Haim Watzman
Yisrael and Shalom,
In response to your comments on my post “Mahmoud Darwish, Zionist Poet,” if you read more carefully, you’ll see that:
a) I don’t put down the Jew, but rather express my admiration for Greenberg’s poetry;
b) I except myself from Darwish’s politics, while expressing admiration for his poetry;
c) I suggest that both poets are [...]

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Recommendation: Check out the short animation films created by students in the animation program at Sapir College in Sderot–including “Shadow and Man,” by my daughter Mizmor. I wrote about this unique incubator of young Israeli creativity and talent in my Jerusalem Report column “Animated Identities.”

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Haim Watzman
I’ve got some things in common with Natalie du Toit, a South African athlete competing in this year’s Olympics. We’re both swimmers. And we’re both amputees.
That’s where the similarity ends. Du Toit swims every 1,000 meters of her ten-kilometer race far faster than I can swim 500 meters on a good day. And [...]

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Haim Watzman
What’s a Zionist to make of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet whose funeral today in Ramallah will be a celebration of both Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian culture?
Darwish was a refugee. His family came from the village of Birwa, near Acre, and fled to Lebanon in the wake of Israel’s War of Independence. They [...]

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Haim Watzman
The title Amir Gutfreund chose for his novel Our Holocaust has a quadruple meaning. “Our Holocaust” is the Holocaust of the survivors who populate his story; it’s the Holocaust of Hans Underman, the German scholar who intrudes on the story; it’s the Holocaust of the narrator and his childhood friend, Efi, who appropriate the [...]

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Following Haim’s recommendation, I went to see Ari Folman’s documentary, “Waltz With Bashir,” on the 1982 Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.
Haim is right that every Israeli should see “Waltz.” But so should anyone elsewhere whose country has marched thoughtlessly into war, or for that matter, anyone interested in the art of film. [...]

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In the Holocaust, the Jews were, uniquely, the victims of a horrible, unprecedented crime. In the Holocaust, the crime committed by the Germans against the Jews shows how fragile the boundary between humanity and beastiality is and how human beings are capable of committing unimaginable crimes. Both those statements are true, but a difference in [...]

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Haim Watzman
Last month I published an essay in the Jewish Chronicle of London in which I asserted that something is missing from most of the literature being produced by and about Jews today: “What I seek are books that, without being bound by conventions of religion and history, nevertheless use familiarity with and respect for [...]

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Haim Watzman
Ice People is ostensibly a documentary about geologists in Antarctica, but beyond than that it’s a work of art about the continent’s landscapes. More than informing us about south pole science, director Anne Ahgion tells us something important about the processes of artistic and scientific creation.

In a central scene, the four geologists she [...]

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Haim Watzman
I admit that I have a hard time with the genre represented by The Ran Quadruplets, screened last night at the Jerusalem Film Festival, whether in literature, on film, or on stage. I mean stories about upper-crust Israelis in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area who are primarily concerned with having lots of sex. Perhaps [...]

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Haim Watzman
When my son informed me Saturday night that he was taking all three of my pairs of walking shorts back to the army with him, I was left scratching my head. Why would a commando-in-training need three pairs of walking shorts? He wasn’t telling me, and I resigned myself to the fact that I’ll [...]

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Haim Watzman
Robert Altman’s Nashville was my favorite movie when I was a college student. I saw it time after time and dragged many friends to it as well. So when my daughter, a film school student, brought it home on the recommendation of one of her teachers, I was curious to see what my reaction [...]

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