Source link

The post Five injured in Russia’s shelling of Chuhuiv district appeared first on Ukraine Intelligence.

“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before,” Danny Burstein told me. “It’s not only about a family — a Jewish family that moves from Brooklyn to L.A. It’s also about the creation of a piece of art.”

Burstein was talking about the new Broadway play Pictures From Home, in which he portrays the real-life Brooklyn-born Jewish photographer Larry Sultan, who starting in the early 1980s spent a decade photographing and interviewing his aging parents at their California home.

The result was a highly influential 1992 book of the same title that used the photographs and interviews, as well as stills from childhood home movies, to create a compelling portrait of the pluses and minuses of American family life. The play spans Sultan’s creative years with his parents, and beyond. 

“The thing that inspires me as far as being an actor is to try to be different every single time,” Burstein said, speaking over the phone from his Manhattan home. “And this was completely different.“

“Sometimes art is beautiful. And sometimes it’s messy. And sometimes it’s quiet and sometimes it’s volatile. And the play captures all those things. And it’s in a most unusual way.”

Burstein, 58, is co-starring in the play with Nathan Lane as his father, a traveling salesman who became a vice president of the Schick Safety Razor Company, and Zoë Wanamaker as his mother, a successful seller of real estate. The family moved to California in 1948, when Sultan was 2; he died in 2009 at age 63.  The book has been adapted for the stage by Sharr White; the director is Bartlett Sher. 

Nathan Lane and Danny Burstein as Irving and Larry Sultan. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Over the course of the play, Sultan gets to know his parents in a deeper way,” Burstein said.

“He loved them desperately and wanted to get to know them better. And wanted to get to know them on their terms. He wanted to see them at their deepest. He wanted to reveal the intimacy of their relationship, their truest thoughts. And that could be difficult. He was there all the time, and so what happened was he got it all — the veneer of regular life and then the depth, the messiness, the arguments. And the silliness of life.“

“They reveal themselves — their triumphs and their foibles. It’s a simple story but a very profound one, and very beautiful.”

In the last 31 years, Burstein has performed in 19 Broadway shows, beginning in January 1992, when he played both a porter and a constable in a farce called A Little Hotel on the Side, which The New York Times called “a complete flop.”

In 2016, he was a Tony-nominated as Tevye in a revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Most recently, he won the 2020 Tony Award as best featured actor for Moulin Rouge: The Musical. His total to date: seven Tony nominations, including his one victory.

Burstein said he prepared for the role of Sultan by studying hours of interview tapes. “I know he was methodical. I know he was kind. I know he was funny. I took as much of him as I could and put him into the show,” Burstein said. “I try to honor his legacy as much as possible. I thought he was a brilliant artist who captured the world, sometimes in one photograph, captured in great depth in a photograph. His legacy is looking for different truths in a single photograph.

”His father would say, that’s a picture of whatever — your mom. And he would say, yes, but can you see, she looks like this, and there’s a depth to it, and the background is this. 

“He marveled at all the, in his words, different truths that could be found in a single picture.”

Early in the play, Sultan’s father talks about the antisemitism he encountered working for a clothing store in mid-1940s Manhattan. 

Danny Burstein, Zoe Wanamaker and Nathan Lane in Pictures From Home. Image by

“That’s one of the first moments in the play, as I’m interviewing them,  where they are relaxed and reminiscing about their pasts,” Burstein said. “They are each talking into a tape recorder and telling me about their lives and how they got to California, how difficult it was for them. The father, Irving, worked near Radio City, and it was an English clothing store, and he had to change his name to John Sutton as opposed to Irving Sultan because John Sutton could pass. And he was disgusted at the way people spoke about Jews at the time freely because they didn’t know that he was one. And he says he wanted to punch them in the mouth.

“But there was a greater good. He had a wife and two kids. He had to take care of them. That’s what was paramount at the moment. And it reminds me of so many Jews and other people of different ethnicities who have to sometimes swallow it because there is something greater that has to go on. They know they have to pay their bills. But at the same time you see the effect it has on them. And it cuts deep.”

Burstein grew up in New York City. His parents split up when he was 2 months old. “My biological father is Jewish and my stepfather is Jewish,” he told me. “My mother was raised Catholic in Costa Rica but she is actually Sephardic — her relatives came from Spain. We’re more cultural [Jews] than anything, and I’m proud of what Jews stand for.”

