FIFTY SEVEN SIXTY TWO
FIFTY SEVEN SIXTY TWO A JEWISH YEAR D I L E T T A N T I S M He'll Never Learn-er It's hard to find any humor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, except for that child of the '60s—unless you...
...A sudden change of heart...
...We'd have to take cabs...
...The Tunisian government initially reported that the huge conflagration was an accident, but evidence mounted quickly that the detonation was an act of terror, probably carried out by a 25- year-old Tunisian citizen...
...that's how much a different group of demonstrators had to pay the week before when they were arrested for blocking a nearby sidewalk...
...This was fbUowed by a planned mass protest in front of the State Department on the day Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Jerusalem...
...For his documentary, Katzir has interviewed such celebrated Yiddish actors as Seymour Rechtzeit, Ziebach "Fives" Felix, Shiffa Lerer (who played Woody Allen's nightmarish mother in Deconstructing Harry), and the recendy deceased Morris Adler...
...People were carrying the black, white, green, and red flag of the Palestinian Authority, as well as the Israeli flag...
...I feel so much better,' said West as he returned to the circle...
...Too late, said the police...
...is still sufficiendy engaged with setting up its embassy in Israel's capital to have security concerns about the proximity of a synagogue...
...he story continued: "After nearly an hour, the police gave the first warning to clear the street...
...I'm fascinated by the history of my ancestors...
...The Occupation is not about protecting itself from terror (in fact, it actually generates the terror...
...However, an expatriate Tunisian Jew, Dr...
...He would have been destroyed...
...But my family dates back 400 years in Europe, so I feel very connected...
...And he did die, says Larry Geiler, who did Elvis' hair for the funeral (using a mortician's mascara to cover up Elvis' white regrowth, no less), and was the last person to see the body before it was placed in the casket...
...We have a problem,' Lerner told the group...
...It's based on logic and rewards non-complicated movements...
...A publishing company accused of ripping off a Holocaust survivor was ordered to pay $32.4 million in damages by a Massachusetts court in April...
...When at first Israel responded to the spate of suicide murders by intermittent incursions into the West Bank, Lerner told the press, "There's a huge outpouring of popular energy, a huge moral upset, at what Israel is doing...
...Geiler no longer does hair but he still wants to make people beautiful—now he just concentrates on what's inside.—Gobi Wenig E R R O R Tunisian Temple Targeted In "Jews in the Land of the Lotus" (MOMENT, December 1999), I wrote about my visit to the Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Jerba, home to half of Tunisia's 2,000 Jews...
...Malina Saval Sightings • The outrage over anti-Semitism in France has hit Hollywood...
...The second warning...
...The president of the synagogue declined to receive my call, explaining through another party that no Jews would talk today because they fear that their phones are bugged...
...Each of the 20 had brought $50 to pay the fine and get out of jail as quickly as possible...
...His latest incarnation is the so-called Tikkun Community, a project of his San Franciscobased Tikkun magazine...
...They did...
...They have decided to charge us Si00 because a street was being blocked, not a sidewalk.' Lerner asked the police if demonstrators could get up and block the sidewalk instead...
...He would have been gone years before if it wasn't for that...
...According to the Post report (see picture below), nearly a hundred people showed up, hoping to get arrested...
...11, Tunisian Jews have become a target of the worldwide network of militant Muslims.— SFS R O O T S Mamaloshen Melodrama At first glance, Dan Katzir seems woefully miscast as a champion of Yiddish theater in the United States...
...In his latest effort to attract attention, Lerner's Tikkun Community took out a full-page ad in the New York Times and the Washington Post in April calling on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank during the period when there was a suicide bombing almost daily in Israel...
...He introduced Elvis to the writings of gurus and nutritionists and tried to protect the King from his own pill-popping and carcinogeningesting vices...
...Mimoun leads an effort by Israel's Tunisian Jews to build another Ghriba in Jerusalem...
...Fair enough...
...an appeal is expected...
...FIFTY SEVEN SIXTY TWO A JEWISH YEAR D I L E T T A N T I S M He'll Never Learn-er It's hard to find any humor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, except for that child of the '60s—unless you take him seriously...
...scholars have questioned the veracity of her stories— including her recollection that a family of wolves fed her while she hid in the woods...
...20 for going home...
...Suddenly, Lerner and [fellow protester Cornel] West jumped up and started walking away very fast...
...When bankruptcy forced the play into early closure and Spaisman suffered a stroke, Katzir made a decision to help raise awareness of Yiddish theater...
