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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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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J.D. Salinger, author of “Catcher in the Rye,” recluse and grandson of a rabbi, has died at 91.
Salinger, whose signature novel became an American classic and remains required reading at high schools and colleges across the United States, reportedly died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in New Hampshire after more than five decades of reclusiveness.
Despite his disappearance from the public stage — some would say because of it — Salinger has remained an object of fascination and enigma in the world of American letters.
The author was born in New York in 1919 to an assimilated Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother of Irish descent. Salinger’s father, Sol, was the son of a rabbi. He worked as an importer of ham and tried to get his son into the business, according to The New York Times, but the younger Salinger instead became a writer.
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Melbourne-born Israeli Jonnie Schnytzer (left) with the director of the Israel office of StandWithUs, Michael Dickson, in Harbin, China.
PETER KOHN
A MELBOURNE-BORN Israeli student has led a delegation to China for the launch of a photo exhibition highlighting aspects of Israeli society, culture and landscapes.
The exhibition, titled Inside Israel, featured photos by 50 of Israel’s leading photographers.
It was well-received at the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, an annual event in Harbin, a city in central China with a strong Jewish history.
Jonnie Schnytzer, grandson of Monash University lecturer Professor Rufus Solomon Davis, made aliyah with his parents in 1985, “the year of the Bombers’ premiership”, he said.
He lives in Ra’anana, specialises in diplomacy and advocacy, and studied a fellowship with StandWithUs -– a Los Angeles-based not-for-profit organisation that fosters mutual understanding between Israel and other countries. He is now the Israeli regional coordinator for the organisation.
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Nita Jawary’s acrylic-on-canvas work, Magic Forest.
DALIA SABLE
DESTRUCTION can be the seed for the new and beautiful. This is the credo behind Melbourne artist Nita Jawary’s new exhibition, Chequered Breezes, which opened this week.
Drawing on the poem The Seed by poet Vasko Popa for inspiration, the exhibition at Wine Justice in Melbourne features a collection of mixed-media landscapes and florals.
“It is to do with what grows out of a seed and how something beautiful can come from something ugly,” Jawary explains, adding that “you can look at [the paintings] and look at them and keep seeing new things”.
Like her art, Jawary’s life has ushered in new things.
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Didier Rache’s image Cityscape is on display at the Jewish Museum of Australia.
DALIA SABLE
WHEN Emmanuel Santos entered Jewish Care’s Creative Arts Studio space to teach a photography workshop, he opened participants’ eyes and lenses to their creativity within.
As the acclaimed photographer led the eight budding snappers on excursions with different photographic themes each week, the participants in turn developed their skills.
The result: the Sandra Bardas Memorial Exhibition, which opened last week at the Jewish Museum of Australia.
Titled Point of View, the installation features photos from participants in Jewish Care’s Creative Arts Studio, all of whom have mental health issues.
Exhibitor Sylvia Zuzowska said: “I always wanted to do photography. As a young girl in Poland I did a photography course. When Jewish Care’s Creative Arts Studio offered the Point of View workshop with Emmanuel Santos, I jumped from happiness that I would be able to do it again in my new country, Australia. I have learnt to express myself through the camera lens.”
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Israeli-born artist Arie Levit.
LEXI LANDSMAN
ARTIST Arie Levit is full of chutzpah. “No one can paint like me,” he says without wavering. “I have more skill than any painter who holds a brush. There is nothing like [my art].”
Calling himself “the greatest artist in the world”, the Israeli-born artist speaks in proverbs and frequently quotes his own poetry, regaling viewers with stories of his art as he leads them through his exhibition at the Double Bay Art Gallery.
“I encourage them to feel my art,” he says, tapping a work in his latest exhibition to demonstrate its durability. “If I let people touch my art, my art will touch them. Seeing is believing,” he chants, “touching is understanding.”
Bounding with enthusiasm and energy, Levit uses fresco/stucco paintings made from ground marble that he mixes into a tinted paste and applies to high-quality boards as his canvases.
Instead of paintbrushes, the artist uses only a gyprocker’s trowel as his tool to create “art locked in marble”.
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Judi Schiff with some of her photos. Photo: Peter Haskin
DALIA SABLE
FOR photographer Judi Schiff, doors have a great deal of symbolism. From offering a gateway to new and great opportunities, to hiding secrets and even presenting the implications of life and death, Schiff believes doors represent both the opening and closing of borders and chapters.
It is this fascination that has taken the German-born artist around the world to photograph doors.
Perhaps her subconscious affinity to doors originates with the story of her survival, when an SS guard walked through the doorway of the train compartment on one of the last trains out of Berlin just weeks before the fateful Kristallnacht in 1938.
The guard ordered all the Jews on the train to disembark, but looking at the then one-year-old Schiff, asleep cradled in her mother’s arms, the guard told her parents to remain on the train so as not to disturb the sleeping baby.
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The Korman family performing at Auschwitz.
ADAM KAMIEN
CATHARSIS takes many forms. Just ask artist Jane Korman, who recently returned from an all-singing, all-dancing tour of Europe’s death camps with her Holocaust survivor father.
The result is Dancing Auschwitz, three video instillations and a photographic image, which are being shown at the Runt Gallery, at Monash University’s Caulfield campus until December 4.
“I wanted to create an artwork that creates a fresh interpretation of historical memory,” Korman says.
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Ceramic artist Avital Sheffer.
DALIA SABLE
CERAMICIST Avital Sheffer finds inspiration in her Mediterranean roots.
The Israeli-born artist, who immigrated to Australia in 1990, creates intricate ceramic pieces complete with text, embellishment and patterns reminiscent of Middle Eastern architecture and design.
“My work is informed by an investigation of my Middle Eastern and Jewish heritage and an engagement with the landscape, architecture, languages and wisdom of that part of the world,” Sheffer says.
“The world of antiquity, in its diversities and dichotomies, is a passion and an infinite source of inspiration.”
These hand-formed “vessels” form Sheffer’s first Melbourne solo exhibition, Origins, currently showing at Mossgreen Gallery.
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