“And I always think about the play as being very Talmudic. Because Larry Sultan is actually someone who’s just asking question after question and trying to find answers for these very deep questions about life, about what is important in life.”  

Late in the play, the photographer must confront the increasingly imminent mortality of his aging parents. Sultan, Burstein said,  “wants to hold on to them forever.”

In the last three years, Burstein himself has twice experienced  the reality of human frailty. In December 2020, his wife of 20 years, the Broadway star Rebecca Luker, died tragically at age 59 of ALS. “There is a void,” he wrote in an essay for The Hollywood Reporter. “Where once there was sunlight.” Nine months earlier, in the first days of the COVID epidemic,  he was hospitalized with a severe case of the disease. Have his own experiences influenced how he approaches that scene?

“No matter who you are as an actor,” he said, “you reach back for different emotions in your life that will help you understand the depth of what that character is going through at particular moments, whether they’re happy ones or sad ones or angry ones. You relate those kinds of moments to those in your own life, to understand them, to approach them in an honest way. So of course there is some of that in there. But mostly I’m thinking that he’s realizing that he will miss his parents very, very much and that I thankfully have both my parents still in my life.

“But it’s also easy to pretend that I would be bereft if I lost either Zoë or Nathan, because I love them both so much.”

“Or even just thinking about the time that we have now and the time passing. That is enough for me to imagine what I need to imagine, and the emotion just naturally comes.”

And speaking of the passage of time, that is also very much what Pictures From Home is about. 

“What he learns is not only do his parents pass away, but that his time is finite as well,” Burstein said. “There’s a beautiful speech at the end of the play, after he all of a sudden is diagnosed with this rare form of cancer that is unclassifiable. And he can’t help thinking ‘Really? Now?’”

The post For a Broadway star, another memorable Jewish character — miles away from Tevye appeared first on The Forward.

KAHRAMANMARAS/ANTAKYA, Turkey (Reuters) -President Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday admitted to problems with his government’s initial response to a devastating earthquake in southern Turkey amid anger from those left destitute and frustrated over the slow arrival of rescue teams.

Erdogan, who contests an election in May, said on a visit to the disaster zone that operations were now working normally and promised no one would be left homeless, as the combined death toll across Turkey and neighbouring Syria climbed above 11,000.

But across a swathe of southern Turkey, people sought temporary shelter and food in freezing winter weather, and waited in anguish by piles of rubble where family and friends may lie buried. Rescuers were still digging out some people alive. Others were found dead.

There were similar scenes and complaints in neighbouring Syria, where the impact of Monday’s huge quake extended to.

The death toll from both countries was expected to increase as hundreds of collapsed buildings in many cities have become tombs for people who had been asleep in the homes when the quake hit in the early morning.

In the Turkish city of Antakya, dozens of bodies, some covered in blankets and sheets and others in body bags, were lined up on the ground outside a hospital.

Families in southern Turkey and in Syria spent a second night in the freezing cold.

Many in the disaster zone had slept in their cars or in the streets under blankets, fearful of going back into buildings shaken by the 7.8 magnitude tremor – Turkey’s deadliest since 1999 – and by a second powerful quake hours later.

“Where are the tents, where are food trucks?” said Melek, 64, in Antakya, saying she had not seen any rescue teams. “We survived the earthquake, but we will die here due to hunger or cold here.”

The death toll rose to 8,574 in Turkey on Wednesday. In Syria – already devastated by 11 years of war – the confirmed toll climbed to more than 2,500 overnight, according to the government and a rescue service operating in the rebel-held northwest.

Turkish authorities released video of rescued survivors, including a young girl in pyjamas, and an older man covered in dust, an unlit cigarette clamped between his fingers as he was pulled from the debris.

In Syria’s Aleppo, staff at the Al-Razi hospital attended to a man with bruised eyes who said more than a dozen relatives including his father and mother were killed when the building they were in collapsed.

“We were 16 and 13 of us died. My brother, one-and-a-half-year-old niece and I got out. Thank God,” he said.

“My father, my mother, my brother, his wife and their four children. The wife and two kids of my brother who got out with me also died.”

Erdogan, who has declared a state of emergency in 10 provinces and sent in troops to help, arrived in Kahramanmaras to view the damage and see the rescue and relief effort.

