Ghetto

The barbarism of the Holocaust is measured by more than the body count. Notice must also be taken of the appalling, irremediable injuries inflicted on the spirits of the living by Nazi persecution. Joshua Sobol's play Ghetto does both. A massacre of Jews precedes the action and another ends it. In between, the drama focuses on a chapter in ghetto life in one of its most remarkable historic manifestations. The production, which opened Sunday and is mounted by the Circle in the Square Theater uptown with a large cast, is only partly successful in conveying a sense of tragedy.

A report on urban poverty recently released by the National League of Cities contains some disturbing findings for the city and the Philadelphia area. I say this not just as author of the report, but as a Philadelphia resident and someone who cares deeply about the future of this city and region. Poverty is complex, and scholars have long sought ways to manage this complexity by identifying its crucial dimensions. The NLC report focuses on three dimensions of urban poverty today: It is more persistent among particular households, more concentrated within particular neighborhoods, and more isolated from traditional avenues of escape.

Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was written two decades ago, when rage, fueled by racial pride, was sweeping the black ghettos of American cities. The atmosphere today may be less strident, but this tale of the frustration and disintegration of a black family is no less pertinent and moving. Some aspects of the play by Lonnie Elder 3d, the current production of Freedom Theater, are dated. A criminal's cynical use of anti-white feeling in the ghetto seems right out of the 1960s, and the involvement of the family in the making and sale of moonshine - rather than dealing in drugs, the big illegal moneymaker in the ghetto now as then - strikes the theatergoer as downright quaint.

Allen Iverson is in trouble again. For some that's old news. For others, it's big business: Newspapers sell, news broadcast ratings soar, punditry proliferates. But with Iverson, what we see is always what we get. That's because what we see is largely shaped - maybe distorted - by the lens through which we view the controversial hoopster. We cannot divorce the recent accusations against Iverson from what we already believe about him. When some people look at Iverson, they see a thug: braids, tattoos, swagger and defiance.

In any other situation, if you were to tell Method Man he's ghetto (cheap, tacky), you'd probably be facing a knuckle sandwich. But when it comes to his fledgling TV show, the rapper schooled in the Wu-Tang Clan wants Fox to show him the ghetto (authentic, happenin'), big time. M.M. says Fox has squeezed the flavor out of Method & Red, the network's new sitcom costarring M.M. and his fellow Clan member, Redman. "I'm trying to keep this show ghetto, and there's a way for it to be both ghetto and intelligent," M.M. told the Los Angeles Times.

The neighborhood where a 14-block section of the Nimitz Freeway collapsed Tuesday is, in the words of one civic leader, the heart of the oldest ghetto in Oakland, the area where the Black Panther Party was born, where Huey Newton was shot to death earlier this year. Residents here are accustomed to swarms of police officers and reporters sweeping down on the neighborhood. Yesterday, several who watched more police officers and more reporters arrive were split over whether the attention would help change things here.

As the black middle class in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the nation emerges socially and economically, it has tended to become ever more distant from the ghetto communities of its origin. This absence has led to the diminution of an extremely important source of moral and social leadership within the ghetto community. In pursuit of status and employment opportunities and out of a sense of genuine concern for their survival, members of the black middle class and those who aspire to it tend increasingly to leave the ghetto behind.

If they ever make a movie of Dan Rose's book, the title could be "White Bread Comes To the Ghetto. " The book is actually titled "Black American Street Life, South Philadelphia 1969-1971. " It's the memoirs of an anthropologist's two-year covert study in the slums. The 46-year-old author reflected on that time as he sat in a lucheonette at 12th and Carpenter streets sipping a can of cream soda, a taste he acquired during his inner-city odyssey. He seems comfortable in the worn, old neighborhood where he once observed street life from a third-floor apartment window and worked as a $1-an-hour semi-skilled auto mechanic.

Shawn Session was born prematurely on March 22 to an impoverished, unwed mother who never sought pre-natal care because she had two children and didn't want another. Brain-damaged and weighing just 3 1/2 pounds at birth, Shawn died after 33 days on a ventilator. To most readers who learned of his short, unhappy life in Sunday's Inquirer in the first of staff writer Susan FitzGerald's two-part series on infant deaths, his death must have seemed a blessing. Clifton Pruitt was born into similar circumstances Jan. 24. His mother, Mamie, was raising four other children in grinding North Philadelphia poverty and, angry at this new assault on her peace of mind, had refused to go to the clinic for pre-natal care.

The latest version of the new-look, 1990s Hollywood thriller is "Judgment Night," another movie about people being chased. In the last few years, the motion-picture industry has made a radical shift in the way it portrays its action heroes. Instead of the ultra-confident, pumped-up, arse-kicking 1980s hero - a reflection of a confident, optimistic era - we now see a more vulnerable protagonist. Tom Cruise was the law school prodigy who fights to keep his job, his wife and finally his life in "The Firm," a movie that finds him using his briefcase to fight off mob hit men. "The Fugitive" casts Harrison Ford as a wealthy physician who loses everything when framed for murder.

