Menachem Wecker
By Menachem Wecker
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The Schmooze Sephardic Legend Flory Jagoda Keeps Singing at 90
Photo: Tom Pich Soon after she assumed the makeshift stage during her July 16 performance at the Washington D.C. JCC, Flory Jagoda, 90, lit a candle. “Sephardic women always believed in light, in a candle,” she told the audience of about 125 people. “With these candles,” the Bosnian-born artist sang in Ladino, “We pray to…
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Culture Getting Back to the Garden (of Eden)
Looking at an image of a serpent encircling an apple branch, most of us will think of the snake from the Garden of Eden. In popular lore, Adam and Eve’s consumption of the taboo meal from the illicit Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as it is called in the Bible, resulted in their…
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The Schmooze Mystery Mosaic Discovered in Ancient Galilee Synagogue
Photo Credit: Jim Haberman Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brigham Young University, Trinity University (Texas), University of Toronto, and University of Wyoming believe that they have uncovered the first ancient synagogue mosaic to feature a non-biblical narrative. In 2012, the team, led by Jodi Magness, Kenan distinguished professor for teaching…
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The Schmooze Did Photographer Garry Winogrand Exploit Nude Subjects?
Garry Winogrand, New York, 1968, gelatin silver print, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Walking through the many rooms in the National Gallery of Art’s exhibit “Garry Winogrand” (through June 8), I was surprised to see several groups of transfixed boys. Winogrand, after all, was born in 1928 and died…
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The Schmooze A Dutch Monastery’s Jewish Prayer Books
Photo: Menachem Wecker For the past three years, mid-March has meant for me a pilgrimage to the southern Dutch town of Maastricht to cover The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF). Undoubtedly one of the world’s finest, the fair offers (for a hefty price) everything from Greco-Roman antiquities and Rembrandts to Warhols, photography and modern sculpture….
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Culture Even Trees Can Be Political
The anonymous narrator of Robert Frost’s 1914 poem “Mending Wall” wonders why his neighbor insists upon having an artificial barrier between their properties. “He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines,” he says. But all his neighbor does is echo,…
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The Schmooze When Journalists Are Also Activists
Photo Credit: Margaret Olin Much was made in 2010 of Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, “becoming part of the story” when he treated the Haitian patients he’d been sent to report on. The journalistic ethics, it appeared, were murky; should reporters — particularly those with medical training — abandon their professional posts to help…
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The Schmooze Reform and Conservative Come Together in Song
When 31 students from Jewish Theological Seminary’s H.L. Miller Cantorial School and Hebrew Union College’s Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music perform together on May 4, the concert will be the first interdenominational collaboration of this sort that David Tilman can remember. Years ago, there were “very significant” differences between the Conservative and Reform movements,…
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