Speaking to reporters, with the wail of ambulance sirens in the background, Erdogan said there had been problems with roads and airports but “we are better today”.

“We will be better tomorrow and later. We still have some issues with fuel … but we will overcome those too,” he said.

However, the disaster poses a challenge to him in the May election that was already set to be the toughest fight of his two decades in power.

Any perception that the government is failing to address the disaster properly could hurt his prospects. On the other hand, analysts say, he could rally national support around the crisis response and strengthen his position.

The quake toppled thousands of buildings including hospitals, schools and apartment blocks, injured tens of thousands, and left countless people homeless.

Entire streets in Kahramanmaras, near the epicentre, were reduced to rubble, drone footage showed, with plumes of smoke rising from fires across the town. Hundreds of tents were set up as shelter in a sporting venue.

Reuters journalists saw around 50 bodies draped in blankets on the floor of a sports hall.

Kneeling on the floor, a woman wailed with grief and embraced a body wrapped in a blanket

Turkish authorities say some 13.5 million people were affected in an area spanning roughly 450 km (280 miles) from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east. In Syria, it killed people as far south as Hama, 250 km from the epicentre.

‘UNDER THE RUBBLE’

In Syria, the relief effort is complicated by a conflict that has partitioned the nation.

Residents in Syrian government-held territory have described the authorities’ response as slow, with some areas receiving more help than others. State news agency SANA quoted Hussein Makhlouf, minister of local administration and environment, as saying the state had opened 180 shelters for displaced people.

In Jandaris in northern Syria, rescue workers and residents said dozens of buildings had collapsed.

Standing around the wreckage of what had been a 32-apartment building, relatives of people who had lived there said they had seen no one removed alive. A lack of heavy equipment to lift large concrete slabs was impeding rescue efforts.

Rescue workers have struggled to reach some of the worst-hit areas, held back by destroyed roads, poor weather and a lack of heavy equipment. Some areas are without fuel and electricity.

A rescue service operating in insurgent-held northwest Syria said the number of dead had climbed to more than 1,280 and more than 2,600 were injured. The Syrian health minister said the number of dead in government-held areas rose to 1,250.

Across the street from an Aleppo apartment building reduced to rubble, 25-year-old Youssef has waited for two days for news of his father, mother, brother, sister and her son.

He said he had heard their voices, and spoken to them, but poorly equipped rescue workers had not been able to reach them.

“I talked to them and heard their voice, but unfortunately as you can see here they’re very slow at work and they don’t have enough equipment,” he said.

The 49-year-old journalist Andrzej Poczobut was critical of President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime.

Kyiv-based Ayn Rand Center, active in the global freedom movement, acknowledged those who have made the greatest contributions to advancing liberty in Ukraine.

The chancellor said Germany had provided 12 billion ($12.9 billion) euros of aid to Ukraine in 2022 and would continue to offer support in 2023.

Fed official Neel Kashkari focuses on grocery prices when thinking about the pace of price rises.

stockcreations/Shutterstock

• A Fed official has an interesting metric for gauging inflation: the price of frozen lasagna.
• Milwaukee Fed president Neel Kashkari told CNN Stouffer’s frozen lasagna has increased from $16 to around $21.
• Kashkari said it wasn’t impossible to avoid an economic downturn while taming inflation, but expressed doubts.

A Fed official thinks he can tell inflation is still too high for interest-rate cuts using an unconventional metric: the price of frozen lasagna.

In an interview with CNN, Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said he pays attention to the price of groceries, particularly Stouffer’s frozen lasagna. 

“I pay attention to grocery prices,” Kashkari said. “There’s this large tray of lasagna that I used to buy that used to cost $16.00, now it’s around $21.00.”

“That’s my own little measuring stick of how inflation is going.”

Kashkari’s drawing attention to grocery prices highlights a stubborn trend in living costs that is helping keep interest rates elevated, with the consumer price index (CPI) for food still in double digits.

Prices for some of America’s most popular food items have skyrocketed amid supply chain disruptions, with eggs jumping 60% in 2022 and cheeseburgers and steaks at risk of a surge due to a drop in the number of beef cows.  

In his State of the Union address though, President Joe Biden highlighted food inflation was coming down, with BLS data showing consistent monthly declines in food CPI since July. 

