Berlin

At last, the put-upon Boston Globe has found a New York Times Company policy it can go along with: O  read more »

In Oct.  read more »

Diane Keaton graces the screen so rarely that when she makes an appearance of any kind, attention mu  read more »

Out of the nine sculptures on view in Thomas Kiesewetter’s second one-man show at the Jack Til  read more »

Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, from his own screenplay, has been chose  read more »

You think Jimmy Carter has problems. Yesterday on the progressive Jewish blog, Jewschool, Mobius noted that Urban Outfitters was selling kaffiyehs—the Arab scarf popularized by Yasir Arafat—as "antiwar scarves":

In hipster enclaves such as Berlin and Brooklyn, the kaffiyeh is so ubiquitous it's already passe [and] as a fashion item it is viewed by many in the Palestinian solidarity movement as a trivialization of the Palestinian struggle... Well, the kaffiyeh just got 10 TIMES MORE PASSE and 10 TIMES MORE TRIVIALIZED, thanks to Urban Outfitters

I went to the Urban Outfitters site today and now you can't even see the picture of the scarf; and the retailer announces:

Due to the sensitive nature of this item, we will no longer offer it for sale. We apologize if we offended anyone, this was by no means our intention.

Score another victory for Abe Foxman! This is actually fascinating as a symbol. Because truly, the antiwar movement in this country is now divided/stymied/unable-to-coalesce because of the unwillingness of many liberal Democrats to identify the Israeli Occupation as a source of problems in the Middle East.

One thing that Walt and Mearsheimer do in their rebuttal is to list the large number of policymakers, including Jews like Feith, Perle, Wurmser and Wolfowitz (I would add Abrams), who are "deeply committed" to Israel and helped get us into the war in Iraq. "We emphasize again that we see nothing wrong with this [commitment], as all Americans are entitled to such attachments and are free to express them in political life," they add.

Identifying the neoconservatives as Jewish is one of those unspoken/spoken things in public life today. Two years ago, Wolfowitz was asked a question about the neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute and quipped, "Don't you mean Jewish?" He was being ironical; his point was that the identification was itself antisemitic.

This is not very straightforward. Before W&M came along, two Jewish conservative scholars wrote books that described the neocons as Jewish. The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, by the late Murray Friedman. And The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, by Benjamin Ginsberg.

Ginsberg's book came out in 1993 and is an important work for anyone trying to understand Jewish power, the Jewish presence in the American establishment. Indeed, though Ginsberg's politics are opposite to mine, I admire him for doing what an intellectual should do, and working to describe new social patterns. Ginsberg's historical theme is simple: Jews have risen again and again because our skills have proven essential to states trying to become modern. We made Spain what it was in the 15th century. We allowed the German and English states to rise in the late 19th century. "Jewish academics, intellectuals, and artists were the leading figures in German theater, literature, music, art, architecture, science and philosophy.... " Etc. The words "Jewish financier" appear countless times in Ginsberg's book, for an obvious reason: the Jewish genius for finance has lifted and empowered the modern state. (Yivo, which burlesqued the issue of Jews & Money by inviting the vapid Niall Ferguson to talk about it, should invite Ginsberg to make up for the lapse).  read more »

Welcome to corporate America, journos!  read more »

The new Broadway musical Grey Gardens, directed by Michael Greif, is a tale of two acts.  read more »

"It's a great space, but they should open it up a bit more, let more people in at the door," said Shamim Momin, an associate curator at the Whitney. It was after midnight on Sunday, October 1, at a party in what used to be a public swimming pool in Berlin.

Trust dealer Javier Peres, a wicked fire starter, to add a dash of door-policy drama to characteristically boho Berlin. Out front: a cheek-to-jowl crush of people. A good sprinkling of the revelers were in town for the five-day art fair Artforum Berlin. Some brandished invites which pictured a nude man with a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, curtained before his junior member.

At the entrance, stone-faced men in red ties flanked an attractive young woman, flaxen hair upswept, cradling a clipboard. A guest list? "This remembers me Les Bains. You know Les Bains?" a woman with a heavy French accent said, fighting for balance in the surging crowd. She was referring to the Parisian nightclub that is housed in a former Turkish baths. Her English-speaking male companion laughed. "The baths?" he said. "Depends on what you mean." "Nah, nah," said Dash Snow, the 2006 Whitney Biennial vet, Rivington Arms artist and Kid Rock look-a-like, who was DJ-ing, when asked if the art fair was what brought him. "Me and my friend came here to promote this." He handed out glossy stickers explaining that "9/11 was an inside job."

"There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down people on the instant replay," he chanted in protest mode. "Write down the words of this song and then call me."

And the DJ-ing? Was this his first time doing that?

"Not at all. It sounds like it, right?" Acoustics were indeed a bit challenging, given that the main dance area was the empty, sloping bed of the swimming pool.

A man with a British accent stepped up to make a request.

"I don't have any techno music," Mr. Snow told him. "I have Yoko Ono. You can dance to that."

"Do you have something like §(/$%)§, or something," the man slurred.

"I don't even know what that is, dear," said Mr. Snow. "But I will try to please you. I'm not an evil DJ. I shouldn't even be here, man."

The man flailed his arm in the direction of friends on the dance floor. "It's those people down there."

"Oh they're all complaining?" said Mr. Snow. "If my dick was long enough I'd piss on them."

For clarity's sake, he said: "I'm a grower."

