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      ‘From Where They Stood’ Review: Auschwitz, as Seen by Prisoners

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      Christophe Cognet’s documentary pores over photographs, some of them clandestine, taken by prisoners, inside the Nazi concentration camp.Christophe Cognet’s “From Where They Stood” scrutinizes an astonishing record of the Holocaust: photographs secretly taken by prisoners within Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps. Cognet’s analytical documentary adopts the stance of an investigating historian to explicate the pictures, which were made and smuggled out at mortal risk.Unlike many documentaries about the Holocaust, this film hinges on still images rather than archival footage or interviews with survivors. Cognet joins scholars to pore over these pictures and their silent testaments; in one clutch of images, women displaying wounds on their legs are revealed to be subjects of Nazi medical experiments. Other portraits catch people in eerily calm-looking repose.But the clandestine pictures known as the Sonderkommando photographs carry the gravest weight of all. These ghostly images depict nude women on the way to the gas chamber and, afterward, corpses left in the open air (both scenes overseen by the cremation prisoner workers known as the Sonderkommando). Shot from a significant distance, apparently through holes in the gas chambers, these figures are small and not greatly defined, but no less devastating.Cognet (who also made a documentary about artworks created in the camps) visits camp sites to re-create the precise positions and sightlines of the photographers and their subjects. His film can feel overly cerebral—a bit like being plunged into a seminar—and the text cards do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting. But Cognet’s forensic approach does insist on memorializing these events in an important, physically specific way and, intentionally or not, queasily anticipates a world without any living eyewitnesses to these horrors.From Where They StoodNot rated. In French, Polish and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Saga of a World War II Ancestor of Miss Piggy, Bert and Yoda

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      Long before Frank Oz brought many Muppets to life, his father, an amateur Dutch puppeteer, made a Hitler marionette as an act of defiance. He buried it during the war.The puppet stands 20 inches tall, hand-painted and carved out of wood, its uniform tattered and torn. But for all it has endured over more than 80 years — buried in a backyard in Belgium at the outset of World War II, dug up after the war and taken on a nine-day cross-Atlantic journey, stored and almost forgotten in an attic in Oakland, Calif. — it remains, with its black toothbrush mustache and right arm raised in a Nazi salute, immediately and chillingly recognizable.It is a depiction of Hitler, hand-carved and painted in the late 1930s by an amateur Dutch puppeteer, Isidore (Mike) Oznowicz, and clothed by his Flemish wife, Frances, as they lived in prewar Belgium.The Hitler marionette, an instrument of parody and defiance, offers an intriguing glimpse into the strong puppetry tradition in the family of the man who retrieved it from that attic: Frank Oz, one of its creators’ sons, who went on to become one of the 20th century’s best-known puppeteers, bringing Cookie Monster, Bert, Miss Piggy and others to life through his collaborations with Jim Henson, and later becoming a force in the Star Wars movies, giving voice to Yoda. The marionette will be shown publicly for the first time later this month at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.Oz’s father was drawn to puppetry from the day when, as an 11-year-old boy, he passed a street show of outsize, colorful Sicilian puppets in Antwerp. “As a youngster, I was interested in things three-dimensional,” Oznowicz told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. After they arrived in Oakland in 1951, Oz’s parents founded the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild, and the family living room became a gathering spot for puppet makers and enthusiasts from across the region. Oz learned how to string puppets from his father, and as a teenager, he earned $25 an hour doing puppet shows, and served as an apprentice puppeteer at Children’s Fairyland, an amusement park.Mike and Frances Oznowicz at a puppet fair in Children’s Fairyland in 1956.via the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild and Children’s Fairyland ArchivesBut Oz — who parlayed his successes in puppetry into a long career as an actor and a director — was never drawn to carrying on the family tradition.“It was a great training ground for me until I hit 18 and I said, I’m done with this, I don’t want to be a puppeteer,” Oz, 78, said in a recent interview as he sat on a bench in Riverside Park in New York. “I never wanted to be a puppeteer. I want to be a journalist, actually.”It was a chance encounter with Henson, whom he met at a puppeteer’s convention when he was still a teenager, that changed the course of his life.“I really don’t care about puppets,” Oz said, under the mist of a light June rain. “I really don’t. And never did. And Jim showed me how to be successful. Then I became successful at the very thing that I didn’t initially want, but the joy was working with Jim and the Muppets.”Oz was startled when he came across the puppet years ago in the attic of his family home in Oakland — “I thought, ‘Oh My God.’” He brought it to New York where he displayed it, along with seven marionette heads carved by his father, in a museum case in his apartment on the Upper West Side.The puppet, the carved heads and a video interview Frank conducted with his father before his death in 1998, will be shown at “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History,” opening at the Contemporary Jewish Museum on July 21. (Frank’s nom-de-Hollywood is “Oz,” but his legal name remains Oznowicz.)“I never wanted to be a puppeteer,” Frank Oz said. He parlayed his successes with puppets into a long career as an actor and a director.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe exhibition tracks the remarkable story of this puppet and how Isidore, who was Jewish and was born in Amsterdam, and Frances, who was Catholic, fled Antwerp in 1940 as the Nazis advanced and bombs exploded across Belgium. At the urging of Frances’s mother, who was fearful that they would be captured with such a defiant marionette as they tried to outrace the Nazis, they buried the puppet in their backyard.