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…
And the Rat Laughed By Nava Semel, Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger Hybrid Publishers, 232 pages, $25.00 ‘And the Rat Laughed” is an exquisitely wrought meditation on the present and future of Holocaust memory in Israel after the survivors are gone. Integrating story, legend, poetry, dream, science fiction and diary, Semel’s novel begins…
Dina Kantor grew up in Minneapolis to a Jewish father and a Finnish mother who had converted. Her Jewish and Finnish worlds were quite separate but, in 2006, she went to Finland to explore the Finnish Jewish communities of Helsinki and Turku. Originally treating it as part of her MFA program at the School of…
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel pulled herself up by her bootstraps from her orphanage roots, trading her boots for a pair of two-toned pumps, which she is often credited with popularizing — along with women’s trousers and the little black dress. “Coco Before Chanel,” director Anne Fontaine’s new biopic, starring Audrey Tautou (“Amélie”) in the title role,…
‘When Saxony’s minister of arts presented me to the press in Dresden and the first question was, ‘How do you feel as a woman?’ I was so tempted to say, ‘After 50 years, I’m used to being a woman!’” Ulrike Hessler said, laughing as she recounted the public announcement that she had been chosen intendant…
like any nut zipped up tight in its shell. like a clam’s clipped momser, the locked maw talked open by fire — by burly water waitressing flesh, flat as a tongue, to sterile plates. under fissures, a soft sloth, holy fruit, hare -lipped by cleavers, the devil’s hand. sweet meat of the tree. bone boy,…
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