ADAM KAMIEN

George Clooney stars in The Men who Stare at Goats.

GEORGE Clooney’s latest film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is based on the non-fiction novel of the same name by influential Jewish Gonzo journalist-cum-author John Ronson.

Ronson spent years researching the US military’s attempts to harness paranormal and psychic powers for use in battle and inspired a documentary series.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is a screwball comedy played out by an all-star cast including Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor.

Small-town newspaper reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) goes to Iraq to prove a point to his wife, who left him for his editor. Waiting for clearance in Kuwait, he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a retired army man who claims he was part of the First Earth Battalion, an outfit which experimented with psychic and paranormal warfare.

Through flashback and voiceover, it is revealed that the leader of the group is Vietnam veteran Bill Django, a hippy looking for meaning in a vision that came to him after he was shot on a tour of duty.
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Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds.

ADAM KAMIEN

JEWISH films and filmmakers were largely overlooked at the 2010 Academy Awards, with frontrunners Inglourious Basterds and Up In The Air taking home just one Oscar from 14 nominations between them.

The night was billed as a shootout between James Cameron’s Avatar – the highest grossing film of all time – and Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War action film Hurt Locker. But Cameron’s epic was taken to the cleaners by his ex-wife as Bigelow became the first female director to win the Best Director award.

It was one of six wins for the hit movie, including Best Film and Best Original Screenplay. Avatar managed just three awards, with no wins in any of the major categories.

Austrian actor Christoph Waltz took out the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the “Jew Hunter” Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, but it was the only win from eight nominations for the film about a group of Jewish soldiers who brutalise Nazis in occupied France.

It was a red-letter night for Jewish producer Fisher Stevens, whose film The Cove won in the Best Documentary Feature category. The film exposed the wholesale slaughter of dolphins at a Japanese cove in Taiji.
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The Kinsey Sicks. Photo: AJN file

LEXI LANDSMAN

BEFORE Irwin Keller stands on the bimah as spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Shalom, he prays, but not in the conventional sense.

“I just always pray before services that I’m not really exhausted and confused,” he jokes from California, referring to not mixing up his tallit with his sequinned frock.

It’s not what one would ordinarily think of before entering a synagogue, but there is nothing that ordinary about Keller.

By day, he leads the congregation, but by night he is a professional drag queen and one of the founding members of the Jewish-flavoured Dragapella Beauty Shop Quartet – Kinsey Sicks.

While his two vocations might seem like an unusual mix, Keller says it was his experience as a drag queen that led him to become a queen of the Sabbath.
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Josh Piterman (centre) and cast members from the new Australian production of West Side Story. Photo: Ingrid Shakenovsky

CHANTAL ABITBOL

PERFORMER Josh Piterman may be a good Jewish boy from the right side of the tracks, but he’ll soon be playing it tough when he stars as Tony in the upcoming Australian revival of the Leonard Bernstein classic, West Side Story.

On Monday, the rising star showed a glimpse of the towering vocals that landed him the part, when the musical’s director announced the young cast at Star City’s Lyric Theatre in Sydney.

It’s a quite a coup for the Melbourne-bred singer who, at the age of 24, will be headlining his first major musical production.

“It’s been my dream role since I can remember,” he told The AJN. “It’s musical theatre’s Romeo. I feel like the luckiest guy ever.”

The musical – set in New York in the 1950s and based on Shakespeare’s tale of two star-crossed lovers – will kick off a six-week run in Sydney on July 1. The production will then make its way to Melbourne, opening at the Regent Theatre from August 20, before embarking on a tour of the rest of the country.
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Israeli singer Ivri Lider. Photo: AJN file

SAMANTHA MIMERAN

IVRI Lider did not dream of becoming a singer when he was growing up. By all accounts he was very shy, and planned to stay in the background writing music and scoring movies.

But for the artist who last year was named one of 10 people with the most significant impact on the Israeli music industry by Timeout Tel Aviv – Israel’s premier entertainment magazine – it seems singing found him.

“Actually, it’s a funny story,” he told The AJN from Israel, ahead of his first tour of Australia. “I wanted to go to UCLA to study film scoring but my parents didn’t have enough money… so I stayed [in Israel and] started working. At the same time I sent some demos to record companies. They called back and said let’s make a record, so we did and the record did really well. And then I became a singer,” he adds matter-of-factly.

