Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret: By Steve Luxenberg Hyperion Books, 401 pages, $24.99 In a letter written on a yellow legal pad, placed in an envelope marked “Do not open until after my death,” Beth Luxenberg (née Cohen) directed that all her possessions be distributed equally among her children and grandchildren. She…
When was the last time music changed your life? Not just to the extent of humming Wagner in public, but to the extent of abandoning your family to rent a hotel room in New York and embrace the young, vulnerable and frankly dangerous world of bebop? That’s what happened in the late 1940s when Nica…
Many of us know Chana Bloch as the translator of Yehuda Amichai, Israel?s most illustrious poet. In collaboration with Chana Kronfeld, she also recently translated Dahlia Ravikovitch, another iconic Israeli writer. Bloch?s own poetry, however, in her recent collection, ?Blood Honey,? engages Israel?s arch foil: the Diaspora. The poet delves into her Ashkenazic Jewish heritage…
Composer Meira Warshauer has taken the shofar out of the synagogue and into the concert hall. Though she is not the first to use the shofar in a concert setting, her concerto for shofar/trombone soloist and orchestra, called “Tekeeyah (a call),” highlights the shofar’s range as an instrument, beyond its traditional ritual role. The concerto,…
Described by Gerald Jacobs in the London Telegraph as “an important document, which should be read by everyone worried about the Middle East,” Rachel Shabi’s “You Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands” is an impassioned argument against the neglect of the country’s Middle Eastern identity, evidenced by the…
Deborah Colker is as animated in life as she is on the stage. A director and choreographer with a more than 30-year career, Colker grew up in Brazil to Russian immigrant parents who gave her the Jewish education that she says allowed her to pursue dance and create art. Colker was the first woman to…
After a year spent dark while renovating what is now the David H. Koch Theater, the New York City Opera has chosen to revive one of the most powerful American Jewish operas for its first full production of the season. On November 7, Hugo Weisgall’s “Esther,” which premiered in 1993 to nearly universal acclaim, will…
In the perennial debate over “nature versus nurture,” most people subscribe to a rather wishy-washy idea eloquently referred to as the “bit-of-this-bit-of-that” theory. But not Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is author of bestsellers “The Tipping Point” and “Blink”, along with a new book, “What the Dog Saw.” In his book “Outliers,” another of his brilliant explorations…
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