Daily Reyd
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• RD Feldman on the new RIETS Substack – The Ten Days of Teshuvah and the
Nature of Time • Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu: ‘On Simchat Torah we will be joyful,
not s...
22 hours ago
Jewish Humor Central is a daily publication to start your day with news of the Jewish world that's likely to produce a knowing smile and some Yiddishe nachas. It's also a collection of sources of Jewish humor--anything that brings a grin, chuckle, laugh, guffaw, or just a warm feeling to readers. Our posts include jokes, satire, books, music, films, videos, food, Unbelievable But True, and In the News. Some are new, and some are classics. We post every morning, Sunday through Friday. Enjoy!
Lewis was born Joseph Levitch on March 16, 1926 in Newark, the only child of two Borscht Belt performers—his father was a Catskills emcee, his mother a piano player. Young Joey was an occasional part of the act from age five. Still, his parents were often away on the road. They even missed his bar mitzvah. By 15, he’d taken a stage name and developed his own comedy routine, lip-synching to records played offstage.
Throughout his entire adult life and career, Lewis was a world-renowned humanitarian who supported fundraising for research into muscular dystrophy. Over nearly half a century, he raised over $2.6 billion in donations for the cause.Lewis’s big break came in 1946 in Atlantic City, where one of the singers on his bill dropped out at the last minute. As a replacement, Lewis suggested Dean Martin, a singer he’d met a couple of years earlier. When they’d shared a bill at a Manhattan nightclub, the two would playfully disrupt each other’s act, but in Atlantic City, they turned those ad-libbed disruptions into a planned routine, and the result shot them both to stardom as the most successful comedy duo of all time.
Weinstein captures Menashe’s turmoil with utmost sincerity and stunning control. Adding to its neorealist flavor, intimate cinematography places us in Menashe's cramped apartment, (where he can only feed his son soda and cake for breakfast) or in the middle of his tense meetings with The Ruv. And every now and then, a moment of meditation is offered by a gorgeous melodic motif (from a score credited to Aaron Martin and Daq Rosenqvist), inhaling and exhaling with just a few notes. Rarely has ordinary clumsiness been treated with such heart or beauty.
“Menashe” is tenderly paced and expressed, though it is also tense in its own way. And yet while the movie is full of a characters’ stress, it is not dominated by that feeling like so many other movies that show people squirming through the worst days of their lives. Instead, “Menashe” transcends its anxieties and becomes wholly comforting, like the closest that art can come to offering a big hug. What an extraordinary feeling to watch a movie that essentially wraps its arms around you and says, It’s okay, buddy. We’ve all been there.Menashe is now playing in theaters in many cities. Check your local listings for showtimes, and enjoy!
Artist's Rendering of the New Resorts World in Kiamesha Lake |
In the spring, Louis R. Cappelli, a Westchester-based real estate developer who has owned the complex for two decades, applied to the State Department of Environmental Conservation requesting that a portion of the property be designated a brownfield, or contaminated site. The former resort is now a hodgepodge of scores of crumbling buildings on hundreds of acres, land he says is laden with chemicals spilled by dry-cleaning and machine repair shops. Such a designation would make the property eligible for state funds to help with remediation of the soil and groundwater, a necessary first step, Mr. Cappelli says, to bring back the world-class resort.
Mr. Cappelli, who bought the place in 1999, more than a decade after the Grossinger family had ceased operations, envisions a grand future: a conference center, housing, spa and chalet-style lodging. It is a bet that piggybacks on the crowds that he hopes will come to the Resorts World Casino, a $750 million complex opening next year in another former borscht belt destination, the Concord Resort Hotel in nearby Kiamesha Lake.Here are two videos, one depicting the high hopes of area residents when the casino license was awarded to the hotel being built on the Concord property, and another report from a local TV station on the current state of the Grossinger's property.