The 36-year-old singer/songwriter made his debut Australian tour last week with concerts in Melbourne and Sydney.
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Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds

ADAM KAMIEN

THE Academy Awards will be announced in Hollywood on Sunday, March 7 (Monday afternoon Australian time) and as always there are plenty of movies with Jewish filmmakers or themes in the running.

It’s been a long time coming for legendary actress Lauren Bacall, who has received an honourary Oscar after close to 70 years in show business. The former wife of Humphrey Bogart and star of such iconic films as How to Marry a Millionaire, The Big Sleep and The Mirror Has Two Faces, Bacall is still acting at 85.

Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy about a group of Jewish soldiers that brutalise Nazis in occupied Paris, Inglourious Basterds, has eight nominations including best film, while Jewish director Jason Reitman’s Up In the Air received six nominations.

Christoph Waltz’s role as the nefarious Jew Hunter in Inglorious Basterds has earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, while Jewish actress Maggie Gyllenhaal is up for Best Supporting Actress for her role opposite Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart.
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Israeli gay icon Ivri Lider.

AMANTHA MIMERAN

SINGER Ivri Lider is touring around Australia this week under the auspices of the Embassy of Israel in Canberra.

In looking for a way to promote Israel’s open and inclusive society, the embassy decided to bring out the prominent gay performer for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

Lider will lead a discussion entitled “Queer Tel Aviv” as part of Queer Thinking, the opening event at Mardi Gras. He will talk about the devastating shooting at a gay youth event in Tel Aviv in August last year.

Since revealing his sexuality publicly in an interview with Ma’ariv newspaper in 2002, he has become a gay icon of Israel.

“I wanted to be true to my fans, I wanted to be able to write whatever I wanted to write about without barriers. So I decided to come out and … it was actually great,” he told The AJN ahead of his trip to Australia.
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Writer and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

ASKED how a journalist, versed in the here and now by the modern-day vogue of his profession, found himself wandering the byways of 18th and 19th century European-Jewish history, American radio broadcaster Michael Goldfarb speaks about “the story” – and the chase for it.

Eighteen months of research, that hallmark of great journalism, “was a big pleasure” for Goldfarb. “As a journalist, I felt as if I had a story nobody else had,” he says from London.

It was his enthusiasm for digging and discovering, which he sees as a trait common to both reporters and historians, that drove him to research and write Emancipation, the story of how liberating Europe’s Jews from almost 500 years cocooned in the ghettos led to revolution and renaissance.

Goldfarb’s 408-page tome, published by Scribe, traces the epic Jewish journey from the first stirrings of civic reformation in the Age of Reason, through the French Revolution, Napoleonic emancipation, integration and the Enlightenment, to the Holocaust.

It has brought the former London correspondent for US radio network, National Public Radio (NPR), to Australia to give lectures and to take part in two key writers festivals.
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A scene from The Merchants of Bollywood, which is currently touring Australia.

ZEDDY LAWRENCE

WHILE we’re all familiar with the role played by Jewish movie moguls in building the American film industry -– with names such as Goldwyn and Meyer synonymous with the early days of western cinema –- less well chronicled is the contribution of Indian Jewry to Tinseltown’s equally successful Asian counterpart. And not just behind the camera, but on the big screen itself.

Stateside, of course, during Hollywood’s golden age, nice Jewish girls such as Theodosia Goodman and Betty Joan Perske were recreating themselves as all-American celluloid stars Theda Bara and Lauren Bacall.

As for the boys, Issur Demsky and Emanuel Goldenberg were reborn as Kirk Douglas and Edward G Robinson. However, it wasn’t just in Los Angeles that obviously Jewish names were being set aside by the acting elite.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the exotically named Sulochana, translated as “the beautiful-eyed one”, raked in the rupees as India’s highest paid movie actress.
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Erwin Lamm. Photo: AJN file

LEXI LANDSMAN

A BLACK and white image shows a group of men, well dressed in suits, brandishing big smiles as they huddle together in a small hall.

Dated 1963, the photograph captures the first reunion of the wartime internees who arrived in Sydney on the military transport ship Dunera.

It’s a far cry from their entry to Australia two decades earlier, when more than 2500 German, Austrian and Italian internees, who were to become known as the Dunera Boys, arrived from Britain.

The photograph is among the items that are being exhibited at the National Library in Canberra in a special collection-in-focus exhibition marking the 70th anniversary year of the arrival of the Dunera Boys and their contribution to Australia.

Many of the internees were of Jewish heritage and had escaped to Britain from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, only to be interned as enemy aliens in camps in Britain in mid-1940, and then transferred to camps in rural Australia.
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