Still, sentiment among policymakers has turned hawkish since an unexpectedly strong jobs report released Friday brought unemployment down to the lowest rate since 1969, limiting the Fed’s scope for premature rate cuts and knocking back optimism in markets. 

Kashkari said the federal funds rate could now go as high as 5.4%, which is higher than general consensus among the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of 5.1%, and would require three 25 basis point hikes this year.

His comments add to those of Raphael Bostic to Bloomberg, who suggested a higher peak for the benchmark rate if labor market strength was persistent.  

Kashkari told CNN that while it isn’t “impossible” that price rises could come down without the labor market taking a hit or the economy slipping into recession, but said there “wasn’t a great track record of pulling that off.”

Stouffer’s didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment on the price of its Lasagna.

This article is part of our morning briefing. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox each weekday. Kyrie Irving deletes apology for sharing antisemitic movie   Fresh controversy: After the NBA star was briefly suspended by the Brooklyn Nets in November for sharing a link to an antisemitic movie, prominent voices around the league suggested he be reinstated after he posted an apology six days after the initial post. Three months later, Irving has been traded to the Dallas Mavericks — and has taken down the apology.   Family ties: Irving addressed the issue at a press conference Tuesday. “I delete a lot of things all the time, and it’s no disrespect to anyone within the community. Just living my life,” he said. Adding that he has Jewish family members, Irving asked: “Did the media know that beforehand, when they called me that word, antisemitic? No. Did they know anything about my family?”   Cuban crisis: Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavericks, is Jewish, and was cautiously critical of Irving at the height of his antisemitism scandal. The likelihood that Irving would be traded to a franchise with a Jewish owner was nearly a coin flip, with 13 of the 30 NBA teams principally owned by Jewish people. Cuban, who called Irving a “transcendental” basketball player after news of the trade broke, has yet to comment on the apology’s removal.   Room for growth: “I don’t think Kyrie has got a bad heart,” Cuban said at the time of Irving’s antisemitism scandal, adding, “We all make mistakes and we all learn from it and I hope Kyrie does the same thing.” Irving’s first game as a Maverick is expected to be tonight.   Read the story ➤   Related… A timeline of Kyrie Irving’s antisemitism controversy Meet the fans who wore “fight antisemitism” shirts to protest Kyrie Irving ALSO FROM THE FORWARD A puppet portrays the late Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero during a performance by the Bread and Puppet Theater at its home base on a 250-acre farm in Vermont. (Garrett MacLean) In savaging the Israeli military, has a legendary puppet theater finally gone too far? The plight of Palestinians has been a longtime focus for the decidedly anti-war Bread and Puppet Theater, which has performed shows about atrocities in Vietnam, Central America, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. But for some, the politics of their latest show, which featured declarations that “Palestine must be free from the river to the sea,” felt too extreme. One critic said the group is promoting “misleading and one-sided narratives,” and some members of the troupe have dropped out of productions. Read the story ➤ First person | Here’s what I learned counseling Hasidic special needs children: Michael Fox — no, not that Michael Fox —  is a trained psychologist and speaks Yiddish. But when he began working with Hasidic children, he faced unexpected challenges. Coming from outside the community, he writes, many “considered people like me a spiritual threat to their children. I was clearly a Jew, but I represented an alternative way of expressing my Jewishness — and they didn’t want their children exposed to it.” Read his essay ➤   But wait, there’s more… Joe Rogan, who hosts one of America’s most popular podcasts, said in a recent episode that “the idea that Jewish people aren’t into money is ridiculous. That’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza.” Rogan has a long history of antisemitic remarks. In January, he referred to George Soros, the Jewish billionaire and Holocaust survivor, as “an evil person in a Batman movie.” We got sneak peeks at two Super Bowl commercials starring Jewish actors Paul Rudd and Alicia Silverstone. (No, it’s not a Clueless reunion.) Our culture critic PJ Grisar says the ads may hold the key to eternal youth. As part of Jewish Genetic Screening Awareness Week, a nonprofit is hosting events on college campuses and at local JCCs. ABOUT LAST NIGHT Your humble morning newsletter host with Mandy Patinkin Tuesday night. (Staci Levine) In the town of Zelienople, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh, the actor Mandy Patinkin stood on a sparse and small stage. His friend, Adam Ben-David, sat at the piano, and Patinkin – in a black shirt, black jeans and slip-on sneakers – leaned on a nearby wooden chair. “Pretty expensive set, huh?” he jokingly told an intimate crowd of 300 gathered at the Strand Theater.   