Israeli-born jazz bassist, pianist, composer and arranger Avishai Cohen performs songs from his recently released album, “Lyla,” his fifth and the first on his new label, Razdaz Recordz. The 11-song collection features Cohen’s International Vamp Band on rhythmically charged tracks, drummer and electronics specialist Mark Guiliana on pop/rock-oriented numbers and vocalists Lola and Jeff Taylor,…
In 1932, Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera were dining with other guests at the Detroit home of Henry Ford, the automotive titan and noted antisemite. (The city had commissioned Rivera to paint a series of murals devoted to the theme of modern industry.) During a lull in conversation, with a characteristic mixture of…
Triangle: The Fire That Changed America By David Von Drehle Atlantic Monthly Press, 340 pages, $26. * * *| March 25, 1911, became a Sabbath like no other. Scores of young immigrant Jewish women who couldn’t afford a day of rest went to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a newfangled high-rise factory on the…
High Holy Days CyberServices: The High Holy Day services of Temple Emanu-El of the City of New York, a Reform congregation, are to be broadcast on the radio (WQXR-FM or 96.3 FM) as well as the Internet (www.emanuelnyc.org) for those who cannot attend services in person. Rosh Hashana Sept. 26, 5:30 p.m., Yom Kippur, Oct….
A Brooklyn rabbi charged with defrauding the federal government of almost $700,000 is proclaiming his innocence and vowing that his legal troubles have only temporarily halted his prodigious political fundraising. Milton Balkany, the dean of an Orthodox girls’ school in Boro Park, surrendered to authorities on August 26 to face charges that he used a…
Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments By Oz Shelach City Lights, 115 pages, $11.95. * * *| Had Ernest Hemingway succeeded in writing the novel suggested by the vignettes that punctuate “In Our Time,” the result might have resembled Oz Shelach’s “Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments.” The novel, Shelach’s first, is set in an…
Dean Defense: In his latest attempt to mend fences after the dustup over his comment that the United States “ought not to take sides” in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Howard Dean is trying to assuage the ire of Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman. In an interview with the Associated Press, Foxman described Dean’s remark, recorded…
J’Accuse By Aharon Shabtai New Directions, 64 pages, $14.95. * * *| In “J’Accuse,” whose title is taken from Emile Zola’s famed letter against the French government during the Dreyfus Affair, Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai accuses his society of brutally oppressing the Palestinians. In the title poem, Shabtai refers to Mohammed al-Dura, photos of whose…
Just in time for the Democratic presidential primaries, a Jewish Democratic group is rebuilding its presence in New York. The National Jewish Democratic Council, founded in 1990 as “the national voice of Jewish Democrats,” has hired fundraiser Jill Straus to spearhead its revived New York chapter. Straus will reach out to donors, candidates, officials, community…
Small Change: A Collection of Stories By Yehudit Hendel Brandeis University Press/ University Press of New England, 142 pages, $19.95. * * *| Yehudit Hendel is being rediscovered. Hendel, born in 1926, first established herself as a major Israeli author in the 1950s, a time when very few female Hebrew prose writers gained wide recognition,…
A New Yorker living in Israel filed a law suit this past week against the Bush administration in an effort to press it to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Ari Zivotofsky claims in the suit that the State Department broke the law when it refused to list Israel as the place of birth…
