How to Peacefully Promote the Culture

BY CHRISTINA PASSARIELLO, WSJ

PARIS—Over a feast of foie gras, crispy pig ears and white Burgundy, a group of epicurean French politicians recently added a new twist to a debate over national identity: You are what you eat. By that definition, being properly French means dining on croissants, brie and duck confit.

The call is a sign of rising culinary nationalism amid fears that the pre-eminence of French cuisine has evaporated. It has also reframed the continuing question of what it means to be French: Couscous and other foreign foods cooked by the country's millions of ethnic and religious minorities aren't on the menu.

Hitler Reappears in Israel

Stalag Comics Israel

Hitler Reappears in Israel
Igal Sarna, FirstPost.co.uk

W e are five on the bed, leaning with our backs against the wall like people watching television. I'm in the middle of the bed. Hitler is at one end. He is about 20 years old, at the time he was moving from one cheap men's hostel in Vienna to another, an ambitious and unhappy young ne'er-do-well. A painter of landscapes and advertisements.
He places a box full of papers in the centre of the bed. He says to me: "I'm writing down all kinds of things for myself."
"Mein Kampf?" I ask.
He looks at me suspiciously, like someone who has just heard something that I couldn't possibly have known. The conversation is quiet but at the same time fraught in a strange way with everything that will happen. He gives me a friendly wink, as though to say: "I, Adolf, whose whole future is ahead of him, and you, the son of the Nashibirskis, who are marked out for death - ¬ we're both of us artists; I am the one who will always rise up from the past and be with you like a member of your household."
I dreamt this dream early in 2007, in Oxford, when I was starting to write the novel Tender Hand, and it is the opening of the book that is now being published in Tel Aviv.
The name Hitler is no longer igniting fires in the land of the survivors who in the past would take to the streets because of a Wagner concert. The text exists in the city alongside the one-man show Adolf, in which a young actor plays Hitler at the Tmuna fringe theatre in Tel Aviv. "How a sensitive boy who dreams of becoming an artist turns into Hitler," says the programme. For the first time in the Israeli theatre, director Yagil Eliraz depicts how Hitler's personality is shaped from early childhood to adulthood.

King Mob

King Mob

Patrick Sawyer, EirstPost.co.uk

For years the graffiti emblazoned along a west London Tube track issued an angry challenge to the deadening conformity of urban life: 'Same thing day after day - Tube - Work - Diner [sic] - Work - Tube - Armchair - TV - Sleep - Tube - Work - How much more can you take - One in ten go mad - one in five crack up'.

Its authors were a group of anarchic anti-artists named King Mob, whose stunts and visual manifestos flowered briefly during the late Sixties and early Seventies, in opposition to both the Establishment and the commercialised counter-culture of the Beatles and Carnaby Street.

King Mob's physical manifestations on the walls of Notting Hill have long faded with its gentrification. However, their leaflets and posters, recently acquired by Tate Britain, serve as a reminder of the bitterness.