The Tuesday night stop was one of 13 that Patinkin is making up and down the East Coast, a resumption of one of Patinkin’s treasured pre-pandemic rituals: performing concerts of Broadway show tunes and Yiddish songs during down time between movie and television projects. He belted out Yiddish renditions of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” and Mary Poppins’ classic melody “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” At one point, while telling a story about his childhood shul in Chicago, he scanned the audience. “For any non-Jews here,” he said, “Google davening.” Spread the word! Invite someone to sign up for this newsletter.👇 Share with a friend ➤ WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY Residents search for earthquake victims and survivors amidst the rubble in Syria, near the border with Turkey. (Getty) 🌍  Israel confirmed that an earthquake hit the country Tuesday night, with 3.5 magnitude tremors reported in Jerusalem and in some areas in the occupied West Bank. This comes days after two massive earthquakes in Turkey and Syria killed at least 11,000 people, one of this century’s worst natural disasters to date. (Times of Israel)    🇺🇦   Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a surprise visit to the U.K. in just his second trip outside Ukraine since the war began nearly a year ago. Zelelnskyy, who arrived in London this morning, is scheduled to speak in front of Parliament, and meet with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and King Charles. (CNN)   🇺🇦  Back on the warfront, the chief rabbi of Odessa is raising money for equipment to convert car batteries to makeshift heaters and generators for some 400 Holocaust survivors who remain in the city. “Someone over 90 cannot start life over as a refugee,” he said. (JTA)   ⏲️  Germany’s top Nazi hunter is racing against the clock to prosecute five cases before the remaining suspects, many of whom are now in their late 90s, die. “Murder is not subject to a statute of limitations,” he said. (Reuters)   🕍   Archaeologists in the southern Spanish town of Utrera uncovered a 14th-century synagogue hidden within a building that had been converted into a church, hospital and most recently a bar, they announced on Tuesday. (AP)   📕  Barbra Streisand has written a memoir, My Name is Barbra, that is set to publish on Nov. 7th. According to the description, it will include, among other things, the behind-the-scenes story of how, with Yentl, she became the first woman to write, produce, direct and star in a major motion picture. (Twitter)   Shiva call ➤  Charles Silverstein, a therapist whose 1973 testimony persuaded the American Psychiatric Association to reassess its classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, died at 87. What else we’re reading ➤  Why those Super Bowl ads for Jesus make Jews nervous … For this yeshiva graduate, teaching Palestinian kids to wrestle is a political act … Meet the first Hasidic woman to be a New York State Supreme Court judge. ON THE CALENDAR Gabbi Stein, the first Orthodox Eagle Scout, sees the group as an extension of her Judaism. (Courtesy) On this day in history (1910): Publisher W.D. Boyce established the Boy Scouts of America. In 2001, the Reform movement prohibited synagogues from hosting Boy Scout troops until the organization lifted its ban on openly gay employees, which it did in 2015. In February 2019, the organization rebranded itself as BSA, and began allowing female scouts to earn badges — paving the way in 2020 for Gabbi Stein to become the first Orthodox Jewish girl to become an Eagle Scout.   Last year on this day, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker testified before Congress about being held hostage at his Texas synagogue. “I am grateful to be here,” he said. “To be honest, I’m grateful to be anywhere.” In honor of National Iowa Day, check out these 8 Jewish facts about the Hawkeye State. VIDEO OF THE DAY

If you walked out of a movie theater in 1981, after having watched Mel Brooks’ epic comedy The History of the World, Part 1, you likely thought Reagan might still be president when the sequel arrived. Well, it took a little longer than that. Brooks, now 96, is set to release The History of the World, Part 2, in March as a“four-night event” on Hulu. The satire debuts, appropriately, on Purim. Expect cameos from Sigmund Freud, Jesus, and Seth Rogen as a biblical Noah who, for some reason, decided to save two of every breed of dog – except for pugs. (For pugs, he saved three.)    — Thanks to Rebecca Salzhauer and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

The post Fresh controversy: Kyrie Irving deletes antisemitism scandal apology appeared first on The Forward.