“He and Mom made a pact that when the bombs landed in Antwerp — and they were expecting that — they’d be ready go to,” said Ronald Oznowicz, 80, who is Frank’s older brother. “They had their bikes ready and their food ready. They had a whole plan and the object was to get to England.”Isidore and Frances traveled through southern France, Spain, Morocco and Portugal — the tale of their journey is recounted in the video interview — before settling in England, where Frank and Ronald were born.The family returned to Antwerp after the war and dug up the puppet. It was another five years before they obtained a visa and came to the United States. The puppet came with them. (A third child, Jenny, was born after they settled in the United States.)“I have to tell you: This is a son’s remembrance,” Oz said. “My parents left Belgium in time. But sadly, half of his family was killed in the gas chambers because they didn’t leave. My father never really liked to talk about it. It was too difficult for him.”“All these stories of my mother and father, they were just fairy tales to me,” he said.Indeed, much of this story is murky, as it reconstructs the life of the parents of one of the men so instrumental in making the Muppets beloved: Isidore was, by day, a window trimmer and sign painter, and Frances became a dressmaker. It is not exactly clear how — or even if — the Hitler puppet was used in performances.An old photograph of the Hitler marionette, which was buried in a backyard in Belgium at the outset of World War II, dug up after the war and taken on a nine-day cross-Atlantic journey, stored and almost forgotten in an attic in Oakland, Calif.via Frank Oznowicz, Jenny Oznowicz and Ronald Oznowicz; Jason MadellaThis exhibit came to be because of happenstance. “The Jim Henson Exhibition: Imagination Unlimited,” which was first shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, was set to move this summer to The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the institution, in keeping with its mission, was looking for ways to place the exhibition in some sort of Jewish context.“I was aware that Frank Oz was Jewish and wondered if there was any kind of story that Frank would want to tell here,” said Heidi Rabben, the senior curator of the museum. Karen Falk, the head archivist for the Henson collection, told her about the puppet that Oz had retrieved from his parents’ attic, and Rabben asked Oz if she could borrow it for this exhibit.“It was such an incredibly inspiring story about resilience and resistance,” Rabben said. “That is what we are interested in: What are the ways we can share stories of the Holocaust? We have limited information and it’s very selective based on what our parents and grandparents chose to share. How do we make sure we never forget?”The two exhibits will overlap for a few weeks; the Henson exhibit closes in mid-August.The Hitler puppet is the centerpiece of “Oz is for Oznowicz.” The mustache, the hair and the eyebrows are painted black; Isidore carved the mustache so that it protrudes from the puppet. A Nazi arm band is strapped around the left arm. No effort was made to refurbish the Hitler puppet or any of the heads; they are being presented the way Frank found them. The marionette’s right leg is exposed because of a tear in the uniform.Given its subject matter and the sensitivities of a museum dedicated to addressing questions of Jewish history, “Oz is for Oznowicz,” contains a warning for attendees: “This exhibition contains a marionette of Adolf Hitler that may be disturbing for some viewers. Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today.”Isidore’s sons remember him as a man of pointed humor with a strong political sensibility, and said it was in character for him to use humor and parody for political effect. But once they made it back to the United States, and embarked on lives as immigrants in a new country, they tried to put that chapter of their lives behind them.After their meeting at a convention of the National Puppeteers of America, Jim Henson asked Frank Oz to come to New York and work part-time with him for six months in 1963. He stayed with Henson until 1986.Oz said he jumped at the chance to lend his parents’ work to the Henson exhibition.“I want to show how people can express themselves in a positive way during a war — and make fun of people through other means,” he said. “I just want to honor my parents. I want to people to see how lucky we are right now, even in the terrible situation we are in right now.” More

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      Review: In ‘Harmony,’ a Band’s Success Collides With History

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      Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s musical chronicles the story of the Comedian Harmonists, a sextet of Jews and gentiles in Weimar-era Germany.For many people, especially those of a certain generation, the name Barry Manilow immediately summons innocuous marshmallow-soft rock. Regardless of whether you interpret that description as comforting or saccharine, it is not necessarily a style you would associate with a show about a Weimar-era vocal group split apart by the rise of Nazism.And yet here is “Harmony: A New Musical,” a project Manilow and his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman have been nursing for over 25 years. It opened on Wednesday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, a location bearing the weight of history that adds an extra layer of poignancy to an imperfect but very affecting show.Those skeptical of the fact that the men behind “Copacabana” could tackle serious matters should perhaps listen closely to “Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again” or “Even Now,” just two examples of Manilow’s flair. Those 1970s songs are very much of their time yet also ageless, and they embrace dramatic storytelling seasoned with a touch of unabashed sentiment that some may dismiss as sentimental. They are the aural equivalent of 1950s melodramas by Douglas Sirk like “All That Heaven Allows,” and, as such, not so different from the best numbers in “Harmony,” which are crafted in a defiantly classic mold. Every time the production becomes a little wobbly, those songs steer it back to solid emotional ground.The Broadway veteran Chip Zien acts as narrator but also pops up as a rabbi and in other minor roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPresented by the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, the show is essentially a biomusical — though not a jukebox — in which Manilow (music) and Sussman (book and lyrics) retrace the saga of the Comedian Harmonists, a sextet made up of Jews and gentiles and whose popularity in the late 1920s and early 1930s spread well beyond their Berlin base.It is at Carnegie Hall in December 1933 that we first meet the band members, performing the lengthy title number, in which the singers emulate jazz instruments before whisking us back to the group’s formation in 1927.This is when Harry Frommermann (Zal Owen), a supremely gifted arranger and orchestrator, not unlike Manilow himself, places a newspaper ad looking for singers. A crew as motley as it is talented answers the call, as if this were in an episode of “Making the (Boy) Band.” It includes Erwin Bootz (Blake Roman), nicknamed Chopin because of his virtuoso piano playing; the “chain-smoking Bulgarian tenor” Ari Leschnikoff (Steven Telsey), who goes by the nickname Lesh; the wealthy, monocle-wearing medical student Erich Collin (Eric Peters); and the rapscallion bass Bobby Biberti (a very funny Sean Bell, with Danny Kaye vibes).Rounding out the ensemble is Roman Cycowski (Danny Kornfeld), nicknamed Rabbi because he had been studying in Poland to become one. Rabbi plays a key role, or rather two: His older self, portrayed by the Broadway veteran Chip Zien (the original Baker of “Into the Woods,” “Falsettos”), acts as narrator, both reflecting back on his band’s history and commenting on the various goings-on.This extra Rabbi is new to the NYTF’s iteration of the musical — “Harmony” premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 1997, then re-emerged in 2014 for runs in Atlanta and Los Angeles — and, at first, he does not feel entirely necessary, especially since Zien also pops up, in a somewhat distracting manner, in a few minor roles.From left: Telsey, Bell, Roman, Kornfeld, Owen and Peters in the show, directed with a steady pace by Warren Carlyle.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs we go on, though, Zien’s Rabbi comes into his melancholy own: He is, after all, the one character who knows where this is going, and Zien eventually leaves it all out on the stage in his heartbreaking last song. In case you were wondering what it feels like to cry under a mask, there is a good chance you will find out then.But before getting to that point, “Harmony” barrels through a lot as it tries to capture the band members’ individual lives and their joint accomplishments: the Comedian Harmonists’ original lineup may have been together only for a relatively brief time, but they were a terrific act and their run was action-packed. (No wonder they have continued to fascinate over the decades, as the subject of a documentary, a book, a feature film, and numerous tributes, including the short-lived 1999 Broadway show “Band in Berlin.”)The show is in good hands with the director and choreographer Warren Carlyle (“The Music Man,” “Hello, Dolly”). Not only does he maintain a steady pace but he somehow manages to fit ambitious numbers — including the pocket Ziegfeld extravaganza “We’re Goin’ Loco!” and the Kander and Ebbesque “Come to the Fatherland,” in which the Comedian Harmonists become human marionettes — on the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s small stage.From left: Sierra Boggess, Kornfeld, Zien, Jessie Davidson and Roman in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesManilow, Sussman and Carlyle mostly succeed in balancing the shifting moods, which is no easy feat because they must shuffle broad humor and, well, Nazis. The “comedian” in the band’s name was to be taken literally, for example, and the singers were as famous for their stage antics and novelty songs as for their tight singing.The downside is that there is a thin line between speedy and rushed, and the men are drawn in brushstrokes. A pair of love interests, Mary (Sierra Boggess) and Ruth (Jessie Davidson), are even less than that — one is loving, the other feisty, and that’s pretty much it.At least those two women get the epic “Where You Go,” which has the heart-on-sleeve grandeur of the finest Michel Legrand ballads. Such “Harmony” songs as that one, “This Is Our Time” and “Every Single Day” create a sense of out-of-time inevitability, yet they also remain grounded in the story: It is impossible to forget why we are watching the show.HarmonyThrough May 8 at the Edmond J. Safra Hall at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan; nytf.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Exhibit at German History Museum Reckons With Wagner’s Legacy

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      A new exhibition at the country’s national history museum examines the strong feelings stirred by its most famous 19th-century composer.BERLIN — Few composers inspire such a mix of appreciation and disgust as Richard Wagner. Especially here in Germany — where Wagner’s work is understood as a combination of national cultural jewel and national political embarrassment — the composer’s work is laden with meaning and interpretation.Along with his music dramas, Wagner’s legacy includes his antisemitic and nationalist political writings, and the Nazi dictatorship celebrated his musical works as a symbol of the pure German culture they hoped to promote. Hitler was a regular at the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, where he was welcomed warmly by the composer’s descendants, and the regime used Wagner’s music in rallies and at official events.“You can’t have a naïve and beautiful production of a Wagner opera in Germany,” said Michael P. Steinberg, a cultural historian at Brown University who, along with Katherina J. Schneider, co-curated an upcoming exhibition on the composer at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. “It’s impossible.”That show, “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling,” opens April 9 and runs through September. The first exhibition dedicated to a composer at Germany’s national history museum, it explores the relationship between Wagner’s politics and his artistic output and influence.“If Wagner had only written his 3,000 pages of prose, he would be remembered as a kook, a second-rate maniacal thinker,” Steinberg said.Instead, Steinberg added, he is mostly remembered for the opus of music dramas that made him “without doubt the most transformational composer of the mid-19th century, without whom one cannot understand European art music after him.”Wagner was a “technician of emotions,” he said, who orchestrated collective experiences of feeling that embedded his ideas in his art. That means the music and the poisoned politics can’t be separated, Steinberg said. “The ideas come out on the stage in subliminal ways,” he added, “through worlds of feeling that are transmitted through music and text.”For this reason, he and Schneider have organized the show according to a series of emotions through which they argue the composer’s legacy can be understood: from the alienation Wagner felt as an 1840s revolutionary; to the sense of belonging as he began to be institutionally accepted; to the eros that characterizes the seductiveness of his work; and, finally, the disgust and loathing that animated the composer’s prejudices.These feelings, the curators argue, were “national” ones because the popularity of Wagner’s music helped embed them in the German national consciousness, especially after the unification of Germany in 1871.