July 29, 2010 by nightfinder79
From May ’08 Spotlight: In December, 2006, the Sundance Channel broadcast a fascinating 4-part series called Office Tigers. Although not yet available for purchase, members of Netfilx can now rent it as a re-edited 90-minute documentary. Director Liz Mermin has crafted an intimate look at globalization focusing on the creation of an outsourcing behemoth called Office Tigers in Chennai, India. (The film ends with the announcement that R.R. Donnelley & Sons is planning to purchase the start-up for $250 million cash.)
Mermin, currently working in London, sent me the following thoughts by e-mail: “Office Tigers is no doubt the only major international company in Southern India founded and run by two nice Jewish boys from New York. CEO Joe Sigelman was a walking cultural study for his enthusiastic and curious employees, most of whom had never seen a Jew in their lives. It was clear to me that they found his business chutzpah inspiring.”
For more information, visit www.merminfilm.com.
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July 29, 2010 by nightfinder79
From May ’08 Spotlight: Israeli filmmaker Adi Refaeli headlined two screenings of her award-winning short Empathy on Saturday, March 29 and Sunday, March 30. She also addressed members of Congregation Kol-Ami during Shabbat services on Friday, March 28, and met with students at Harold Washington College on Tuesday, April 1. Then I went with her to Washington, DC, where she greeted a sold-out crowd at the Israeli Embassy on Thursday, April 3 before flying home to Kfar Saba. Sponsors of the metro Chicago programs included local chapters of Hadassah and ORT, with additional support from the Israel Consul General to the Midwest, the Israel Ministry of Tourism, Hillels Around Chicago, and Cinema/Chicago. Adi left two DVD copies of Empathy in my care, so if you would like to schedule a screening, please let me know.
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July 29, 2010 by nightfinder79
From May ’08 Spotlight:Amit Goldenberg and Ya’ara Dolev, married to each other as well as their art, will present “Dancing The Dream” at the North Shore Center for Performing Arts in Skokie on Monday, May 12. The program, which also features members of Germany’s Wee Dance Company as well as Ethiopian, Israeli, and Russian students from the Ne’urim Youth Village, is one of Hadassah Chicago Chapter’s “Celebrate Israel @ 60″ programs.
When I called them in Jaffa, Amit and Ya’ara told me that after working with Wee founders Danny Peleg and Marko Wiegert for several years, the four dancers decided to begin touring together. “We have a relationship of true friendship and love,” Ya’ara said. So they are delighted to add Chicago to a list of stops that already includes Germany, Holland, and Israel. For tickets, visit www.chicago.hadassah.org or call Hadassah’s Chicago Chapter office at 847-675-6790.
In addition to the NSCPA performance on Monday night, Amit also told me they plan to do workshops featuring four of their De De Dance Company colleagues at Deerfield and New Trier High Schools on Tuesday, May 13.
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July 29, 2010 by nightfinder79
From May ’08 Spotlight:Susannah Heschel, the daughter of Abraham Joshua Heschel and a highly-accomplished scholar in her own right, began a speaking tour last year in honor of her father’s 100th birthday. Nextbook has scheduled a stop for her on Thursday, May 29 at the Women’s Club of Evanston.
Born in Warsaw in 1907, Abraham Joshua Heschel was a world-renown theologian as well as a prominent activist in both the civil rights and antiwar movements. When I called Susannah at her office at Dartmouth College for more details, she told me: “We are very preoccupied as Jews with a lot of worries. We’re all worried about anti-Semitism and the security of the State of Israel. We’re still haunted by the Holocaust. So I think sometimes we also need moments of inspiration. My father’s work gives people a sense of joy in being Jewish, lifts us up so we can remember what we stand for as Jews.”
For tickets, visit www.nextbook.com or call Chicago coordinator Abigail Pickus at 312.747.4074.
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July 29, 2010 by nightfinder79
From May ’08 Spotlight: Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’s name is typically associated with Grammy Award-winning recordings of Mahler symphonies and other high brow releases from the San Francisco Symphony. But Tilson Thomas is on his way to Chicago this month to offer us something entirely different: a tribute to his grandparents, Yiddish Theatre stars Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky. I contacted him by phone to ask why he was dedicating a considerable part of his own life to telling their story.
“I grew up surrounded by the veterans of Yiddish theater,” Tilson Thomas told me. “Bessie Thomashefsky, my grandmother, had been a major star. She had amazing memories and astonishing abilities as a performer. People she had known from the old days, people like Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, she had known them when they were really young kids, given them a start on their very first plays, so they still would check in with her sometimes. I heard so many different stories: lots of laughs and lots of tears.”
“So it became a mission of mine to honor them and their contributions to American cultural life. How much could I rescue from the realm of anecdote and actually put it into a timeline? I worked for five years researching this. This is a real story about two kids who came to the US when he was 12 and she was about 5. They went from a little shtetl in Ukraine to being mega stars in New York, and all this they did just by imagining that it was possible. My grandparents discovered the theater could be used as a means of social transformation in which a lesson and a song and a laugh were all simultaneous.”
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will offer two programs on Sunday afternoon, June 1 and Tuesday evening, June 3. Both will be multimedia productions with full orchestration. For tickets, visit www.cso.org or call the CSO’s ticket hotline at 800-223-7114.
Spertus Institute has also scheduled a related program on Tuesday May 27: a casual conversation between Tilson Thomas and Andrew Patner of WFMT radio, with time built in for audience participation. Think of it as “the appetizer course.” For tickets, visit www.spertus.edu or call 312-322-1773.
