By Cynthia Citron LOS ANGELES – I discovered something very interesting when I interviewed poet-playwright Murray Mednick last week: If you want to get a provocative interview, start by making the subject angry. I begin by remarking, quite innocently, that I don’t understand his plays. Innocent, but terminally tactless. “You want me to explain my plays [...]
By Shoshana Bryen WASHINGTON, D.C. — NATO’s snub of Israel — a “major non-NATO ally” and member of NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue — in its Chicago summit this weekend was simply waved away. ”Israel is neither a participant in ISAF nor in KFOR (Afghanistan and Kosovo missions),” said NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Israel didn’t [...]
By Cynthia Citron BEVERLY HILLS, California — In my view, it’s cause for rejoicing when a play is beautifully written and is performed by actors who are at least as brilliant as the writing. Mostly because it doesn’t happen all that often. Two new shows demonstrate what I mean. Love Struck, which opened at the [...]
By David Bedein JERUSALEM — On Holocaust Remembrance Day, people in Israel stand in silence to recall the victims murdered by the Nazis and their allies. Tragically, the Palestinian Authority’s curriculum and media still carry the legacy of Haj Amin Al Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian Arab community, who forged [...]
By Shoshana Bryen WASHINGTON, D.C. — In early 2011, President Obama announced that the United States would sign the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Now the U.N. wants us to give Mt. Rushmore to the Indians. James Anaya, U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, spent twelve days in the [...]
By Shoshana Bryen WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rarely do politics in a democratic country wrap up as neatly as they did for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week. Having scheduled new parliamentary elections that he was assuredly going to win, today he announced that the coalition was expanded and reconstituted, and will last until September [...]
By David Amos SAN DIEGO — Together with Sharlene and David Berman, my wife Lee and I occasionally schedule visits to a different part of the Americas, and look for points of exploration, leisure, entertainment, edification, and encounters with distant friends. This was the case two weeks ago, when we flew to New York City, [...]
By Cynthia Citron LOS ANGELES — “A review is something I read before I see a play. A critique is something I read after,” actress Deidrie Henry said. She was responding to a question about the distinction between reviews and criticism posed by LA Stage Alliance CEO Terence McFarland, who was serving as moderator of a [...]
By David Brin ENCINITAS, California — Last week it was asteroid mining, as Peter Diamandis and his partners showed us their bold new venture, Planetary Resources, aiming eventually to start harvesting trillions of dollars worth of materials that would then no longer have to be ripped out of Mother Earth. This glimpse of a vigorously [...]
By Shoshana Bryen WASHINGTON, D.C. — The 37th anniversary of the fall of Saigon today is a good time to review the utility of American security promises — including those purchased with American blood — to countries fighting ideologically based insurgencies. There were 540,000 Americans in Vietnam at the peak of the U.S. part of [...]
