Currently Browsing: July 2010
From Aug ’08 Spotlight: The Consulate General of Israel to the Midwest is also showing Shay Kanot‘s romantic comedy Colombian Love as co-host of Cinema/Chicago’s International Summer Screenings Program at the Chicago Cultural Center. This is one night only (Wednesday August 6) beginning at 6:30 PM. Admission to CCC screenings is free but space is […]
From Aug ’08 Spotlight: Victory Gardens is also hosting the Hubris Productions revival of Harvey Fierstein’s play Torch Song Trilogy, which won two Tony Awards when it opened on Broadway in 1982. According to actress Susan Adler (cast in the role of an archetypical Jewish Mother): “The tragedy of Ma and Arnold is that they […]
From Aug ’08 Spotlight: Two years ago, Diane Gilboa, the Artistic Director of North Carolina’s Theatre Or, bought us Hard Love, a challenging play by Israeli provocateur Motti Lerner. Now she’s back with OnStageIsrael, a festival of staged readings celebrating Israel’s 60th Anniversary. “Curating the plays was difficult,” Diane told me. “I looked long and […]
From July ’08 Spotlight: I went to the Zygman Voss Gallery at 222 West Superior in Chicago on June 14 for the opening of a new exhibit of work by Moshe Rosenthalis. Rosenthalis was born in Lithuania in 1922 and trained in the style of Soviet Social Realism, but he made aliyah in 1958 and […]
From July ’08 Spotlight: Peter Ascoli’s recent biography of his grandfather, Julius Rosenwald: The Man who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South, was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Chicago Tribune. But also contained within the 453 pages of this monumental book is […]
From July ’08 Spotlight: Also recommended is James Sheridan’s new play Relatively Close, a comedy about three sisters with different ideas about how to allocate family property now that both parents are deceased. Looked at as individuals, there’s nothing very Jewish about these sisters, and they don’t go about their negotiations in any specifically Jewish […]
From July ’08 Spotlight: “Never judge a book by its cover,” teachers warn us, and sometimes that admonition also applies to movie posters. A current case in point is the new British film Brick Lane. I’m not saying it isn’t a film about a Bangladeshi woman living in London, I’m just urging you to dig […]
From July ’08 Spotlight: The recent death of actor Charlton Heston set me to brooding about Rome, so when I learned that “The Teaching Company” had added a new course by Isaiah Gafni to its catalogue, I ordered it immediately. Gafni, the author of Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity, is the […]
From June ’08 Spotlight: The Sundance Channel is currently screening a six-part series called Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman by filmmaker Jennifer Fox, but Chicago residents had a head start when the Gene Siskel Film Center featured the series last September. The ambitious daughter of a progressive Jewish family, Fox came of age in […]
from June ’08 Spotlight: I attended a beautiful afternoon concert called “The Sephardic Legacy” at the Instituto Cervantes on April 18. Fascinated by folk music from many nations, composer Manuel García-Morante worked with Jewish scholars to rescue a set of Ladino songs from obscurity. Soprano Yrene Martínez-Roca sang them for us as García-Morante accompanied her […]