There is no way David Berman could have known the path he would set himself on in merely naming his band. As a young man at the University of Virginia, Berman began writing his songs: soliloquies left on friends’ answering machines, songs steeped in abstruse histories and personal revelations. Naming his band the Silver Jews,...

In the late ’90s, writer/director Harmony Korine (Kids, Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy) was the “it” boy of New York’s downtown scene. To escape the spotlight, he moved to London and then to Paris where he found darkness amid the City of Lights—during a difficult period, he decided that he never wanted to make another film. But,...

Summary

Fanny Brice, Molly Picon and Theda Bara were pioneering Jewish stars of film's Silent and Golden Eras. We imagine them as BFFs in these gorgeous fashion photos by Doron Gild.

The most highly anticipated comic book in years (aside from the sequel to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight) doesn’t feature superheroes, nor is it published by Marvel or DC. No, the title that’s got graphic novel-heads turned is RASL (pronounced “razzle”), a new quarterly black and white sci-fi noir series about a dimension-hopping art thief created...

It’s easy to mistake Etgar Keret for light reading. With Keret, four pages is an epic tale—most of his stories weigh in at five or six paragraphs. But brevity and levity are not the same, and nowhere is this more clear than in his fifth and latest collection, The Girl on the Fridge. Though rooted...

After the success of The Passion of the Christ, critics forecasted a Second Coming of Christian blockbusters. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the rapture. Eric Kohn investigates.

Dave Itzkoff on the two Jewish guys from New Jersey who
created the funniest Asian-American characters in contemporary cinema.

“Oh my God!! Listen to this!” Kristen Schaal squeals in her appealingly cartoonish voice. She jumps off her bed, which is covered by the kind of faded, old-fashioned quilt you’d only have if you, like, grew up on a farm—which she did. “This is how the Melbourne Comedy Festival is describing me: ‘She’s dorky and...