The Arts

What has been missing from the tidal wave of animated features released theatrically in the past decade is the anarchic wit of the great Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1940s and ’50s. Somehow it is less than surprising that one of the rare examples of that kind of manic energy and total disregard for propriety comes from outside the U.S., but Joann Sfar’s “The Rabbi’s Cat” is precisely the kind of film that our homegrown animation directors seem incapable of making now.

Leading the Passover seder each year is, for many Jewish men, a sign of their continuing vigor and prominence within the family. In Jennifer Maisel’s Off-Broadway play, “The Last Seder,” directed by Jessica Bauman, a patriarch’s impending slide into dementia signals that nothing, including their Passover observances, will ever be the same.

“Punk Jews,” the new documentary having its world premiere at the JCC in Manhattan on Dec. 11, has the peculiar feel of a version of “60 Minutes” concocted by the demented offspring of some MTV producer and a wonder-working chasidic mystic. Only an hour long, the film is the work of a team of Emmy Award-winners, led by director Jesse Zook Mann, and it definitely looks like a pilot for an expansive TV news magazine-type show, although it is hard to imagine what audience demographic it would attract.

If they recognize his name, most Americans will think of Stephen Fry as the brilliant comic actor who has frequently paired with Hugh Laurie (of “House” fame), or the Anglo-Jewish polymath whose BBC excursions have covered everything from the mysteries of the English language to the peculiarities of American society. He’s a novelist and a stage actor of note. That Fry is Jewish and also a great lover of the music of Richard Wagner seems a contradiction; and it is the subject of a new film, “Wagner & Me,” which opens on Dec. 7.

When he talks about Jewish music, Netanel Hershtik uses a word that one doesn’t usually hear from a musician preparing for an upcoming concert: mission. .

Given that he is a 14th-generation cantor — no, that is not a typo; his family can trace its history of hazanut back that far — the idea of singing Jewish music as a “mission” may not seem incongruous, but the intensity with which he speaks of it informs you instantly that Hershtik is not merely paying lip service. He firmly believes in it.

For all the stories of Maccabees and cruses of oil, Chanukah is ultimately a holiday about family togetherness. So mused the multitalented artist Arthur Yorinks when he sat down more than a decade ago to write “The Flying Latke,” a children’s book about a Chanukah pancake that magically circumnavigates the globe. Now the tale’s play version, which sold out its run last year in Tribeca at The Flea Theater, returns to the same theater just in time for this year’s Festival of Lights.

The collaboration of world-class painters and opera companies is an old story by now, but remains a fascinating object of study nonetheless. Chagall, Hockney, Dali, Cocteau, Picasso — the list of those who designed opera sets encompasses some of the greatest visual artists of the 20^th century.

In our collective consciousness, New York City during World War II often conjures up imagery of sailors “On the Town,” the “Stage Door Canteen” and Alfred Eisenstadt’s iconic photo of a sailor and a nurse in Times Square celebrating Japan’s surrender with a kiss. Except for an occasional History Channel glimpse of a troop ship leaving the harbor or a nod to the distant past from a gentrifying Brooklyn Navy Yard, the city is remembered, if at all, as a convenient recreational stop before American GIs moved on to more serious work overseas.

For the ancient Romans, life was short but art endured — “vita brevis, ars longa,” as the Latin saying goes. Alas, the helpless Yiddish writers in Nathan Englander’s first play, “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” directed by Barry Edelstein, can count on neither, as they face the extinction of both their earthly existences and the entire Jewish cultural life of Russia.