"But as I look ahead and think about what may still be relevant in fashion years from now, I think back to eras in style that were defined by freedom."

"I am so happy I was young in the ‘70s and participated in the women’s movement and all it meant. My generation behaved as if it had invented freedom. That was a moment in time, between the discovery of the pill and the arrival of AIDS, when sex was carefree and fun. For design inspiration then, we looked 40 years back, to the 1930s. We loved its furniture and architecture, all minimalist, and the light style of the clothing."

Writes Diane von Furstenberg.

ADDED: Her penultimate paragraph is "Who saw this coming? An icon of the ‘70s: Andy Warhol," which was especially funny to me because as I was reading, I was planning to search for "Diane von Furstenberg" in my copy of "The Andy Warhol Diaries." She's all over the place in there. Sample:

Bianca [Jagger] was there. I thought she’d already left for Paris. She was saying out loud everything I was thinking— what two bitches Diane Von Furstenberg and Sue Mengers were— and she said, “At least Sue can be funny sometimes.” Sue was on her way to Europe to meet her husband, who only lets her see him once every couple of months, I think.

Another one:

And Diane Von Furstenberg was there and she lives in Eleanor Lambert’s building so she invited Bob and me down for dinner and to watch Holocaust. So we went down and Diane’s mother was there, and Marina Cicogna. Diane’s mother had been in Auschwitz, and when the concentration camps came on she was laughing— she said that they made it so much more glamorous than it was when she was there, that all the women had crewcuts and it was a lot more crowded, that where the movie had 20 people there were really 300,000. And it was weird to be seeing this with Marina Cicogna whose family was so involved with Mussolini. Before it was over, Diane was ready to go out, she was calling for a limousine.

And:

There was a mob scene around where Barry Diller and I were sitting because John Travolta sat down two inches away. His eyes are just like— dyed— blue-green. I mean, really deep blue. And he has the most beautiful smile. His teeth must be polished every day. And his skin is beautiful. And he’s so nice. And he says nice things to everyone. And he was talking the most to this girl he thought was with us, but she was a DVF groupie. And Diane is so desperate to be recognized that if one person says, “You’re Diane Von Furstenberg, I love you,” she says, “Come with me,” and she makes them follow her around for the rest of the night so that she can have a following, and then she gives them presents— she carries lipsticks and compacts with her to give out, and she autographs them.

And:

Sondra looked great in this beautiful bright yellow silk dress— the color I used on the Debbie Harry portrait— and it made her look so young, eight years old, and we asked her who made it because it was really pretty and she said, “You’ll fall over if I tell you.” So she told us and Bob and I did fall over— it was a Diane Von Furstenberg. Off the rack for $ 120. It really was pretty.

Also:

Diane Von Furstenberg was having a party for her boyfriend, Alain Elkann, who was married to the Agnelli daughter. He’s French. He’s written four books, and in France if you’re an intellectual, you don’t have to work, they just treat you like this big—“ intellectual.” Like Loulou de la Falaise’s husband who’s supposed to be a novelist but I don’t think he’s ever finished anything. So Diane’s going the Marilyn Monroe route of marrying one person for the name, and now she’s going with this guy who’ll write books about her.

"Of course all this dorky revolutionary-aesthete chatter about tearing down barriers and storming citadels is meant to get museum-goers’ pulses racing."

"After which everybody will be too revved up to notice that Art Spiegelman is constitutionally incapable of making a single mark with any power."

TNR's Jed Perl is very jazzed up about trashing Art Spiegelman.

"Who knew that the world-famous sex therapist was sent to Switzerland with a group of German-Jewish children in 1938, when she was ten years old..."

"... and was treated like a servant there? Or that her entire family was killed by the Nazis? Or that she moved to Palestine as a teen-ager and became a sniper in the Haganah? Who knew that her success as a radio-show host was due to a vow she made to herself to 'repair the world' because she survived the Nazis, when more than a million Jewish children didn’t?"

"Iran foreign minister Zarif tweets happy Jewish new year."

Reports BBC.com:

He then had a response from Christine Pelosi, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives, who said: "Thanks. The new year would be even sweeter if you would end Iran's Holocaust denial, sir."

He replied: "Iran never denied it. The man who was perceived to be denying it is now gone. Happy New Year."

BUT: "Iran Plots Revenge, U.S. Says/Officials Say Intercepted Message to Militants Orders Reprisals in Iraq if Syria Hit."

"It was all bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic... You will never see it. No one will ever see it..."

"... because I am embarrassed at the poor work," said Jerry Lewis about his 1972 movie "The Day the Clown Cried," a drama about a clown forced to entertain children in a Nazi death camp. But there's a bit of video from it on YouTube now. Was it really so completely horrible? Even if it was in the end, a terrible idea — but wasn't it basically the idea in "Life Is Beautiful"? — can't we see it now, with the understanding that it was a mistake and extract the good and learn from the lesson about what badness is?

It ended with a notoriously cringe-inducing scene of cavorting clown Lewis leading the laughing kids into the gas chamber. Overcome by the grief of what he is being forced to do, he chooses to stay in the gas chamber with them as they are killed.