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July 28, 2010 by nightfinder79
From Apr ’08 Spotlight: When I called Michèle Ohayon to ask about her new documentary Steal a Pencil for Me, she told me: “I thought I was numb to most Holocaust images since I’ve seen them before, but looking at hours and hours of footage took a toll. And dealing with all the archival houses in bureaucratic institutions all over the world? To convince them to look a little further than the usual and to really dig, that was really hard.”
I applaud Michèle’s persistence. Some of the images in this film, particularly actual footage from Westerbork (the Dutch transit camp through which Anne Frank also passed) will astonish you. This is a story about survival under the most extreme circumstances. “It was both the hardest film I ever made and the most daunting one, but the most rewarding and inspiring.”
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July 28, 2010 by nightfinder79
From Apr ’08 Spotlight: Tal Grinfas-David from Emory University’s Institute for the Study of Modern Israel came to Spertus on February 24 to lecture on “A Century of Israeli Music.” She began by asking audience members how they defined Israeli music. Response from the mostly middle-aged participants focused on folksongs from the ‘60s, but after reminding us that Israel had been engaged in “ingathering of immigrants from the world over for over a century,” she started with “HaTikvah” (originally published in 1886).
Tal played Eastern European songs from the turn of the last century (heavy on the accordion), songs of loneliness and separation (idealistic teenagers making aliyah in the 1920s typically left their family members behind), and odes to the land (like “Ha Eucalyptus” from the 1950s). Sometime Tal made us sing along (standing for “Jerusalem of Gold”) and sometimes she made us dance. (It was hard not to when she played a new version of “HaTikvah” with a disco beat that most of us had never heard before.) Another great afternoon at Spertus!
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July 28, 2010 by nightfinder79
From Apr ’08 Spotlight:Based on the incredible success of their first production back in June ‘06 (which received ten Jeff Citation nominations and won four), Timeline Theatre Company is staging another revival of Fiorello!. With lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and music by Jerry Bock (the duo who helped to create Fiddler on the Roof), this musical version of the life of legendary New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony award after its Broadway premiere in 1959. Harnick, who came to town last month to headline a benefit for the Timeline folks, polished up some lyrics for the new production. So even if you’ve seen Fiorello! before, you’ve never seen THIS Fiorello!
The new production opens on April 17 and runs through June 18. For tickets, call 773-281-TIME (8463) or visit www.timelinetheatre.com.
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July 28, 2010 by nightfinder79
From Apr ’08 Spotlight:World-renown artist Judy Chicago will be speaking at Women and Children First bookstore located at 5233 North Clark Street in Andersonville on Tuesday April 22.
As I explained last year when CUNY Professor Gail Levin came to Spertus to read from her book Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist, Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen. In 1970, though, she rejected both her birth name and her married name (Judy Gerowitz), choosing her new name because “friends tended to identify her as ‘Judy from Chicago’” based on her distinctive accent.
After years in transition, Chicago’s best known work is now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum’s new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Chicago has just published a book about it called The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation.
Her WCF appearance, scheduled to begin at 7:30 PM, is free and open to the public, but space at WCF is limited, so arrive early if you want to be sure of a seat. For more information, visit www.womenandchildrenfirst.com.
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July 28, 2010 by nightfinder79
From Apr ’08 Spotlight: Moishe Szelewiansky is happily dancing to a band playing Mariachi-tinged Klezmer music when he has a sudden heart attack, and thus begins My Mexican Shivah (Morirse esta en Hebreo), a wonderful new film playing in this month’s Chicago Latino Film Festival line-up. A pillar of Mexico City’s Jewish community, Moshe ben Yehuda emigrated from Poland in 1936. His home town, Vielun, was the first place the Nazis bombed on the first day of World War II. But that was years ago, and Moishe’s daughter Esther is soon contending with a full house as grandchildren, great-grandchildren, old lovers and lifelong friends congregate for the full seven days of traditional mourning.
My Mexican Shivah is an artful blend of farce and philosophy. People come to Moishe’s funeral obsessed with private problems, but as the yahrzeit candle melts away, immersion in Jewish ritual has a purifying effect. Director Alejandro Springall, working with writer Jorge Goldenberg, lovingly crafted his screenplay based on a novella by Ilán Stavans, and Jacobo Lieberman composed the lively “klezmariachi” music on the soundtrack. Most of the dialogue is in Spanish, but all of the prayers (which are numerous) are in Hebrew, and two elderly Hassids function as a Yiddish-speaking “Greek chorus.”
Although director Springall is a relative newcomer, he’s studied at the feet of a master. He worked on both of Indie icon John Sayles’ Spanish language productions (Casa de Los Babys and Men with Guns) and Sayles is one of Shivah’s executive producers. Like the best of Sayles’ films, Shivah has an enormous cast, every member of which is imbued with felt life. Even as the final credits begin to roll, it’s easy to believe that the characters we’ve met on this journey, major and minor alike, all have arcs that will continue on, even though we won’t be watching. That’s our loss!
See My Mexican Shivah on Monday, April 14 at 6:30 PM or Wednesday, April 16 at 9:00 PM. Both Shiva screenings will be at the Pipers Alley Theatre in Old Town. Also recommended is the Chilean film El Brindis (To Life) playing on Friday, April 11 at 6:30 PM and Sunday, April 13 at 8:30 PM at the Landmark Century Center in Lincoln Park. To order tickets, visit www.latinoculturalcenter.org.
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