Word: johnings
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Walsh does, however, find himself at the center of a truly remarkable rendition of the play’s Pyramus and Thisbe scene. Shakespeare’s purposely atrocious play-within-the-play reaches almost sublime levels of comic absurdity, and is the only scene that truly succeeds. John Kuntz—who plays a caricatured version of Peter Quince to perfection—begins the scene by acting out the play with action figures. His madcap energy fully sustains this feat until the other actors take over with even more delightfully embarrassing antics. Walsh’s Pyramus performs...
...Tulia Zevi, another top Italian-Jewish leader, says that even John Paul's visit to the synagogue 24 years ago was met with some hesitation at first. "There were very mixed feelings, excitement but also skepticism. But we also understood it was a very big event," Zevi recalled. One of the other Jewish leaders who attended that 1986 service will also likely be revisiting his memories this weekend. Toaff was five years older than John Paul when he greeted him on the steps of the synagogue on that spring day. When John Paul died in 2005, the rabbi...
When Pope John Paul II stepped into Rome's central synagogue on April 13, 1986, the man in white was met by a thunderclap of applause. After centuries of Jews suffering through pogroms, ghettos, Nazi death camps and arm's-length-at-best cohabitation with Christians, the first-ever papal visit to a Jewish house of worship - entering the synagogue side by side with Rome's avuncular chief Rabbi Elio Toaff - was much more than a photo op. It was a shared embrace to begin to heal the wounds of history...
...Still, the momentous visit 24 years ago, during which John Paul referred to Jews as Christians' "older brothers," could never fully erase that history. And indeed, when John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, crosses the Tiber River on Sunday to visit that same synagogue, he will be dogged by a new dispute about the past: the controversy over the Vatican's decision last month to push for possible sainthood for World War II-era Pope Pius XII, whom some Jewish groups and scholars blame for not doing enough to try to halt the Holocaust. Because of this and other tensions...
...While Di Segni has indicated he will speak about the Pius case during the service on Sunday, it is unclear whether Benedict will mention it, or details of his own experience as a teenager in Germany during World War II. In contrast to John Paul's willingness to talk about the war years, Benedict has offered scant recollections of his forced conscription into the Hitler Youth group. "I believe every elderly German has something worth telling Jews, and maybe also asking forgiveness," Pacifici says. (Read: "Benedict's Pope: Should Pius XII Become a Saint...