“During the Break,” a portrayal of the Richard Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth by Gustav Laska, 1894.Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth – Leihgabe der Oberfrankenstiftung, BayreuthTo support their case, they have assembled objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection, combined with video clips from performances and stagings, and interviews with notable Wagnerian artists.The curators also commissioned a new audio installation from Barrie Kosky, the director of the Komische Oper in Berlin, whose Jewishness is a major part of his artistic identity. He has spent the last few years pursuing what he calls a “public cultural exorcism” of his own Wagner demons, exploring the composer’s antisemitism through a series of acclaimed productions that culminated with an acclaimed staging of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at Bayreuth, which ended with the composer literally on trial.His point of departure for the installation, he said in an interview, was Wagner’s infamous essay “Jewishness in Music.” The essay, an antisemitic screed that argues Jewish composers could only imitate, and never truly create, also lingers on the composer’s visceral hatred for the Jewish “voice.” Arguing that art music arose from race-based folk cultures, Wagner describes Jewish folk music as a “sense-and-sound confounding gurgle, yodel, and cackle.”Kosky said he heard echoes of those hated sounds in the music for Wagner characters who embody antisemitic archetypes: the pedantic critic in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” for instance, or the gold-hungry dwarves in the “Ring” cycle.Kosky’s sound installation plays out in a small dark room at the museum. Visitors hear jumbled-together recordings of synagogue music, excerpts from old recordings featuring the “Jewish” Wagner characters and sentences from “Jewishness in Music,” read by a woman, in Yiddish. Kosky called the effect “deliberately nauseating.”The entrance to Barrie Kosky’s installation “Schwarzalbenreich” in a chapter of the exhibition called “Ekel“ (“Disgust”).Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerKosky said he would continue to direct the composer’s music dramas, even though there was antisemitism in them. Having completed his “exorcism,” he added, he felt personally and artistically free to approach the composer’s work from new perspectives.“It’s the combination of things: the music, text, and cultural specificity of what he is using that makes Wagner’s work, to me, so deeply problematic and fascinating,” Kosky said.Mark Berry, who leads the music department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has published widely on politics and religion in Wagner’s work, said Wagner had become something of a scapegoat in German attempts to come to terms with the country’s past. It was, he added, as if guilt about the murderous consequences of German antisemitism could be outsourced to one man who died long before the Nazis came to power.“Clearly there are romantic nationalist elements in Wagner’s thought,” he said, “as there were in just about any German artist of that time. If one looks at his theoretical writing, however, he is adamant that the time of national characteristics in art is over, that this is to be an age of artistic universalism.”Yes, Berry said, there were antisemitic tropes in Wagner’s music dramas, and antisemitic politics in his essays. But, he added, that doesn’t make the music itself antisemitic, and Wagner wasn’t the main conduit by which antisemitism became prominent in the German national mood, and the basis of genocidal state policy.Daniel Barenboim, one of the most prominent Jewish figures in classical music in Germany and the music director of the Berlin State Opera, has written that Wagner can hardly be held “accountable for Hitler’s use and abuse of his music and world views.” He declined to be interviewed, but in an article on his website, he describes Wagner as “a virulent anti-Semite of the worst kind whose statements are unforgivable.”The show features objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection.Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerIn that article, Barenboim, who will conduct a new “Ring” in Berlin this October, asks: why allow Hitler to have the last word on Wagner when so many Jewish artists — singers, conductors, directors — have made careers from the composer’s work, and his work has inspired so many Jewish composers?That same essay opens with a meditation on the storm scene that opens Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre,” with Barenboim laying out the precise, almost mathematical structure through which Wagner sketches the feeling of being in a forest and a snowstorm, and the emotions of an alienated outsider on the run. The phrases swell and recede before an explosion in the winds and brass and an abrupt roll of the timpani. In the audience, your heart skips a beat. These are the techniques by which Wagner manipulates emotion — on the scale of a phrase, or a melody, or an opera, or a nation. More

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      ‘Babi Yar: Context’ Review: Unearthing Footage of a Nazi Massacre

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      Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, about the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews in 1941, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own.Over two days in September, 1941, German soldiers, assisted by Ukrainian collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kyiv. The massacre was one of the earliest and deadliest episodes in what is sometimes called the “holocaust by bullets,” a phase of the Nazi genocide that took place outside the mechanized slaughter of the death camps. These mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, are estimated to have taken at least 1.5 million lives.The Ukrainian-born filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, consisting of archival footage interspersed with a few tersely informative title cards, is called “Babi Yar: Context.” What’s meant by “context” isn’t so much a broad, explanation of the event — such as one finds in the historian Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands” — as a detailed visual narrative with a hole in the middle.When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they brought movie cameras as well as rifles. So did the Soviet Army