Let us see it. Of all the Nazi-related things to be ashamed of... maybe this excessive shame about bad art is shameful. Or is it the other way around... and more bad art should be destroyed before anyone can see it?

"Why would the Bronx High School of Science invest not in electron microscopes but in a museum of Jewish history when 62 percent of our kids are Asian?"

Winnie Hu in the NYT quotes Valerie J. Reidy, the principal of the Bronx High School of Science. The school, Hu notes, "started in 1938 as an all-boys school that served primarily Eastern European Jewish families in the Bronx, [but] its nearly 3,000 students today are more likely to be Asian and come from Queens and across the city."

While many schools teach Holocaust courses, few if any have assembled a trove of 900 artifacts, most of which were donated by alumni and local residents or bought at auctions over more than three decades. The 1,000-square-foot museum will include three exhibition galleries, an archive and a classroom. It is just steps away from the boys’ locker room that has been in the spotlight since three students on the boy’s track team were accused this winter of hazing a freshman teammate....

The Holocaust museum was inspired by the late Stuart Elenko, a teacher who brought an unusual level of passion to his course on the Holocaust. In 1978, Mr. Elenko started displaying Holocaust artifacts in a former microfilm room in the back of the school library....

“I think Mr. Elenko’s idea originally was to make history come alive for his students,” said Sophia Sapozhnikov, who currently teaches the Holocaust course. She noted that Mr. Elenko even held mock Nuremberg trials in his classroom to encourage students to explore the meaning of justice and moral responsibility.

Obviously, any high school — even if it specializes in science — must teach history, and having on site a significant historical archive — of any kind — can orient the school's history teaching toward methodologies that parallel or resemble the methodologies of science.

Is it a problem that the archive represents the alumni, rather than the current students? What is this concept of representation? In present-day education, we might tend to assume that each group is served by learning about itself, so that the black students deserve intense coverage of black history and so forth.

Perhaps the most scientific approach is to study things other than oneself, something new that requires exploration. But in that light, a problem might be that the subject of the Holocaust dictates such a strong point of view that students will fear that any sort of experimental attitude will be punished. Just last week, we saw a teacher in New York get into trouble over an assignment that required students to compose their own Nazi propaganda.

Presumably, the real purpose of the Holocaust archive is to teach "the meaning of justice and moral responsibility" — as the teachers of the Holocaust course have done over the years. That's something that public school teachers can do well, though they might do poorly. If I were teaching morality to very intelligent teenagers — which is what the students at the Bronx High School of Science are — I would want them to study problems that make it harder to tell what's right and wrong, that build up their powers of moral reasoning. I would avoid the material that lends itself to indoctrination. But I see the dangers there too. If everything is in the gray area, you're teaching that morality is a matter to be determined individually. Some things are unquestionably wrong, and that's a foundational lesson.

Have you seen "Room 237" — the movie about what people think about the movie "The Shining"?

It was released for streaming — watch it here — at the same time that it opened in theaters. We watched last night. It will be quite fun for you, I think, if you've seen the movie "The Shining" — even if you're not obsessed with the movie — if you're interested in the way a work of art can draw people in and open up the doors of perception. With the revered genius director Kubrick cramming visual details in every shot, a viewer's mind can run wild with theories. The viewers' response to the movie parallels the Jack Nicholson character's response to the hotel. How crazy are these people? What do those cans of Calumet Baking Powder really mean?



Was Kubrick deliberately nudging you to think that the movie is really about the genocide of the Native Americans? Start looking for the other clues. It's amazing. It's a maze. You could get lost in there.

Was Kubrick trying to drive Stephen King crazy, like by making Jack's Volkswagen Beetle yellow instead of red and then later showing a crushed red Beetle under that semi in the snow?

Kubrick does these dissolves between scenes that have some interesting superimposed images — liked the peaked hotel roof and the ladder in the lobby — and the movie has several instances of characters walking backward — Shelley Duvall retreating up the stairs and swinging a baseball bat at Jack and the little boy retracing his steps in the snow to escape — and there's the backwards writing — "redrum" — so maybe Kubrick would like us to project the movie backwards and forwards simultaneously on one screen? Think what you could learn! All the secrets!

Well, I learned that Kubrick likes symmetry and puts things smack in the middle of the screen, which increases the likelihood of interesting combinations if you project backwards over forwards, but these people who obsess about the movie think Kubrick was trying to say something important. And what a coincidence! The message is about that person's central obsession — the slaughter of the Indians, the Holocaust, sex... 

"With fewer than 200,000 Jews among Germany's 82 million people, few Germans born after World War II know any Jews or much about them."

"To help educate postwar generations, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Berlin features a Jewish man or woman seated inside a glass box for two hours a day through August to answer visitors' questions about Jews and Jewish life. The base of the box asks: 'Are there still Jews in Germany?'"

Performance art... what can't it do?

Asked "How old are you?," the 7-year-old said "What difference does it make? I’m older than you, anyway."

"Why do you think you’re older?" Rabbi Schacter asked.

“Because you cry and laugh like a child,” Lulek replied. “I haven’t laughed in a long time, and I don’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?”

"Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness."

"Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear."