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Three terrorists threaten a writer in his living room. They demand of him a story. Frightened, the writer looks around and begins: “Three people are sitting in a room.” The terrorists are not amused. They want fiction, not fact. But producing fiction on demand proves difficult: “It’s hard to think up a story with a barrel of a loaded pistol pointed at your head,” the writer explains.
This short story, which is the first and title story of Etgar Keret’s new collection, sets the agenda for the following 34, all of which expose fiction as we produce it daily: in dreaming and day-dreaming, fantasizing and being delusional, lying, worrying, cursing and being depressed. → continue reading

I thought I was losing my visual cognition yesterday noon, at the Jewish Museum’s canteen, when a colleague bought a candy bar which looked like a snickers in every way except for the writing, which spelled STÜRMER. I turned out to be healthy. Consulting the website of chocolate makers Mars, Inc., I learned that STÜRMER-bars are part of a “happy day edition” campaign to boost sales during the European Football Championship. Sometimes, we get paranoid at the Jewish Museum, so I was quite relieved to find that not everybody associates STÜRMER (which means “striker”) with the notoriously anti-Semitic 1920s and 1930s publication…

Naomi Lubrich, Media

“German Jews are interesting,” remarks the Israeli director Arnon Goldfinger dryly in his award-winning documentary film Ha-Dira (הדירה 2011).

Gerda and Kurt Tuchler © Goldfinger / Tuchler family archive

Clearing out the apartment of his recently deceased Jewish-German grandmother Gerda in Tel Aviv is the point of departure of Goldfinger’s investigative journey through time. Until then, his grandmother’s German past was kept secret from her family. One can imagine therefore how perplexed the many relatives were when they stumbled upon some editions in the apartment of the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) from 1935. → continue reading