when it took back Kyiv in 1943. Some of those cameras were instruments of propaganda; others were wielded by amateurs. The two sides left behind an extensive cinematic record, a pool of images that have mostly languished unseen since the end of the war. Weaving them together and dubbing in sound (the rumble of tanks and the murmur of crowds, with an occasional snippet of intelligible speech), Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.The killing itself took place off camera. What is astonishing is how thoroughly nearly everything that happened before and after the massacre was documented, in black-and-white and sometimes in color. The detail is unsparing and relentless: farms and villages set on fire by German soldiers; Jews being rounded up, humiliated and beaten; snowy fields strewn with frozen corpses; bombs exploding in downtown Kyiv; the public hanging of 12 Germans convicted of atrocities after the war.Though there is a military and political narrative to be gleaned from all of this, Loznitsa’s method (displayed in earlier found-footage films like “State Funeral,” about the aftermath of Stalin’s death) is to allow the human reality to speak for itself. A few prominent officials are identified — you may recognize Nikita S. Khrushchev, who became the leader of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic soon after the Germans were driven out — but what the film displays most vividly is the intense individuality of anonymous, ordinary people. History is a catalog of faces: city-dwellers and peasants; victims, perpetrators and bystanders; Germans, Jews, Russians and Ukrainians.Mostly, these people don’t speak. Toward the end, there are scenes of courtroom testimony, during which a German soldier and several witnesses and survivors talk about what happened at Babi Yar. Their words, in the absence of images, have a harrowing intensity beyond what any pictures might convey. So does the Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s 1943 essay “Ukraine Without Jews,” quoted onscreen to emphasize the enormity of what can’t be shown.Much of the rest of “Babi Yar: Context” works the other way around, finding an eloquence in actions and gestures that words might not supply. And also an element of indeterminacy, as you try to read the thoughts and feelings on those faces.There is a political, moral dimension to the work of interpretation that Loznitsa compels. After Kyiv, other cities like Lviv fall to the Germans; the streets fill with Ukrainians celebrating their victory as liberation from Soviet oppression. Girls in traditional costumes present bouquets of flowers to Nazi officers, and banners are hoisted proclaiming the glory of Adolf Hitler and the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. When Jews are rounded up, harassed and brutalized, local civilians are on hand to participate.Later, there are parades and flowers to welcome the Red Army. Hitler’s likeness is taken down and replaced with Stalin’s. You might wonder about the composition of the crowds. Did some of the same people who welcomed the German army as liberators also turn out to support the Soviet army’s return? Did residents of Kyiv who cheered the arrival of Nazi fighters also cheer their execution?Forcing you to think about these questions is one of the ways Loznitsa’s film draws you closer to the horror at its center, stripping away the easy judgment of hindsight as well as the layers of forgetting and distortion that accumulated around the massacre in subsequent decades.And of course “Babi Yar: Context,” completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own. The Babi Yar Memorial near Kyiv was damaged in early March by a Russian missile. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has claimed that one of his goals is the “denazification” of Ukraine, whose current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. The past that Loznitsa excavates casts its shadow on the present. Knowing about it won’t make anything easier, but not knowing can make everything worse.Babi Yar: ContextNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      After Criticism, Academy Museum Will Highlight Hollywood’s Jewish History

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      The new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which tried to present an inclusive history of film, overlooked the role Jewish immigrants played in creating the industry.LOS ANGELES — When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a 300,000-square-foot tribute to Hollywood, opened here last fall, it was lauded for honoring, in an industry historically dominated by white men, the contributions that women, artists of color and people from many backgrounds have made to film, an essential American art form.“We want to ensure that we are taking an honest, inclusive and diverse look at our history, that we create a safe space for complicated, hard conversations,” the museum’s director, Bill Kramer, said the day after the museum opened as he welcomed guests to a panel discussion titled “Creating a More Inclusive Museum.”But one group was conspicuously absent in this initial celebration of diversity and inclusivity: the Jewish immigrants — white men all — who were central to founding the Hollywood studio system. Through dozens of exhibits and rooms, there is barely a mention of Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer, to list just a few of the best-known names from Hollywood’s history.The omission, which came at a time of increasing concern about rising antisemitism across the country, soon drew complaints from Jewish leaders, concern from supporters of the new museum and a number of critical articles, including in Rolling Stone and The Forward, which ran a piece headlined “Jews built Hollywood. So why is their history erased from the Academy’s new museum?”“I was there opening night: I was shocked by the absence of an inclusion of Jews in the Hollywood story,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, a group that tracks antisemitism and hate crimes.Now, museum officials say, that is going to change.The museum was criticized for overlooking the first- and second-generation Eastern European Jews who helped create Hollywood, including Louis B. Mayer.Margaret Herrick LibraryBarraged by complaints, the museum plans to open a new permanent exhibition next spring devoted to the origins of Hollywood, and specifically the lives and contributions of the Jewish studio founders who were largely responsible for creating the world that is being celebrated by the sellout crowds flocking to the new museum.Kramer said in an interview that the Academy Museum had always intended to open a temporary gallery devoted to the subject. “We’ve long had this on our list to do, and we knew this was going to be in our first rotations,” he said recently over coffee at Fanny’s, the museum’s restaurant. But the criticism prompted museum officials to shift gears and decide to enshrine it as a permanent exhibition.