Arts and Entertainment
News about Jewish and Israeli films, television shows, theater and other celebrity news
The move follows a dispute over efforts to exclude Israeli and Russian artists from top awards at the prestigious global exhibition.
“I was brought in to unite the room in a sense of wonder,” the mentalist Oz Pearlman told JNS prior to the event, which was cut short after an assassination attempt.
Public letter says kicking the Jewish state out of song contest would be “inversion of justice.”
Currently on display in Jerusalem, it celebrates the life and mourns the death of Sgt. 1st Class (res.) Yakir Hexter.
The country’s main watchdog on antisemitism, CIDI, urged the government to follow the example of the U.K.
“It has been less than a year since Kanye West released a song titled “Heil Hitler,” the culmination of three years of appalling antisemitism,” Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said.
The United Kingdom banned the rapper from entering the country, leading to the festival’s cancellation.
Recent shows revive a debate that has echoed across Jewish and Christian tradition for millennia.
The event, which was attended by 70,000, comes just over two months after the rapper, also known as Kanye West, publishing an apology letter for antisemitic remarks.
The film documents the circumstances of the small rural town of Gniewoszów, focusing on one of its last living survivors, along with a resident who says he saw Jews murdered there six months after the Nazis’ reign of terror ended.
Matti Leshem, the show’s Jewish creator, told JNS that the Israeli actor playing Jesus “seems like he’d be at home in first-century Judea.”
