The Arts

John Houseman once said that Patti LuPone exudes the “smell of the gallows,” but for one gay Jewish boy from Los Angeles, the star was nothing less than a lifeline. LuPone, famed for playing blistering, brutal Broadway divas, became an obsession for theater artist Ben Rimalower when the teen was struggling with his parents’ divorce, his father’s  traumatic coming out, and his own coming of age.

In “Patti Issues,” directed by Aaron Mark, Rimalower charts a rocky, bi-coastal, but ultimately exultant journey from LuPone fan to LuPone friend and collaborator.

When he was a little boy growing up in Kfar Saba, Gilad Hekselman became fascinated by Michael Jackson.

“When I was 7, I was a big Michael Jackson fan and wanted to be a singer,” Hekselman, now 30, admitted in a telephone interview this week. “But I tried to play the drums and the guitar and I gave up singing.”

Israel may have lost a potential “Melekh shel Pop,” but the jazz world gained a terrific guitarist and composer, whose fourth CD, “This Just In,” is being celebrated with a gig June 11 and 12.

“I come from a music-appreciating family, but no one is a musician,” said Hekselman, who moved to New York about 10 years ago as part of a wave of Israeli jazz musicians who have made a significant mark on the city’s jazz scene.

At a close look, what appears to be a tear on the cheek of one of Sara Erenthal’s painted portraits is actually a hole in the wooden board the piece is painted on. The painting is one in a series called “Out of the Drawer” — the boards were pulled from a drawer she found on the street.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, The Jewish Museum was closed to the public. But a group of visitors to the second floor was looking closely at the art and installations, discussing the artist’s background and approach and commenting on what they saw and felt, sometimes expressing very strong opinions.

Shattered, soul-less husks, wandering in an alien landscape — such is the impression given by the Holocaust-eviscerated characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1966 Yiddish novel “Enemies, A Love Story.” Paul Mazursky made a film of it in 1990, starring Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston and Lena Olin.

“Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria” is one of those peculiar documentary films that makes a sort of nonsense of everything I know about film and art. On the one hand the film, which is produced, written, directed, shot and edited by Jeff L. Lieberman, is a baggy, often shapeless mess, meandering and repetitive, filled with side roads that lead nowhere and a narration that borders on the amateur.

When it played last fall’s New York Film Festival, Rama Burshtein’s debut feature, “Fill the Void,” was one of the great surprises of the autumn, a stunningly poised and mature first film that heralded the first major talent to emerge from the haredi film community in Israel. Now that the film has opened theatrically in New York, it looks — if anything — even better.