Rebecca Kaplan Boroson
We’ll always have ‘Casablanca’
Time goes by — film turns 70 this year with Jewish backstories
Aliens and robots come and go in Hollywood — and a jaded audience, judging by dwindling box-office returns, wishes they would mainly go.
But “Casablanca” is still as fresh and appealing as when it went into general release 70 years ago. Although set in a specific time and place, when stranded refugees from Nazism sought safety in the United States, it is timeless and universal. Most people agree that it is a classic, well-defined by Murray Burnett, who (with Joan Alison) wrote the play that was transformed into the film, as “true today, true yesterday, true tomorrow.”
We’ll always have ‘Casablanca’
Some of the Jews who helped make ‘Casablanca’ a classic
Catherine Taub: ‘A hometown hero’
I first read about Catherine Taub in the New York Times, in a 2001 article about Varian Fry headed “A Hometown Hero for Ridgewood.”
Few people recognized that strange-sounding name before Catherine rescued it from an obscure corner of history. Few people knew that Fry had saved some 2,000 (mainly Jewish) intellectuals, artists, and others from the Holocaust and was the first American named a “Righteous Gentile” by Yad Vashem. (You can read about him in “A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry,” by Sheila Isenberg.)
Catherine, who lived in Ridgewood and died May 28, sadly and all too soon, learned about the former Ridgewood resident when she saw an exhibit about him at the Jewish Museum in New York. As she recalled years later, “I thought to myself, ‘How did we not know about him?’”