“Representation is so important,” Kramer said “We heard that and we take that seriously. When you talk about the founding of Hollywood studios, you’re talking about the Jewish founders.”The dispute highlights the challenges museums across the nation face in an atmosphere of heightened sensitivities about issues of representation and race and gender. It is particularly complicated for the Academy Museum, as it tries to walk the uncomfortable line between being a place of scholarship and a sales tool for an industry struggling to reinvent itself as audiences abandon movie theaters for their living rooms.“It’s a colossal miss,” said Greenblatt, of the Anti-Defamation League. “Any honest historical assessment of the motion-picture industry should include the role that Jews played in building the industry from the ground up.”Some historians said the omission appeared to be the latest example of Hollywood’s strained relationship with its Jewish history.“You have to understand that Hollywood in its very inception was formed out of a fear that its founders — and those who maintained the industry — would be identified as Jews,” said Neal Gabler, the author of “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” a book about the Jewish studio heads. “It’s almost fitting that a museum devoted to the history of Hollywood would incorporate in its very evolution this fear and sensitivity.”Still, Jewish leaders said they were heartened by the museum’s response to their complaints. Kramer and other museum leaders reached out to rabbis and Jewish scholars, including Gabler and Greenblatt, asking their guidance on what should be included in the new gallery to repair this breach.“I am convinced they are going to do the right thing,” Greenblatt said.What that is, though, is not yet clear. The exhibition is being planned for a relatively modest 850-square-foot gallery on the third floor of the building. Dara Jaffe, the curator, said the exhibition, which will be called “Hollywoodland,” will be a broad look at the origins of the industry. It will highlight the biographies and achievements of the founders of the major studios, as well as of some lesser-known Jewish filmmakers.Carl Laemmle, who was born to a Jewish family in Germany, became a founder of Universal Pictures and later worked to help German Jews escape from the Nazis. Margaret Herrick Library“We want to answer the question of: Why Los Angeles?” Jaffe said. “Why is this the place where the world capital of cinema blossomed? It’s not a coincidence that many of the founders are predominantly Jewish. It’s a specifically Jewish story and a specifically Jewish immigrant story.”The exhibition will not open for a year, and key details, from how it will be presented to what kind of artifacts will be included, are still in the planning stages.Haim Saban, an Israeli American philanthropist and media entrepreneur who with his wife, Cheryl, donated $50 million to the museum, becoming one of its most important benefactors, said in an email that the promise of a new gallery “not only underscores how seriously the Academy Museum has taken the feedback, but demonstrates an understanding of the critical role that Jewish founders had in the establishment and shaping of Hollywood.”Saban was among the major backers of the museum to register his concern within days after it opened. He and his wife were critical to financing what ended up to be a $487 million project; the main exhibition hall at the museum was named the “Saban Building” in their honor.Some are asking how a museum that took such care to highlight the contributions of people from a diverse array of backgrounds — it created an Inclusion Advisory Committee to offer guidance on how to deal with these issues, and made a call to “Embrace Diversity and Be Radically Inclusive” one of its guiding principles — neglected to account for the role of some of the biggest names in Hollywood history.“There is a historic tendency of Jewish people in the industry to play down the fact that they were Jewish,” said Rabbi Kurt F. Stone of Boca Raton, Fla., who grew up in Los Angeles and is one of the rabbis the museum consulted after the backlash began. “But do I have an answer as to why they screwed up so badly? I don’t.”Sid Ganis, a former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a lifetime trustee of the museum, said he was surprised at the depth of the outrage that emerged after the museum opened its doors. “It was vocal and real and something we paid attention to,” he said.Ganis, a longtime proponent of the museum, said organizers were always aware of the importance of Jews in Hollywood history, adding that this was not an oversight. “We just hadn’t gotten to it yet,” he said. “Opening the museum at the end of October, the beginning of November, was an enormous undertaking. And we made choices. It was something we always knew we were going to attend to. But now, even more so.” More

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      in Movies

      Is It Funny for the Jews?

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.In the climactic scene of the musical “Caroline, or Change,” an 8-year-old Jewish boy, Noah, and his African American maid, Caroline, living in the Jim Crow South, get into a heated fight and end up trading ugly insults. Noah says he hopes a bomb kills all Black people, and Caroline responds that all Jews will go to hell.It’s always a charged moment, but there was something peculiarly unsettling about it the night I saw the recent Broadway revival. For while there was silence after Noah’s hateful outburst, what followed Caroline’s comment was something I did not expect: laughter. Nervous giggling in uncomfortable moments can be a coping mechanism. And that wasn’t the audience reaction every night. But in a radio interview, Sharon D Clarke, who played the title character, said that at the majority of shows, there was laughter. She was disturbed by it but couldn’t explain it.I found it jarring because I thought I could. Of course it’s impossible to get inside the heads of theatergoers, but as a Jewish person, I recognized this laughter. Who would buy a ticket to a Broadway show and chuckle at the eternal damnation of Jewish people other than Jews?There is a long, rich Jewish tradition of grappling with antisemitism by laughing at it. This has produced a vast amount of great comedy, from Mel Brooks turning Nazis into musical theater buffoons in “The Producers” to Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Borat, leading the denizens of a Southern bar in singing, “Throw the Jew down the well.” There is a sensibility behind these jokes that I grew up around and have long embraced.Adam Makké as Noah and Sharon D Clarke as Caroline in the recent Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSome artists argue that making light of prejudice, or turning purveyors of it into absurdities, robs hatred of power. I’ve been persuaded by that idea, and like many secular types, a Jewish sense of humor is more integral to my identity than any religious observance. It’s also a source of pride. A resilient comic sensibility that finds joy in dark places is one of the greatest Jewish legacies — as is an ability to laugh at ourselves.Those hung up on the question of whether the latest news is good for the Jews always seemed not only hopelessly ineffective but also tedious. Scolds from the Anti-Defamation League, alert to the damage done by every Jewish stereotype, will never end an ancient prejudice, but they could ruin a good time. And yet, as a critic engaging with a chaotic and constantly changing culture, in an online world that seems somehow both more outraged by and tolerant of hate speech, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this kind of condescension. It’s too glib. And that has made me look closer at the disturbing rise in antisemitism today, Jewish culture and identity, and the implications of what we find funny.THERE’S BEEN GROWING PUSHBACK in the last year from some Jews about double standards in the cultural conversation. Take the increasingly politicized issue of casting, which has inspired considerable controversy. We have never been more sensitive to issues of whitewashing, appropriation and representation. Think of Scarlett Johansson being hired for an Asian role. But when gentiles are cast as Golda Meir or Mrs. Maisel or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is little blowback. The superb indie comedy “Shiva Baby” tackles explicitly Jewish themes, but the fact that the lead is played by a Catholic stand-up, Rachel Sennott, barely raised an eyebrow.On her podcast, Sarah Silverman has spoken passionately about how Jewish characters are regularly played by gentile actors, specifically lamenting the lack of meaty roles for women. “The pattern in film is just undeniable,” she said, “and the pattern is — if the Jewish woman character is courageous or deserves love, she is never played by a Jew.”Gentile performers playing Jewish characters include, from left, Felicity Jones in “On the Basis of Sex,” Rachel Sennott in “Shiva Baby” and Rachel Brosnahan in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Photographs by Jonathan Wenk/Focus Features; Utopia; Nicole Rivelli/Amazon Prime VideoShe delivered this sharp monologue with an ambivalence that also resonated with me. Acting requires an empathetic leap of imagination. Like Silverman, I know that great performers of any religion can and have brilliantly played Jews, and it’s easier to pass as Jewish than, say, African American. But is experience as a Jewish person irrelevant to playing Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” (as Alfred Molina, who was raised Catholic, did on Broadway) or to embodying Joan Rivers in a biopic? (Before the project fell apart, the gentile Kathryn Hahn was slated to play her.) I think it matters. When a gentile plays a Jew, the results are often more affected, the mannerisms pronounced, which can often mean the difference between someone playing Jewish vs. inhabiting a Jewish character.In his book “Jews Don’t Count,” the British comic David Baddiel argues that casting is one of many issues in contemporary discourse that illustrate how antisemitism is far more acceptable than other forms of bigotry. One need only point to the career of Mel Gibson to find evidence. Part of the reason, Baddiel explains, is that at a time when we are particularly sensitive to power imbalances, what distinguishes antisemitism is that the bigot imagines Jewish people as both low status (rats, venal) and high status (running the banks, part of a globalist conspiracy).Jewish people have clearly been tremendously successful in Hollywood, on Broadway and in comedy, among other artistic pursuits, but that doesn’t erase the specific discriminatory shadow hovering behind their rise. Silverman points to the number of famous Jews who have changed their names. “If Winona Ryder had stayed Winona Horowitz, would she have starred in ‘The Age of Innocence’?” Silverman has asked. “She wouldn’t.”Behind the discussion of gentiles in Jewish roles is the long history of Hollywood anxiety that a work will be “too Jewish,” words that have haunted Jewish artists for generations. The first time Jerry Seinfeld appeared on a sitcom, on “Benson” in 1980, he played a courier trying to sell a joke for the governor to use in a speech. When one flopped (“Did you hear about the rabbi who bought himself a ranch? Called it the Bar Mitzvah”), he asked: “Too Jewish?” Nine years later, a Jewish NBC executive dismissed the pilot for “Seinfeld” as “too New York, too Jewish,” and while it was picked up, the network ordered only four episodes.In the most memorable joke of his breakthrough 1986 Broadway comedy, “The World According to Me,” the comic Jackie Mason said, “You know what’s going to happen after this show: The gentiles are going to say, ‘It’s a hit.’ And the Jews are going to say, ‘Too Jewish.’” Mason delivers this cheerfully, but there’s a bristling undercurrent, a finger wag about self-loathing.Jackie Mason’s accent reflected a bold refusal to assimilate.Mario Ruiz/Getty ImagesMason has always been a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Compared with my favorite comics, he seemed impossibly old-fashioned, not just in his borscht belt rhythms, but also in having bits centered on how fundamentally alien gentiles were to Jews. But listening to him again more recently, I detected a defiance that was, in its own way, radical, even countercultural. His accent itself, which if anything got thicker as he got older, represented a bold refusal to assimilate. The Jewish artists who found mainstream success didn’t sound like him.And when he died last year, with a modest amount of media attention paid to his legacy, it made me wonder about the obstacle course of Jewish success in a country where we are a tiny minority. But I also thought about the role played by Jewish people measuring the degree of acceptable Jewishness, the kind Mason was talking about in his show.WHEN REPRESENTATION IN CULTURE is discussed today, what’s often emphasized is how valuable it can be when children from minority groups see or hear someone like them and how that can expand their horizons. I have never felt this was an issue for me, because there seemed to be an abundance of Jewish people in the arts. Sure, some changed their names or played down their background, but we could tell. I never questioned the idea that Jews had been well represented in popular culture until I read Jeremy Dauber’s book “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History” and learned that not one leading character on prime-time television clearly identified as Jewish from 1954 to 1972 and again from 1978 to 1987.That came as a surprise and made me reconsider my 1980s childhood diet of pop culture. Back then, this mainly consisted of the offerings of three television networks, along with the occasional PG movie. This was the era of “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” and I couldn’t think of a single Jewish character on a show I watched until I became a teenager. But a major shift for Jewish representation took place in 1989. That’s when “Seinfeld,” “Anything but Love” with Richard Lewis and “Chicken Soup” with Mason all premiered. (It’s also the year of “When Harry Met Sally.”) What’s striking about this influx of Jewish characters is that only one kind was allowed: A male stand-up with a gentile love interest.“Seinfeld,” left, and “When Harry Met Sally” typified the ’80s pairings of Jewish funny guys and gentile women.Monty Brinton/NBC, via Getty Images; Columbia PicturesIn order to not be too Jewish in the popular culture of my youth, you had to be a funny man interested in someone from another background. For a funny Jewish woman, you had to wait until “The Nanny.”How much did it matter that as a boy I saw no Jewish couples on television? I’m not certain — draw your own conclusions about the fact that I married a non-Jew.But one thing I surely developed as a young Jewish culture vulture were the tools to enjoy work by antisemites. The most formative artists I loved as a kid, from Roald Dahl to Ice Cube to H.P. Lovecraft, have track records of hateful comments toward Jews. I knew this even then.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Prayer for the French Republic,’ Echoes of the Past

      by

      Joshua Harmon’s ambitious new play toggles between a contemporary Jewish family facing growing antisemitism and their relatives during World War II.The well of naïve young Americans being schooled in life, love, politics and croissants by effortlessly worldly French people is in no danger of running dry. The latest addition to this cohort is 20-year-old Molly, a New Yorker who has just met her distant cousins in Paris.Thankfully it is they, not sweet, passive Molly, who are the subjects of “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s ambitious and maddening, thought-provoking and schematic new play, directed by David Cromer at Manhattan Theater Club.At the very beginning, the matriarch, Marcelle Salomon Benhamou (an excellent Betsy Aidem), painstakingly explains her family’s genealogical ties to Molly (Molly Ranson). They are so complicated that Marcelle has to repeat them for the young woman’s benefit, and of course the audience’s as well. Even then, it takes much of the play’s three-hour running time and some toggling between 2016-17 and 1944-46 for the connections and their consequences to sink in.Harmon (“Significant Other,” “Admissions”) has set himself quite a challenge because Molly has arrived at a critical juncture for Marcelle; her husband, Charles (Jeff Seymour); and their 20-something children, Daniel (Yair Ben-Dor) and Elodie (Francis Benhamou). Daniel, who wears a kipa, has come home with a bloodied face after an antisemitic aggression. It is just another example of what Charles feels is an increasingly scary climate for Jews in France, a last straw that makes him want to move to Israel.Betsy Aidem, left, and Richard Topol as siblings in Joshua Harmon’s play, a Manhattan Theater Club production.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s the suitcase, or the coffin,” he says, referring to his ancestors’ forced wandering as he may be about to emulate it. (One of the play’s most fascinating aspects, though an underexplored one, is how these characters represent two strands of French Judaism: Marcelle’s Ashkenazi ancestors have been rooted in France for centuries, while Charles’s are Sephardic Jews who lived in North Africa for generations before relocating from Algeria in the 1960s.)The Benhamous have spirited arguments that have the urgency of life-or-death decisions: Should they stay or should they go? What does it mean to be Jewish in France? (The play’s title refers to a prayer that has been said in French synagogues since the early 19th century.)Some of the show’s concerns, including the temptation of appeasement via assimilation — a position embodied by Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Richard Topol) — echo those Harmon explored, in a much more comic vein, in his blistering debut, “Bad Jews,” from 2012. That show was dominated by a hurricane-like character named Daphna, and she now has a marginally milder-mannered relative in Elodie, who injects volatile energy every time she opens her mouth.Incidentally, Ranson was also in “Bad Jews” and once again finds herself on the receiving end of impassioned, and often wickedly funny, tirades and put-downs that have the biting rhythm of New York Jewish humor rather than a French sensibility. (A faux pas: The Benhamous buy croissants in an American-type cardboard box rather than the paper bags used in French boulangeries.)From left: Nancy Robinette, Kenneth Tigar, Peyton Lusk and Ari Brand in one of the scenes from the end of World War II.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll of this would be enough to pack any story, but Harmon also transports us to the end of World War II for several scenes with Marcelle and Patrick’s older relatives — their grandparents, Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Kenneth Tigar, both heart-wrenching), have somehow managed to survive in occupied Paris and held on to their piano store.The two narratives progressively start bleeding into each other, with Marcelle and Patrick’s father, Pierre (Peyton Lusk in the 1940s, Pierre Epstein in the 2010s), embodying the link, both literal and metaphorical, between past and present.Cromer, a technically astute and emotionally sensitive director, handles the back and forth as well as you might expect — he puts a stage turntable to evocative, if perhaps a little clichéd, use, for example. Still, it’s not hard to feel the show’s tension slacken when we leave the Benhamous. The play’s finale aims for the lofty and falls terribly short, but it does represent the family’s tragedy: they want to be part of a country that may never fully accept them.Prayer for the French RepublicThrough Feb. 27 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 3 hours. More