Broadway’s Bruce Sabath Remembers Stephen Sondheim
Broadway actor and singer Bruce Sabath reflects on his relationship with Stephen Sondheim, who died on November 26.
Book Review | The Politics of Paranoia, Then and Now
Almost a half-century before Donald Trump signed on to the fraudulent notion that President Barack Obama’s American citizenship and constitutional legitimacy were suspect, Robert Welch (1899-1985) reached an equally alarming conclusion about the president of his day, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Book Review | Beneath the City of God
The rabbinic tradition speaks of a Jerusalem above and a Jerusalem below.
Poem | Portrait of the Poet’s Grandmother (Lighting Candles)
In many Jewish homes, lighting candles at dusk marks a shift to sacred time, the moment when the Sabbath starts—or a holiday, a yahrzeit.
Staff Picks: Milan Kundera, ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ and Post-War Germany
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
Fiction | Polonaise
The music of Chopin brings together a mysterious young Hungarian Holocaust survivor and an American music student. But just when romance is in the air, he vanishes.
Book Review | The First Covid Comedy
As Jonathan Safran Foer pioneered the 9/11 novel, so Shteyngart does for COVID.
Oh, I Remember the Black Birch: Play Reading and Talkback with Velina Hasu Houston & Keren M. Goldberg
This program is part of the 2021 Moment Theater Festival.
In the Autumn of 1941, 18-year-old Brina Berman, a Jewish Polish young woman from Warsaw, finds herself alone in Kobe, Japan, having traveled halfway across the world following the Nazi invasion of her hometown and murder of her family. Thus unfolds a little-known true story of what happened to Jewish refugees when Japanese Diplomat Chiune Sugihara was stationed in Kovno, Lithuania and wrote transit visas to Japan, saving thousands of Jews who were running from the advancing German army. Seen through her many struggles in Kobe, Brina is surprised to find an established Jewish community and nurturing Japanese residents and organizations working to support the arriving Jewish refugees.
The cast, director, and playwright of Oh, I Remember the Black Birch discuss their new original play about a young Jewish woman struggling in a new country and finding community during the Holocaust. Playwright Velina Hasu Houston is also in conversation with producer and dramaturg Keren M. Goldberg about the journey of Oh, I Remember the Black Birch which is inspired by true events.
Visual Moment | Judy Chicago’s Revolutionary Art
Judy Chicago always wanted to be an artist. “From the time I was a child,” she writes in her 2021 autobiography, The Flowering, “I had a burning desire to make art.”
Israel’s 2022 Oscar Submission: Let It be Morning
Based on the novel by Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua, Let It Be Morning is Israel’s official submission to next year’s 94th Academy Awards, in the “Best International Feature Film” category.