—Nicholas Boston

Last week my father gave me a book of the English essayist Isaiah Berlin's portraits. Berlin was a friend of Chaim Weizmann, the moderate Zionist and first president of Israel, whom Berlin often visited in Palestine during the tortuous years under the British mandate, 1945-1947, when Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, and captured and executed British soldiers. Berlin says that Weizmann refused to condemn the terrorists. Why?

When Jewish terrorism broke out in Palestine he felt and behaved much as Russian liberals did when reactionary Tsarist ministers were assassinated by idealistic revolutionaries. He did not support it; in private he condemned it very vehemently. But he did not think it morally decent to denounce either the acts or their perpetrators in public. He genuinely detested violence: and he was too civilised and too humane to believe in its efficacy, mistakenly perhaps. But he did not propose to speak out against acts, criminal as he thought them, which sprang from the tormented minds of men driven to desperation, and ready to give up their lives to save their brothers from what, he and they were equally convinced, was a betrayal and a destruction cynically prepared for them by the foreign offices of the western powers...

Noteworthy for a couple of reasons. Palestinian sympathizers are continually called upon to condemn terrorism. Sometimes they comply, sometimes they don't. Many of them, as Weizmann did, understand the desperate and tormented reasons for terrorism, which are not generally religious, per Robert Pape, but utterly mundane: about land and occupation.

Robert Elmes spent the month of August in Berlin.  read more »

Robert Elmes spent the month of August in Berlin.  read more »

Today, Columbia University professor Barry Bergdoll was named as MoMA's chief curator of architecture and design, as reported in the New York Times. He takes over from Terence Riley, who is currently director of the Miami Art Museum. The department was founded by Philip Johnson in 1932.

This morning, the MoMA sent out a release announcing the move. Full release is after the jump.  read more »

As the city rather melodramatically girds for riot over the Teitelbaum succession in the Satmar section of Williamsburg, police found themselves having a job of work handling the neighborhood's hipster population Saturday Friday night*.

Onlookers at a bar across the street from 184 Kent Street, the waterfront loft building cleared for conversion into luxury condos, said a crowd of thousands had made their way into the building to party through the building's last night of occupancy.

But come midnight, they were trespassers. So a passel of police cars and fire engines showed up at the scene to clear them out.

Neighbors have objected to the conversion, and lost a battle to get the building landmarked last year.

At one point, an exodus of hipsters could be seen filing down the street from the building, but some were more stubborn.

One large group of them took up residence atop the canopy hanging over the building's loading dock.

As police moved in to clear out the building, there was some vague fist-pumping in the crowd. Mostly, though, the mood seemed merry as the hipsters filed out of the building and towards the L train under an almost full moon.

We've got a call into the police to ask what their account of the evening was. Write in! Send pictures!

We were safely ensconced at the outside patio of Check Cashing, watching the proceedings from a distance and without a cameraphone.  read more »

* Apparently your correspondent had a bit too active a weekend to be precise the first time about which night the party took place.

- Tom McGeveran

New York’s cool kids have been keeping busy: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Fiery Furnaces, the Walkmen  read more »

For a year, I’ve had a fantasy: I check into a hotel in the late afternoon and have a hamburge  read more »

For a year, I’ve had a fantasy: I check into a hotel in the late afternoon and have a hamburger se  read more »

When I read a good book—any good book, but especially a biography—I can’t help but  read more »

When I read a good book—any good book, but especially a biography—I can’t help but suspect tha  read more »

At 5:30 a.m. on Oct.  read more »

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, by Anonymous.  read more »

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, by Anonymous. Metropolitan, 261 pages, $23.  read more »

Valerie Berlin and Jonathan Rosen are leaving the offices of the State Senate Democrats to start their own, currently nameless, political consulting shop.

The move is notable in that these are rare Democrats on something of a winning streak. Berlin was the strategist in last year's pickup of three seats for the Democrats in the Senate; Rosen was her deputy at the State Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.  read more »

We're told that Senate Minority Leader David Paterson is likely to be a client.

At last, we have a winner.  read more »

As professional accomplishments go, there can’t be many things more difficult than singing your wa  read more »

Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse , from a screenplay by Ms.  read more »

As a cultural battleground, the teaching of history never excited the, er, passions associated with  read more »

A big fuss has been made about the brilliance of Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife , meticulously direc  read more »

It has taken an awfully long time for our art institutions to grant full recognition to the achievem  read more »

Call them Mr. and Mrs.  read more »

When Berlin-based American architect Daniel Libeskind unveiled his plan for the World Trade Center s  read more »

White Christmas: The Story of an American Song , by Jody Rosen.  read more »

In the days just after Sept.  read more »

The early portraits of the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), which are currently the sub  read more »

There are many ways to trivialize history, especially in a culture as amnesiac as ours, where even t  read more »

It was a fitting night for a Prankster's wake.  read more »

The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin , edited by Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet. Alfred A.  read more »

You are the fruit of her loins, and yet your relationship with this woman is degenerating into a rag  read more »

Max Färberböck's Aimée & Jaguar , from a screenplay by Mr.  read more »

Certain figures in the history of modern art seem destined to be "rediscovered" by every generation.  read more »

Reading Richard Z.  read more »

There is inevitably something dolorous and even frightening about the current exhibition at the Jewi  read more »

Why is it that Irving Berlin's songs–he wasn't musically trained, he could barely play the piano (  read more »

Irving Berlin: American Troubadour , by Edward Jablonski.  read more »

Hungry?  read more »

The new production of Irving Berlin's vintage Annie Get Your Gun is a key event in the history of th  read more »

There are artists whose lives are more compelling than their art, and the Brazilian painter Lasar Se  read more »

As I say, when the English catch a whiff of the sewer, they're in heaven.  read more »