...A spokesperson for Alias could not explain why Garner's character chose Krav Maga over more conventional martial arts like karate or tae kwan do, but Yanilow understands why it is popular among females...
...E N D S The New Karate Kids While actresses from Linda Hamilton in Terminator to Cameron Diaz in Charlie's Angels have been kicking butt in Hollywood for a while, a new crop of roles is calling for lead heroines to execute their moves Israeli-style...
...Israel Mimoun, a physician who now lives in Jerusalem, told me he knew from the outset that terrorism had hit Jerba because the delivery track was on a road that went only one place—to the Ghriba...
...Krav Maga was developed in the 20th century so it's geared toward today's situations," says Yanilow, 43, who has been practicing for 30 years...
...Avi Pazner, spokesman for the government of Israel, said evidence is overwhelming that Al Qaeda was responsible for this attack on the Jewish community in Tunisia...
...The pages of approximately 12,000 aging books were pulled apart and scanned into a computer system that will put the library on the Internet...
...Michael Lerner is the professional Jew who is always there to criticize the Jewish community whenever we are in a clutch...
...Geiler, who lives in Los Angeles, compiled his memories into a best-selling book tided If I Can Dream—Elvis' Own Story, and recently had his life story optioned for a movie, which is generating considerable buzz around Hollywood...
...It teaches them to attack with common objects and how to escape a situation as early as possible...
...government insisted that they move...
...That seemed like a small piece of good news, implying that the U.S...
...The National Yiddish Book Center destroyed its rare collection in order to save it...
...Too far," said Lerner...
...A jury had awarded the authors more than $10 million in August, and the judge tripled damages...
...for Garner's character says she is also fluent in Hebrew...
...As police were preparing to move in, another complication developed...
...Ivy Press, accusing the company of withholding profits and failing to properly market the book...
...Lerner decided to take a vote...
...they were on their way to jail...
...and the synagogue did not use gas...
...He's an Israeli-born exparatrooper with a family tree that includes former Prime Minister Moshe Sharett as well as former President Ephraim Katzir...
...Elvis' spiritual growth enhanced his life tremendously," says Geiler, 59, who five years ago came full circle in his own spiritual journey by becoming a baal teshuva, a "born-again" Jew...
...Katzir plans to have the film ready by spring 2003...
...He's also spoken with Aaron Lansky, founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, and Tetsu Kohno, a renowned Korean-born Japanese Yiddish scholar...
...Krav Maga ("contact combat") was invented about 50 years ago to help Israeli soldiers in combat situations, according to Eyal Yanilow, head instructor for the International Krav Maga Federation...
...Lerner appealed to supporters not planning to be arrested to kick in some cash...
...While a graduate student at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Katzir was scouting for actors in New York when he came across the famous Yiddish actress Zephora Spaisman...
...By 2 p.m...
...Mimoun feels even more strongly today than he did three years ago that the Jews of Tunisia should pack up and come to Israel, carrying with them their holy rock, the focus of a pilgrimage that reaches a fever pitch on Lag B'omer, the 33 rd day of the 49-day countdown from Pesach to Shavuot...
...So some people stepped onto the street in front of the State Department...
...People can achieve relatively high levels [of competence] in a short time...
...The Elvis that Geiler knew was an extraordinary man...
...Since Yasser Arafat ratcheted up violence against Israel in the fall of 2000, even Israel's low-level interest bureau in Tunis was shut down...
...The collection of Yiddish stories, plays and poems can now be purchased online at www.yiddishbooks.com.—Andrew Wallenstein...
...Acts of terrorism," the ad proclaimed, "whether by suicide bombers or by the Israeli Army, will not bring peace...
...And each week in the hit TV show Alias, CIA agent Sydney Bristow— played by Golden Globe winner Jennifer Garner—uses Krav Maga to beat up her rivals in the covert intelligence world...
...Over the years that's when he appears on the op-ed pages of national newspapers and on radio and television...
...He saw her play Green Fields at the Folksbiene Theatre, one of the only remaining Yiddish playhouses in the United States, and was moved to tears by the production...
...empathetic, kind, generous to a fault, and highly intelligent...
...Krav Maga teaches women techniques to use their disadvantages of weight, power, and size," Yanilow says...
...But his latest cinematic endeavor, about Yiddish theater and tentatively tided Bubbemeises, is very much inspired by Katzir's Eastern European roots...
...Alas, the Washington Post was the only major newspaper to report the event—and it was reported not in the news columns, but in a section with soft features called "Style...
