By Nathan Guttman, Eileen Reynolds and Maia Efrem
A $118 million program aims to help non-profits protect against terror attacks. A Forward investigation found Jewish groups got most of the cash with no clear link to actual threats.
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By Eileen Reynolds
To say that Yoav Gal’s “Mosheh,” playing in New York City’s HERE through February 5, is an opera about the life of Moses is to understate the exhilarating complexity of the work. Those expecting a simple linear retelling of the biblical story won’t find it here: Gal uses Exodus less as a plot blueprint than as a starting point for a hallucinatory meditation on themes of alienation and loneliness. Four female characters who receive short shrift in scripture — Moses’ sister; his wife; his biological mother, and his adoptive mother, Bitia, Pharaoh’s daughter — are foregrounded in this version of the tale, each singing an aria before performing, as a quartet, a chilling recitation of the Ten Plagues. Mosheh himself is reimagined as a modern-day urban dweller: The Nile becomes the East River, Pharaoh’s palace a graffiti-scarred colonnade under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Ultimately, though, the setting for this story is neither Ancient Egypt nor present-day New York, but rather the murky, sometimes grotesque terrain of the human subconscious.
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