IN THE PARALLEL sci-fi universe of "In Time," scientists have capped the aging process at 25, and rich people have turned time into a commodity. You die when you hit your limit of 25 years (there's been a little deflation since "Logan's Run"), but if you can literally buy more time, you can live indefinitely as a 25-year-old. Thus is born a cutthroat economy in which poor people work, cheat and steal for a few extra units of time in their blue-collar ghetto, while in a nearby posh suburb the idle rich gamble vast stores of accumulated time in poker games.

ROME - It is still hot in Rome this time of year. That doesn't mean you shouldn't go. In fact, a little sweat seems a small price to pay for the chance, at almost every corner, to duck into a church where you can sit in the shade and stare at a lustrous virgin by Raphael or a strenuously ardent saint by Caravaggio. Still, on a recent trip to the Eternal City we happened to lodge in the ancient Trastevere section, and on one particularly sweltering day, not wishing to walk too far, we crossed the Tiber River to explore the nearby neighborhood, Rome's former Jewish ghetto.

A canister of film on a shelf in a bunker in the German woods, an archive of Nazi propaganda, discovered after World War II. A label on the canister: " Das Ghetto . " In the extraordinary, powerful, disturbing A Film Unfinished , much of the footage from that reel, shot in May 1942 in the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw, is replayed - and revisited with the knowledge that it was a lie. Directed by an unknown Nazi official, who deployed cameramen...

GhettoPhysics: Will the Real Pimps and Ho's Please Stand Up ! is a radically ingenious, in-your-face documentary hybrid that takes the basic street relationship between pimps and hookers and holds it up on a global scale. "When the leader is pimpin' you on some game like patriotism," says E. Raymond Brown, GhettoPhysics' wily onscreen guide and codirector, "it's the ho's that go marchin' off to war gettin' shot up and stabbed. " Or, credit card companies: pimps.

Gov. Christie has proposed creating a protected, high-class, high-roller ghetto for the casino industry in Atlantic City. This would perpetuate the problem that brought the city to its present low estate. Christie ignores - as everyone has for three decades - that other ghetto, made up of poor people who could not afford to move out of Atlantic City. This other ghetto has prevented the city from becoming what many hoped for in 1980: the Las Vegas of the East. In 1980, some of us understood what Las Vegas knew well: Casinos don't work without an attractive non-gambling milieu.

The Education of an Urban Farmer By Novella Carpenter Penguin, 277 pp. $16 paperback Reviewed by Bob Sheasley Novella Carpenter wells with tears to see her turkey mourning his mate, ripped by a rottweiler in the Oakland, Calif., ghetto she calls home. Harold circles what's left of Maude, puffs and preens as if asking her to mate, then thumps his head by her side. So much meat wasted. But she still had Harold for the Thanksgiving feast. That's how it is with Carpenter, who loves animals, in lots of ways.

Pope, in Portugal, stirs the faithful FATIMA, Portugal - Pope Benedict XVI called abortion and same-sex marriage two of the most "insidious and dangerous" threats facing the world. He spoke Thursday to Catholic educators and social workers after celebrating Mass before 400,000 people in Fatima. He was interrupted by applause several times. The central Portuguese farming town, where three shepherd children reported having visions of the Virgin Mary in 1917, is one of the most important shrines in Christianity.

The outsourcing of the action movie peaks this week with a French invasion represented in part by "District B13: Ultimatum. " It's a sequel to the awesome "District B13," directed by Pierre Morel, who last year gave us the blunt-force classic "Taken" and today returns with the more garish "From Paris With Love. " Meanwhile, his "B13" franchise has been turned over to director Patrick Alessandrin, although it's still under the banner of producer Luc Besson, who wrote the screenplay, such as it is, or isn't.

On a Sunday in June, The Inquirer published my "Personal Journey" about a visit to the Krakow ghetto during a concert tour with the men's choir from Congregation Beth Sholom in Elkins Park. I had been moved by a letter written by Martin Baral of Sydney, Australia, thanking a Christian pharmacist for providing medicine 50 years earlier that saved his life. Baral enclosed a check to pay the pharmacist. That evening, I received a Facebook e-mail from a woman identifying herself as Baral's daughter, stating that Martin wanted to speak with me. After determining that it was not a scam, I responded.

IT'S A GOOD thing President Obama is using this week to rejuvenate in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. His vacation comes just as his lovefest with the media seems to be over. Although Hurricane Bill missed the island, several political storms have been brewing, not the least of which are the explosive town-hall meetings that have raged across the country. Both Pew and ABC News polls report that the president's approval ratings have dropped 10 points, and 37 percent of Americans appear to think that he's not doing a very good job. Some journalists, responding to his declining support, have dipped their pens in more critical ink. Sequestered at Blue Heron Farm, the president is trying to avoid the media, which might irritate journalists prickly about "access.