Free Republic

Stage farce lets Israelis see funny side of the Fuhrer Stephen Farrell, Tel Aviv 17feb06 IN a khaki blur of bad taste, SS uniforms and prancing Fuhrers, the Mel Brooks Broadway farce The Producers has come to Israel for the first time. The show, in Hebrew but replete with swastikas and Nazi salutes, is playing nightly in Tel Aviv to chuckling audiences of Holocaust survivors. Even as they chat during the interval about the best lines, many recall the horror of Kristallnacht. "If ever there was a place that has full licence to make fun of Hitler, it is probably...

Saul Bellow, Trotsky, and Mexico By Stephen Schwartz Reforma | April 19, 2005 In the first week of April, Holy Father, John Paul II, Pope of the world’s Catholics, died at 84 in Rome. Three days later, he was followed in death by the sole contemporary individual who could be called the Pope of the Jews, if that community were to acknowledge such a figure of authority: Saul Bellow, the Canadian-born American author and Nobel laureate. Bellow died, aged 89, in Massachusetts. As the Pope represented the Catholic virtues, Bellow embodied the Jewish values of high intelligence, dedication to the...

OP-ED COLUMNIST In this country we have hotels that are democratized versions of European palaces. We have parks that are democratized versions of royal hunting grounds. And we have the novels of Saul Bellow, which are European novels of ideas adapted to the idiom of the American wisenheimer. So much of the best American culture has been an imitation, adaptation or rejection of European forms and ideas. But Bellow's death reminds us that we're now living in a unipolar moment, culturally as well as politically. Today's writers and artists are much less likely to be Americanizing European stuff, and a...

Just heard it on the radio...........