JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
By the time of his death in 1965, few would have taken Michal Waszynski for the director of one of the classics of Yiddish cinema. He had been living a surpassingly posh life in Rome, inhabiting a gorgeous urban estate with a social circle that included many of the luminaries of Hollywood and Italian cinema,…
Two months — that’s all it took to transform a 1920’s-style black gown into a shimmering, salt-covered piece of art. Israeli artist Sigalit Landau submerged a dress — a replica of the traditional Hasidic one worn by the character Leah in the seminal Yiddish play “The Dybbuk” — into the Dead Sea in 2014 and…
Television’s golden age ran roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1960s — a quaint period in which not a single Jersey housewife or Kardashian made it on the air. Instead, viewers were treated to classical theater and original productions from the likes of Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal and Rod Serling. Great actors and…
S. An-sky’s “The Dybbuk” is arguably the most famous play and film in the cannons of Yiddish theater and cinema. Written in 1914 and first produced by the Vilna Troupe in 1920, “The Dybbuk” is an otherworldly tale, based on Jewish folklore collected by An-sky during a three-year ethnographic expedition through Russia and Ukraine. In…
Is Broadway ready for dancing girls in the Warsaw ghetto? Can an American musical high kick through the darkest moments of Jewish history and still avoid giving offense, or worse, falling into kitsch? “The People in the Picture,” a new musical playing at the Roundabout theater until June 19, raises this question, treading where even…
With the opening of San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay’s (JCHS) new building on Ellis Street in 2002, the city’s organized Jewish community finally returned to the Fillmore. Only local Jewish history buffs appreciated the significance; the neighborhood in which the school is situated — now called The Western Addition — was…
