The Arts

Is any human need deeper than the need to know where we came from? In Rock Wilk’s one-man show, “Broke Wide Open,” directed by Stephen Bishop Seely, the poet and performance artist explores his conflicted identity about the time he was given away at birth and then adopted by Jewish parents. The play opens this weekend at the 45th Street Theatre for a month-long run.

In a recent interview in these pages, Richard Peña, the retiring director of the New York Film Festival, remarked on the explosive growth of the Israeli film industry during his quarter-century in that post. Appropriately enough, this year’s festival, celebrating its 50th anniversary, offers three examples of how the industry has matured.

In South Africa, apartheid institutionalized racial segregation in every facet of life and the struggle against it took many forms. From the outset, photography was a critical element both in documenting the impact of the system and the resistance to it.

The International Center of Photography has put together an extraordinarily wide-ranging exhibition that spans the Afrikaner nationalist ascension to power in 1948 through Nelson Mandela’s assumption of the presidency in 1993.

With the Days of Awe upon us, the sense of fear and trembling is almost palpable in the verses of the prayer U’Netana Tokef: “Who by fire, who by sword, who by beast.” Leonard Cohen’s whimsical take on these questions could come as light relief.

Communication between parents and children is often fraught with misunderstanding. But few children are frustrated even by the simple mechanics of relating to their parents. Gloria Rosen’s one-woman show, “Listen … Can You Hear Me Now?,” is the autobiographical tale of a hearing child with two deaf parents. When it ran on the West Coast, the Santa Monica Mirror hailed the show as “amazingly funny,” adding that “audience members, regardless of their backgrounds, identified with it.”

The first image one sees in David Fisher’s new documentary “Six Million and One” is a crumbling stone doorway bridged by a spider web. The visual irony is striking, with the rough yellow stone breaking down, the wispy lacework sturdy and undamaged. That irony is, perhaps, at the center of Fisher’s film.

To see the Rambam’s handwriting up close is astonishing. Two of his handwritten works are behind glass, part of The Jewish Museum’s new exhibit, “Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries.” His autograph draft of his comprehensive legal code, or Mishneh Torah, dates back to around 1180. Its black Hebrew letters are written in a cursive Sephardic script, with many letters joined, as though the philosopher, rabbi, doctor and leading figure in the medieval Jewish world were writing in a hurry, without lifting the pen very often.

Pregnancy is almost always both physically and emotionally discombobulating. But nothing could have turned Alice Eve Cohen’s world upside down more than learning, at the age of 44, a decade after she had been told that she was infertile, that she was carrying a 6-month-old fetus. Cohen’s new one-woman show, “What I Thought I Knew,” recounts her agonized struggle, during the period between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur in 1999, to decide whether or not to give birth. The show is being performed as part of the All For One Theater Festival in the West Village.

It may be the world’s oldest profession, but it was the last place that a nice Jewish boy from Dix Hills, L.I., expected to land a job after college. In Josh Mesnik’s autobiographical new comedy, “Have I Got a Girl For You,” directed by Sara Sahin, the playwright stars as the manager of one of the largest escort agencies on the East Coast, a job that taught him the ins and outs of the business of prostitution.

For Rosh HaShanah, 5771, two years ago, I had dragged my father, a rabbi, and my younger brother to Uman, a blighted Ukrainian city halfway between Kiev and Odessa. We were ostensibly there for the purposes of a book I was working on: the book was about pilgrimage, more or less.