By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews Four years ago, during an interview with JTNews while waiting for the post office to finally deliver the boxes filled with copies of the first edition of Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Wendy Marcus mused she was happy just to get it finished. “I was only thinkingContinue Reading
By Gigi Yellen, JTNews Correspondent June 18 marks the Seattle Symphony’s last performance with Gerard Schwarz conducting as music director. After 26 years, the man who has influenced not only the orchestra and its work, but also the shape of the city itself, will become “Conductor Laureate,” returning now andContinue Reading
By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews When Music of Remembrance commissioned Betty Olivero to write a piece for this year’s spring concert, they didn’t expect one of Israel’s most respected composers to draw from her own personal history. It’s one that Seattle’s large Sephardic community can relate to. “She’s chosen toContinue Reading
Again, our Jewish calendar sets our people’s history into bold contrast. Passover’s triumphant exodus story is followed swiftly by Yom HaShoah, a day marking the Holocaust’s horrifying unchecked human cruelty. Despite some counterbalancing examples of courage and compassion, how do we tell this tale to our children? Here are someContinue Reading
A funny thing happened to Daniel Alpern as his life began to crumble following the death of his father last year. He began to talk to God and to his recently deceased dad as a way of helping him ease his troubled mind — and he got a response. “IContinue Reading
“Why did you leave me? Why can’t you come back for me?” Dilawar, a young, unemployed Kashmiri Muslim, is praying, as he does after each of his many calamities in Zero Bridge, to a godlike figure, his mother, who abandoned him, who never answers him. His voice, actually his voiceContinue Reading
The pain is physical, it’s emotional, and it’s constant as Ora and Avram hike Israel’s northernmost reaches. But it’s impossible for them — and us — to ignore the beauty of the spring, the budding flowers through verdant fields. The detail woven throughout David Grossman’s To the End of theContinue Reading
NEW YORK (JTA) — With all the restrictions, are decent desserts even possible during Passover? “My particular talent is working around restriction,” says Paula Shoyer, author of The Kosher Baker: Over 160 Dairy-free Recipes from Traditional to Trendy (Brandeis University Press, 2010). Her cookbook contains a chapter on Passover baking,Continue Reading
When the Price girls show up at their parents’ house for Passover, their mother Lilly opens the door and laments, “You’re early! You’re all early.” Hardly an expected greeting from a mother whose four daughters have taken up the pilgrimage home for one of the most important and celebrated JewishContinue Reading
It’s a seasonal phenomenon — this contrast of holidays and observance, ping-ponging between solemn and celebration. Several children’s books this spring marked Purim’s story of threat and deliverance and should be noted, even if a bit late. But celebrated here are also some new works appropriate to Pesach, Yom Ha’atzmaut,Continue Reading
Seattle is no New York. Here, bourekas are more common than blintzes and gefilte fish is reinvented with wild Pacific salmon. The Yiddish culture that unloaded all of its baggage onto Ellis Island and came to define, in large part, the phenomenon of American Judaism, got watered down enough somewhereContinue Reading
Life in Weimar Germany was, well, a cabaret. For a few years between the two world wars, before the Nazis came into power, Germany’s gay community was progressive, accepted, and even vocal. “We found one song, called “˜Lavender Nights,’ that was a gay pride anthem from that period,” said DennisContinue Reading
It’s not by any means the whole Megillah, but like the woman at the heart of the Purim story, the Baroque oratorio “Esther” made history. With its premiere, it introduced to the world a new musical form: The English-language oratorio, a grand creation for chorus and orchestra. Its composer, GeorgeContinue Reading
When a band has been together for nearly a quarter of a century, a celebration is warranted. If it’s a Jewish band, you can assume that a certain amount of tzuris has accompanied the success. That’s the case with the Klezmatics, the world-renowned klezmer band founded in the mid-‘80s inContinue Reading
Rachel Amado Bortnick didn’t suffer through pogroms. She didn’t escape her home country as government troops closed in on her town. She didn’t have to leave everything behind — her family, her cherished treasures — to make her way to the new world. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t haveContinue Reading
Chaim just can’t keep it together. Like the panels of the ads unravel off the rusting billboards, Chaim is falling apart. And just like he tries, desperately, to keep the smiling face of a politician from revealing the toothpaste ad underneath, Chaim can’t pull himself together. Every time he hearsContinue Reading
VANCOUVER, BC — David “Dudu” Fisher, Israeli-born world-renowned performer who rose to fame as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, first in Israel — where “Les Miz” became the nation’s longest running show — and then on Broadway, is coming to Vancouver, BC for one Pacific Northwest performance as part ofContinue Reading
When we think about Israeli films, we think about them taking place in Israel. Often, we think about them addressing the kinds of issues that make Israel such a dynamic place and such a constant presence on the nightly news: tension, territorial conflict, and terrorism. Lauded Israeli director Eran Riklis’sContinue Reading
For decades after the war, French filmmakers avoided the subject of their country’s collaboration during the Nazi Occupation. The late Louis Malle helped break the silence with his chilling teenage-fascist saga Lacombe Lucien (1974) and movingly autobiographical Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987). The latter film famously centered on the wartimeContinue Reading
Were things really better in the old days? Or do we look back and see our past with rose-colored glasses? Those hazy memories — of the shtetl in Russia, of the farm fields in the Congo — may feel like simpler, happier times, especially compared to a lonely subway rideContinue Reading
