William Kunstler, the late civil rights lawyer, used to brag to his daughters, Emily and Sarah, that he was the only Jew in a youth street gang of Latinos and blacks. Fueled by the values of his faith, Kunstler later commanded turf far beyond his neighborhood. “The work that Bill did with the outcasts, the…
South America’s biggest pop star is a fan of klezmer, if her latest CD is any indication. Colombian singer Shakira, who has topped charts with her Spanish and English lyrics, samples the Jewish musical genre on her new album, “She Wolf,” which debuted at 15 on the Billboard album chart dated December 12 . The…
Alvin Ailey danced for her as a young man. She worked with Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams on Broadway, and taught Patti LuPone and Robin Williams at the Juilliard School. Anna Sokolow passed away in 2000 at the age of 90; she would have been 100 years old in 2010. This inventive, elegant yet gritty…
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…
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