...The AJC compared France's current rash of vandalism and violence—440 incidents were reported in April alone—to a similar outbreak in 1942, when the Vichy government was in power...
...With the deadly blast in Jerba, the first purported Al Qaeda terrorist attack since Sept...
...Besides, the protesters weren't sure of their message...
...Lopez, who learned Krav Maga specifically for Enough and trained under one of Yanilow's students, described it in an Internet chat room to promote her movie as a "hard, intense kind of fighting, street fighting...
...In the early summer movie Enough, pop star Jennifer Lopez played an abused wife who learned Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art, to exact revenge on her husband...
...Someone suggested getting arrested at the Israeli Embassy instead of the State Department...
...Based on Defonseca's life during World War II, Misha has also drawn controversy for its content...
...After that, three official warnings to leave the street, then jail...
...Maybe Df II] raise the issue of anti-Semitism in France," he said...
...They ducked into the nearby National Academy of Sciences building and entered the second room on the right...
...Geiler became Elvis' chief stylist, confidante, and spiritual mentor...
...Mimoun reported that the U.S...
...In May, the American Jewish Congress called for a boycott of the Cannes Film Festival...
...A renowned Jewish pilgrimage site, the Ghriba is famous because a stone within it is believed to have been carried by kohanim (Jewish priests) from the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem...
...After the 1996 publication of Misha—A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, co-authors Misha Defonseca and Vera Lee filed a breachof-contract lawsuit against the now defunct Mt...
...Still, Yanilow sees the sport becoming more popular in civilian life and in Hollywood fighting choreography.— DR M U S I C The King and Chai Elvis Presley was wearing a chai around his neck when he died...
...I wanted to make a documentary about Yiddish theater that would reach younger audiences so that they would realize its importance and help spur on a revival of Yiddish culture...
...It is an odd coincidence canisters pulled up at the entrance to the Ghriba and exploded, killing 20 people, including 13 German tourists...
...He cultivates it and he is a master at publicizing himself...
...The Post story continued: "A police officer asked if the protesters had a message...
...Israelis don't feel the support of world Jewry," says Katzir, now 33, "so we form our own culture and rebel against European influences...
...Embassy-(on the site of the former British Allenby barracks), the Ghriba now has a new prospective location in western Jerusalem...
...The result: 26 in favor of getting arrested...
...He has also written another book called GellerCare (to be published by December 2002), a primer of his spiritual approach to health and beauty...
...But there was a problem: "Much of the national media is not present," said Lerner...
...What Israel needs, he asserted, is some "tough love...
...Since the fighting technique is relatively new, there aren't enough trained instructors to bring Krav Maga entirely into the mainstream...
...Not that they would be blocking any traffic—for security reasons, police have already closed this section of C Street...
...Fine, said the officer, the police would give them time to make speeches before moving in...
...Geiler, the original men's celebrity hairdresser who cut the tresses of stars like Frank Sinatra, Robert Wagner, and Paul Newman, began working full time for Elvis in 1964 after a routine haircut turned into a three-hour spiritual bonding session...
...The powerful blast killed eight people sitting in a bus across the street, but no worshipers were hurt inside the Ghriba...
...Israeli civilians began learning it for selfdefense in the mid-1960s, and it has seen a recent surge in popularity in America, which Yanilow attributes to the practical and simple techniques the fighting employs...
...Moreover, it was his identity as an Israeli, not as an Ashkenazi Jew, that first captivated the maverick documentary filmmaker, best known for his 1997 awardwinning Israeli youth cult classic Out for Love ...Be Back Shortly...
...On Yom Kippur, after two Israeli soldiers were lynched in Ramallah, Lerner proudly announced that in his prayers he had atoned for "Jewish violence...
...And Lerner and his colleagues were determined to get arrested—if only the media would report it widely enough...
...the r?sum...
...It is easy to learn and to retain...
...Commented the Post writer, David Montgomery: "So what are the BBC and the Washington Post, chopped liver...
...The war in Israel might never get resolved," laments Katzir, "but there's something I can do to preserve the beautiful culture of my European forefathers...
...The men's room...
...Originally slated to rise next to the long-postponed future U.S...
...The protest was to show how effective was the power of civil disobedience...
...Few were expected to heed the boycott, but AJC Executive Director Gary Ratner defended the measure as a means of promoting awareness...
...Geiler says it's not true that Elvis ate fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches—but he did enjoy burnt bacon strips...
Vol. 27 • August 2002 • No. 4
