The Arts

The Ghost Of Bubby's Past

Gloria Rosen plays a grandmother who returns from the dead in “Bubby’s Shadow.”
05/22/2012
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week

How deeply do we have to bury the past to keep it from erupting into the present? In Andrew Rothkin’s “Bubby’s Shadow,” in which the playwright also stars, the spirit of a deceased grandmother reunites a deeply divided Jewish family and restores its connection to Judaism. The play, an earlier version of which ran Off Broadway in 2008, returns starting June 3 at a theater in the West Village.

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A Lens For Healing

Burnat with his damaged video cameras.

The Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers behind '5 Broken Cameras', a portrait of life in a West Bank village, look beyond their anger.

05/22/2012
George Robinson
Special to the Jewish Week

Seen together, filmmakers Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi could be one of those clichéd “odd couple” pairs so beloved of unimaginative contemporary Hollywood action comedies. Davidi is Israeli, tall, thin, weedy, mercurial. Burnat is Palestinian, shorter, solid, graying and insistently sober in demeanor. The peculiarly theatrical atmosphere of a morning with them is amplified by the central object in the chic quiet of their Midtown hotel — a large cylindrical aquarium filled with exotic fish.

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Second Avenue Redux

Judy Blazer as Bessie and Shuler Hensley as Boris Thomashevsky in new DVD, top. Right, Blazer and Eugene Brancoveanu.

Michael Tilson Thomas remembers his grandparents, the Thomashevskys, the first family of Yiddish theater.

05/15/2012
George Robinson
Special to the Jewish Week

The story of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky is a classic American success narrative. Although they were born only a few miles apart in “the middle of a Ukrainian nowhere,” as their grandson Michael Tilson Thomas puts it, they met in Baltimore when he was performing with a traveling Yiddish theater troupe and she was a star-struck girl working in a tobacco factory. They went on to fame and acclaim, stars of the Yiddish theater from the late-19th Century until the Depression.

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Netanyahu Recalls His Heroic Brother

Yonatan Netanyahu, with his wife Tutti, and dog, Lara, in new documentary, “Follow Me.”
05/15/2012
Staff Report

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, commenting on “Follow Me,” a documentary film opening here this week on the life of his heroic older brother, Yonatan, told The Jewish Week: “This film will show an American audience about Yoni’s humanity, his leadership, and his commitment to Israel.”

Yonatan Netanyahu, a highly decorated Israeli soldier, was killed leading the Entebbe rescue in Uganda in 1976 that saved the lives of more than 100 Israeli hostages.

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Kafka’s Rage — Toward His Father

Michael Guagno stars as Franz Kafka in “Letters To My Father.”
05/15/2012
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week

As they reach maturity, children sometimes feel obliged to pour out their resentment and rage toward their parents, whom they blame for the deficiencies of their childhood. In his vituperative “Letter to My Father,” the Czech Jewish writer Franz Kafka excoriates his father for abusing him both physically and psychologically.

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Israeli Filmmaker Aiming ‘Big’ On Herzl Project

Theodor Herzl saw need for Jewish homeland after hearing anti-Semitic taunts against Dreyfus.

Prestigious N.Y. Public Library fellowship a large step forward for Shimon Dotan’s ambitious biopic.

05/15/2012
Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

Imagine a biopic about Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Talk about a dream team. But the match-up is a wild dream that the accomplished Israeli director and former Hollywood filmmaker Shimon Dotan got one step closer to realizing last month. 

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A Father-And-Son Team Take On Freud And Mahler

Filmmakers Felix and Percy Adlon.

Percy and Felix Adlon tease out the famous counseling session in ‘Mahler on the Couch.’

05/15/2012
George Robinson
Special to the Jewish Week

When he began working with his father, Percy Adlon, on the script for their new film “Mahler on the Couch,” Felix O. Adlon felt a heavier than usual weight on his shoulders.

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Sebald: ‘Don’t Put Me In A Box

W. G. Sebald

Film looks at the life and work of German novelist W. G. Sebald.

05/11/2012
George Robinson
Special to the Jewish Week

 

There are times when you are out walking that a kind of hypnotic paralysis overcomes you. You are enwrapped in the rhythms of your gait, the pleasant sameness of the countryside, and you become oblivious to anything but the forward motion, the almost imperceptible bobbing of your gaze.

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Fight For Your Right To … Be Jewishly Proud

Adam Yauch, aka MCA.

Remembering the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch and the thorny question of cultural authenticity.

05/09/2012
Andrew Furman
Special To The Jewish Week

It never would have occurred to me that the passing of the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch (aka MCA) would hit me so hard. Yet I’ve been awfully sad ever since reading the headline across the CNN crawl last week. It’s not something I’ve contemplated much until Yauch’s death, at 47 from cancer. But the Beastie Boys really did mean something to me when they first emerged on the national scene almost three decades ago. 

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The Mame Loshen Has Legs

Mendy Cahan will perform his “Yiddish Bouquet” next week at Baruch College.
05/08/2012
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week

‘Yiddish is my mother language, and a mother is never really dead,” reflected Isaac Bashevis Singer in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1978. Indeed, the mame loshen continues to play a vital role in the cultural life of the city, as one gathers from two overlapping productions running this month — one a translation of a rarely seen Yiddish play, and the other an evening of Yiddish music and poetry. 

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