16 Jan
Beshert, Latest

Beshert | Bonded by the Bard

“Was that your friend Bill Shakespeare?” my youngest son, Alex, then six, asks after my husband, Steve, hangs up the phone. 

If that seems like a crazy question from a child, it was par for the course in my household, because it was words that wooed me, words that won me, and words that keep us – the entire family – in thrall. 

From the very beginning, in fact. 

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14 Jul
Arts & Culture

Shakespeare's "Merchant of NYC"

By Sarah Breger; Interview by Sophie Taylor To stage The Merchant of Venice is courageous; to stage The Merchant of Venice so soon after the celebrated Al Pacino-led performance on Broadway even more so. The Washington Shakespeare Theatre’s production—a re-imagining of the play in 1920s New York—certainly does not lack for guts, but this madcap romp through the Lower East Side yields mixed results. In Director Ethan McSweeny’s beautifully staged production, Venice is New York, Antonio and his fellow gentry are Italian Mafioso—and the Jews? Well, they seem to be Lower East Side Hasidim. Ignoring the fact that the twenties were glory days for Jewish mobsters (think Bugsy Siegal, Meir Lansky et al.) McSweeny chooses to dress his Jews in beards and payos, playing them as insular ultra-Orthodox.  (This was especially disappointing for me, since I was...

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14 Jul
Arts & Culture

Shakespeare’s “Merchant of NYC”

By Sarah Breger; Interview by Sophie Taylor To stage The Merchant of Venice is courageous; to stage The Merchant of Venice so soon after the celebrated Al Pacino-led performance on Broadway even more so. The Washington Shakespeare Theatre’s production—a re-imagining of the play in 1920s New York—certainly does not lack for guts, but this madcap romp through the Lower East Side yields mixed results. In Director Ethan McSweeny’s beautifully staged production, Venice is New York, Antonio and his fellow gentry are Italian Mafioso—and the Jews? Well, they seem to be Lower East Side Hasidim. Ignoring the fact that the twenties were glory days for Jewish mobsters (think Bugsy Siegal, Meir Lansky et al.) McSweeny chooses to dress his Jews in beards and payos, playing them as insular ultra-Orthodox.  (This was especially disappointing for me, since I was...

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07 Jan
Uncategorized

Sects, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

By Symi Rom-Rymer A group of young Hasidic men hang out at the foot of the subway stairs at a station in Brooklyn, New York.   Soon, another one joins them and the conversation quickly turns heated.  “Do you bite your thumb at us sir?/I do bite my thumb, sir./Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?/No sir, I do not bite my thumb at you sir, but I bite my thumb sir.”  These lines may seem familiar, as they open one of the most famous plays ever written: William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  But would they seem as familiar in Yiddish? That is a question tackled in “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish,” a film by Eve Annenberg now playing as part of the 2011 New York Jewish Film...

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