Arts Preview

Fiction and Poetry

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:06:45 +0000

Sandee Brawarsky

Jewish Week Book Critic

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Filmmakers Leslie Epstein reprises his character Leib Goldkorn, now a centenarian living in New York City, in “Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Leib Goldkorn” (Norton, February). This is the first time Goldkorn, who has appeared in Epstein’s work, gets his own novel. Here, the European émigré and successful musician is invited back to his hometown in Moravia. He encounters family surprises including a long line of rabbinical cousins who follow him back to New York, where he plans to stage a grand opera.

Film Giants Shoot The Camps

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:03:00 +0000

‘From Hollywood to Nuremberg” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Except for anniversaries, timing is an overlooked quality in the museum world. Perhaps this is understandable — with exhibits planned years in advance, there’s no predicting how culturally relevant a show might be when it finally opens. Yet when the Museum of Jewish Heritage opens its main spring show, “Filming the Camps: John Ford, Samuel Fuller, George Stevens: From Hollywood to Nuremberg,” they may still be able to ride the coattails of this year’s Oscars, which are celebrating retrograde filmmaking.

Return Of The ‘Happenings’

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:01:06 +0000

Israel’s artist collective, Public Movement, part of politically tinged New Museum show.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Ever since the artist and art-professor Allan Kaprow staged the first “happening” in 1957, performance art has become ever more ubiquitous. The basic idea behind a happening, and indeed all of performance art, is that what matters in art is not the final product but the process that creates it. Originally, artists would stage wild events, inviting viewers to watch as they took hundreds of photos of themselves, say, or an artist painted and a musician fiddled nearby.

A New ‘Stage’ For Israeli Portraiture

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:59:23 +0000

Kehinde Wiley at The Jewish Museum.

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Since graduating Yale’s MFA program in 2001, the painter Kehinde Wiley has made no secret of his black identity. For much of the last decade, his work has been boldly Afro-centric, and in a distinctly subversive way. He re-appropriates the regal portrait form of the Old Masters. But instead of casting European aristocrats as his subjects, he paints black urban youth; hoodies and baggie jeans are what we see, not breeches and silk stockings. In the backdrop, Wiley adds vibrant colors with arresting geometric patterns, adding ever more visual pop to these already pungent portraits.

Peace Through Music

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:57:00 +0000

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Romain Rolland, a Nobel laureate for literature, famously said, “We must struggle with a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will.” The gifted Arab Israeli singer-actress Mira Awad puts it a little differently.

The Music List

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:54:00 +0000

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

March 18: New World/Old World Klezmer with Yale Strom and Hot Pstromi, part of the celebrations of the 125th anniversary of the Eldridge Street Synagogue. The Museum at Eldridge Street (12 Eldridge St.), 3 p.m.

March 18: “East Meets East, A Concert.” Alicia Svigals and her band collaborate with Ethiopian singer-songwriter Alula on a program that unites East Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Forest Hills Jewish Center (106-06 Queens Blvd., Flushing), 6 p.m.

Keeping It In The Family

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:51:12 +0000

George Robinson

Special To The Jewish Week

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

When you ask Gil Shaham, one of the world’s great violinists, about playing with family members, he has plenty of experience upon which to draw. His wife, Adele Anthony, is a violinist who performs and records internationally. His sister, Orli Shaham, is a world-famous pianist. And his brother-in-law, David Robertson, the conductor, is musical director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

But he can’t resist a joke. “The family that plays together, well at least we don’t have to talk to each other!” Shaham says.

The Film List

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:48:47 +0000

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Feb. 16-28: Documentary Fortnight 2012. The Museum of Modern Art’s annual gathering of contemporary non-fiction films includes several unusual programs this year. In addition to short films by Jem Cohen, a new look at the Arab Spring and a deft examination of a hundred years of Ukrainian Jewish history, there will be two programs on interactive documentary and the Internet. Most of the screenings will take place at MoMA (11 W. 53rd St.), but there will also be several screenings in other locations.

In The Privacy Of Your Home

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:45:31 +0000

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The proliferation of new media has wrought the most significant changes in the movie business since the coming of sound. With the invention of the VCR, the advent of the DVD, and the explosion of the Internet and its attendant opportunities, audiences today can avail themselves of more ways of experiencing films than ever before. These changes strike right at the heart of the business of film: distribution. If new rhythm patterns create radical transformations in jazz, new distribution patterns provoke similarly cataclysmic metamorphoses in movies as both art and industry.

Jewish Princes Of Wales?

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:43:31 +0000

George Robinson

Special To The Jewish Week

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Nathan Abrams is feeling a little, well, alienated. The London-born film scholar teaches at Bangor University in Wales and has fallen into a secondary specialty, almost by accident, of tracing the history of the Jews of Wales.

“When I’m in London I’m a curiosity because I’m studying the Jews of Wales, but in Wales I’m a curiosity because I’m a Jew,” he says, laughing.

The Theater List

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:40:47 +0000

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

“The Big Bupkis! A Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville.” Non-Jewish Yiddish actor Shane Baker presents a mix of magic, ukulele music, hypnotism, ventriloquism, transvestism, a Yiddish bullfight poem and even a mock attempt to behead a member of the audience. Saturday, Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 18 at 3 p.m. at the JCC in Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave. For tickets, $15-$20, call the box office at (646) 505-5708.

‘Lost In Yonkers’ Comes To Off Broadway

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:38:33 +0000

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

We think of him primarily as a writer of comedies, but Neil Simon’s greatest plays are arguably his dramas, especially his autobiographical “Eugene” trilogy and his Pulitzer Prize-winning hit, “Lost in Yonkers,” about a stony-faced German Jewish grandmother who unwillingly takes charge of her two young grandsons during the Second World War. A revival of “Lost in Yonkers” opens Off Broadway in March at TACT/ The Actors Company Theatre, located on Theatre Row in Midtown.

The Jewish Lomans, Back On Broadway

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:35:00 +0000

Ted Merwin

Special To The Jewish Week

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

It may be a shattering exploration of the death of the American Dream, but is “Death of a Salesman” also about a Jewish family’s denial of its heritage? Arthur Miller certainly thought so, although it took him half a century after his masterpiece was first staged to admit that the Lomans were Jewish. Now “Salesman” is coming back to Broadway, in a star-studded production starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Andrew Garfield and Linda Emond. “Salesman” opens in March at the Barrymore Theatre.

Spring Arts Preview February 2012

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:29:32 +0000

The season ahead in theater, film, music, the visual arts and books.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Books

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 21:46:00 +0000

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Books about Israel and Israelis, including new books by Amos Oz, Meir Shalev and Aharon Appelfeld, dominate publishers’ fall lists. There are biographies of David Ben Gurion and Ariel Sharon and others who created, dominated, destroyed and developed the city of Jerusalem; and there’s a lyrical memoir of about life between Israel and America. Along with debut books and highly anticipated works by established authors, the season’s new titles also include tales of love, family, and still untold stories of the Holocaust.

FICTION