Atef Ahmed protested its inclusion.

Though he resigned his post as a board member of the festival “Rencontres de l’Image”, scheduled for April, the CFCC and services of the Embassy of France also decided not to reinstate him in the jury.

This Israeli film appears to be a real cliff-hanger.
don’t worry if you don’t understand Hebrew, it has English sub-titles…

A Matter of Size


A pound-for-pound pleasure

Reprinted from Bostom Globe

In “A Matter of Size,’’ four Israeli friends of a certain weight become amateur sumo wrestlers. Lightly directed by Erez Tadmor and Sharon Maymon from a script Maymon wrote with Danny Cohen-Solal, this is a sweet, enjoyable — if limited and episodic — “when life gives you lemons’’ sort of a movie. The lemon in this case is a body-mass index that would make Richard Simmons bleat. In the last decade or so, weight has become another politicized identity. So it’s a not-insignificant achievement that these guys don’t show up in the last five minutes looking like Adrien Brody.
Demoted from his job as a cook because of his size, Herzl (Itzik Cohen) starts dishwashing at a Japanese restaurant in Ramla whose grizzled owner (Togo Igawa) used to coach sumo. Obviously, the old man wants nothing to do with coaching a bunch of slumping Israelis. Herzl still lives with his nagging mother (Levana Finkelstein). Macho Aharon (Dvir Benedek) treats his wife like — well, he doesn’t treat her at all. Sami (Shmulik Cohen) works for the local news station. Gidi (Alon Dahan) is a closet case who finds the one hot man in Ramla who loves bears (Gidi also discovers what a bear is).

Things with these folks proceed predictably enough. Herzl and Aharon have a real chip on their shoulder about their weight (Aharon learns that people don’t enjoy him because he can be a jerk, not because he’s fat). We’re meant to like these men, and we do, more or less, but they’ve been simplified for easy digestion.

Surprisingly, the most complicated character is Herzl’s new girlfriend, Zehava (Irit Kaplan). She’s as big as he is, but she’s beautiful. She might even know it, but her self-image is fitful. Her relationship with Herzl is prom ising. But she knows that he’s a desperate, mediocre boyfriend, and that his mother disapproves of her. So to the dismay of the shrew who runs Zehava’s diet club, she gradually starts eating to cope, and the sadness in Kaplan’s face breaks your heart. Who hasn’t been there, hunched over a plate of something he or she will regret in 20 minutes?

By the movie’s standards, things start looking up for her. I just didn’t feel that great about her choices. She gets her self-esteem back. But will it last? Does she know she has other options? This is the one character whose feelings mattered to me. Forget what Herzl’s mother thinks about Zehava. She can do better.
In Hebrew, with subtitles

It must be those long, long winter nights in the frigid country of Denmark…
How else can you explain mom dressing her infant up as Hitler, swastika and all? Apparently a transvestite Nazi, since the baby is a girl. And, even weirder, the woman obviously has some Jewish roots. She mentions a Jewish aunt, however THAT connection works out, and the Danes themselves, weren’t they crushed by the Nazis? So where’s the art? Or is it humor?
Oh, well…I never could quite appreciate such “modern art” projects, anyway…

Mother dressed her baby as Hitler, other dictators for exhibit


Bored and confined to a wheelchair for months, Danish-Norwegian artist Nina Maria Kleivan saw inspiration in her newborn child and began to sew.

Reprinted from National Post Kathryn Blaze

Soon enough, her four-month-old daughter, Faustina, became both muse and model, adorned in miniature costumes replicating nine infamous men including Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler.

Crafting the latter costume, Ms. Kleivan, 50, said from her home in Denmark, was the most emotionally trying, “It was very difficult for me to sew the swastika on her little sleeve. I could never have done this to someone else’s child.”

Ms. Kleivan’s exhibit, Potency, also featured photos of her daughter dressed as Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic. In the 10th and final photo of the series, Faustina — depicted as a boy throughout — was naked, revealing her gender and, according to the artist, her innate innocence.

“We are all born as a blank slate, who knows who we will become,” Ms. Kleivan said. “I wanted people to think about where tremendous evil comes from.”

The art exhibit is so controversial and so startling that, nine years since it debuted in Sweden and long after Ms. Kleivan sold the series to a private collector for approximately US$11,000, Potency is again garnering headlines.

The Danish newspaper Politiken recently published the photos alongside a review about Ms. Kleivan’s new book, Enigma. It was not long before the images were again circulating the globe, and even became a lead story on the website of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper yesterday.

“I’m a bit nervous about how people will react now that it’s back out there again,” Ms. Kleivan said. “I know how angry my Jewish aunt was when she saw the exhibit a decade ago.”

For her part, the artist said she long harboured hatred toward Germany, and even became “a little obsessed with the war.” Her father was part of the Norwegian resistance movement, and was held captive in a German prison camp for years.

“As a little girl, I used to carry around a note with the name of the prison guard, and I swore I would someday kill him,” Ms. Kleivan said. “I had such great hatred toward the Nazis for what they had done. I felt like I had a right to work with this subject.”

Ralph Erber, professor of psychology at Chicago’s DePaul University and co-editor of the book Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust, said it is no wonder people have again been outraged: The image of a baby dressed as Hitler is wildly conflicting and therefore provocative, he said.

“The visual of Hitler — even just his moustache — instantly evokes an emotional reaction, one that most people would describe as repulsion,” Mr. Erber said.

“It is extremely difficult for most to conceive that Hitler was ever an innocent baby. People have limits on their ability to stomach something like this.”

However, Ms. Kleivan said she was “surprised” when, in 2001, staff at the Kulturhuset, a Stockholm cultural centre, threatened to strike if the image of Faustina as Hitler graced the gallery walls. And, after Potency travelled to Berlin, Germany and Italy, she was equally surprised by the slew of “angry letters” she

received.

“I was a bit blindsided by the reaction — I expected people to laugh and then reflect on the concept of evil,” she said.

“People could not believe that I could dress my own daughter as these characters. Yes, it was strange to see her dressed as Hitler, but I thought of her as a doll.”

Bernie Farber, head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said he recalls discussing the exhibit when it first gained notoriety 10 years ago, and said the issue has again become a talker in Jewish community.

“While I understand the artist’s intentions, I don’t agree with the way she went about it,” he said.

“I have a visceral reaction to using children to try to explain an adult concept like evil. Surely, there’s a better way to explore evil than to throw a swastika on a baby.”