The Arts

Call it the Jewish Cape Canaveral. Brooklyn has been the launching pad for so many eminent Jewish Americans — from Arthur Miller to Woody Allen, and from Barbra Streisand to Ruth Bader Ginsburg — that one could hardly imagine America without it. Perhaps this helps to account for the continuing popularity of Jake Ehrenreich’s one-man show, “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn,” which has returned to New York after a record-breaking Off-Broadway run and a North American tour.

We Jews, traditionally, are an ahistoric people. That’s not to say that we don’t have a history; praise the Lord, we have plenty! But the rabbis of the Talmud did not see their job as doing history. For the rabbinic leaders and decisors of old, history was not front and center; the rabbinic leadership asked not “What happened?” but rather “How can we set a context, a chronological order, for the events in the Hebrew Bible and by extension for the halacha, the normative system that governs the life of the individual and the community?”

David Winitsky is a theater artist with a mission. In an era in which most of the Jewish repertory companies in New York have folded for lack of support, he views theater written by and for Jews as still essential to the revitalization of the Jewish community.

Its premiere was a watershed in American theatrical history, galvanizing an audience caught in the throes of the Great Depression.

The concept of “tikkun olam” — repairing the world — is a central tenet of Judaism. It is also, not infrequently, an excuse for critics like your humble servant to shoehorn texts and art that are not obviously Jewish into the pages of a Jewish newspaper. But there are times when the connection between Jewish identity, social justice work and the arts is so palpable that to ignore it would be more foolish than to proclaim it.

Rabbi Eleazar of Worms was a 13th-century scholar whose life was torn apart when two Crusaders broke into his house and killed his wife and three children. After that terrible incident in 1196, he wrote numerous ethical texts counseling cheerfulness, patience and love for humanity, suggesting a greatness of spirit that all but passes understanding. But he also delved deep into the mystical vein of Judaism, authoring countless kabbalistic texts including new systems of gematria (the numerological interpretation of Torah) and a singular work called “The Secrets of Secrets.”

In two new exhibits at the National Arts Club, the Russian American Federation is celebrating ties between Russia and the Jewish people. The main exhibit in the Grand Gallery of the exclusive Gramercy Park club is devoted to the Odessa artist Yosef Ostrovsky. The secondary show is “The Times of a Great Dream: American Artists Gift to the Jewish Autonomous Region in the USSR,” which revisits an exhibit that took place over 75 years ago.

Sometimes a film’s first few shots tell you almost everything you need to know. Consider the case of “Off-White Lies,” the 2011 directorial feature debut of Maya Kenig, playing here Tuesday, June 12. In the film’s first shot we see a close-up of Libby (Elya Inbar), an adolescent girl dragging a suitcase and carefully carrying a potted plant across an air terminal, her face a mix of uncertainty and determination. Kenig cuts to an overhead shot that isolates the girl in the frame; she is surrounded by the unreadable space of the terminal’s featureless floor.

Colorblind people see the world in a different way. In Jessica Fleitman’s “Deuteranomaly,” now playing at the Planet Connections Theater Festivity, a Jewish family struggles with a son’s visual deficit. Based on the scientific term for a relatively mild form of colorblindness — which affects mostly men, making it difficult for them to distinguish between red and green — “Deuteranomaly” uses the boy’s condition as a metaphor for the flaws in human relationships.