Word: rabbis
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What the tribe finds offensive, the literary priesthood hails as original. Zuckerman is granted an audience at the Berkshire retreat of E.I. Lonoff, a celebrated carpenter of ironic Jewish stories. To the young writer, art replaces traditions, Lonoff supersedes all spiritual advisers as the chief rabbi of aesthetic purity, and the visit itself becomes a kind of bar mitzvah at which Zuckerman is accepted as a man and a writer...
...Moscow, the only monument was a single synagogue. About 100 old men, their Rembrandt faces limned by faith, prayed as their ancestors have done for thousands of years. Here Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, 34, deputy director of the commission, read from Lamentations...
...idea is marvelous: send a gentle, pious and very stupid young Polish rabbi to the U.S. in 1850 to take over a congregation in wicked San Francisco. Shlepping his way overland from Philadelphia, he will be tricked by con men, be friended by a lonesome bank robber, roasted by the desert sun, frozen by mountain storms, captured by Indians, and from sea to shining sea, he will cause wise men to marvel at his unparalleled and in exhaustible nitwittedness. With Gene Wilder as the woodenheaded rabbi and Harrison Ford as the lovable bank robber, what could go wrong...
...Frisco Kid just misses being very good, perhaps because although Wilder is funny and endearing, we never quite believe in the character he plays. He is not really a pure Polish rabbi, he is Gene Wilder doing bits. We are asked to laugh at all too human failings, as we laugh at Tevye's in Fiddler on the Roof, but through some lapse of direction or acting, we are never really shown a man. - John Skow
Greek Orthodox Church; the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., a Cleveland Baptist minister; David Preus, president of the American Lutheran Church; Claire Randall, general secretary of the National Council of Churches; Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee...