It’s hard to believe, but it’s been almost 35 years since a small group of students, grandmothers and homemakers in Seattle got together to try to raise community consciousness about the plight of Jews in the former Soviet Union. Through clandestine visits to Jews in the FSU, demonstrations, protests ofContinue Reading
Gazing out on the placid Galilee from the roof of her apartment building, the 40-something Aviva appears content with her life. And yet this Mizrahi hotel-kitchen employee has three spoiled, lethargic children and a spoiled, unemployed husband to care for. It doesn’t compute, except for one thing: the protagonist ofContinue Reading
In Diana Brement’s February book reviews, she selected a few haggadot for early bird shoppers wanting to get a jump on their Passover preparations. Below are a few more choices, as well as supplements to both the holiday and the meal. “A Mystical Haggadah” by Rabbi Eliahu Klein (North AtlanticContinue Reading
In a town as literary as Seattle, writers come through nearly every day to talk about their books. But it’s rare when the author bakes her audience cookies. That’s exactly what Judy Bart Kancigor did in early March, when she came to Ravenna Third Place Books to talk about CookingContinue Reading
What do costumes, political intrigue, epic stories and the Stroum Jewish Community Center make you think of? If you said Purim, you would be very close. Now shift your thinking to the stage, add a good strong singing voice or two, and think of the opera. Seattle Opera and theContinue Reading
What’s so funny about lunch? Well, when you get a bunch of Jewish comediennes around a table — in this case, Judy Gold, Cory Kahaney, Jackie Hoffman and Jessica Kirson — with a large tab and a heap of pastrami, you’d think it might be a laugh a minute. NotContinue Reading
Dror Shaul paints Sweet Mud in the soft golden hues that filmmakers typically use to denote cherished memories. His choice of palette is bitterly ironic, however, for this semi-autobiographical look back at a pivotal year in a young boy’s life is anything but a feel-good reverie. The drama centers onContinue Reading
Slate Magazine music critic Jody Rosen admits that his first historical Jewish music compilation, Jewface, is quirkier and distinctly separate from his earlier and more conventional work, White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, a book about Jewish American musical icon Irving Berlin. But he was excited that dayContinue Reading
If it were an American film, writer-director Ayalet Menahemi’s first feature in 14 years would be called a small independent film. It has a small cast of intimate characters whose lives unfold on a limited number of sets (mostly) in and around an anonymous middle-class Tel Aviv neighborhood. But IsraelContinue Reading
The early settlers who created the first kibbutzim dreamed of more than just a Jewish homeland. They were creating a new egalitarian society free of exploitation by holding their property in common, idealizing collective labor, and even raising their children as a single collective family who lived together in theContinue Reading
Sixty Six, the opening night film for the 13th annual Seattle Jewish Film Festival, tells the story of dweeby, asthmatic British adolescent Bernie Rubens (Gregg Sulkin) as he prepares for what he assumes will be the biggest day of his life: his Bar Mitzvah. The youngest child of a far-from-functionalContinue Reading
When Margriet Tindemans, director of The Medieval Women’s Chorus, finally accepted a request from one of her chorus members to present a program of Jewish Medieval music, she couldn’t have anticipated how much of a challenge this would turn out to be. Tindemans, a world-renowned musicologist who has taught andContinue Reading
Israeli writer Ron Leshem wasn’t up on the finer points of Oscar night fashion, but he did know something better: how it felt to be nominated for an Academy Award. Beaufort, a tale of an Israel Defense Forces outpost in the waning days of the Lebanon war, earned Israel itsContinue Reading
The 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film went to an Austrian movie about Nazi crimes. You may not have heard about these crimes — yes, there are still Holocaust stories to be told. So when two different producers within a week approached director Stefan Ruzowitzky with survivor Adolf Burger’sContinue Reading
Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore — but let me back up. Maybe I should start by telling you that the title of the second song is “Un Madre Comió Asado,”— “A mother roasted her child,” and is a traditional Sephardic song after “The Lamentations of Jeremiah.” Now have IContinue Reading
scourse? Donald Byrd, artistic director of Spectrum Dance Theater, isn’t sure, but he and his colleagues aim to find out over the course of the next three years as the Madrona-based dance company embarks on a series of productions designed to get audience members thinking and talking about war, politicsContinue Reading
The Band’s Visit was supposed to be Israel’s entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category for this year’s Academy Awards. But it wasn’t, for the oddest reason. It also made news when it was invited, and then disinvited, to the Middle East Film Festival in Abu Dhabi. That’s justContinue Reading
Of the nearly 150,000 Jews sent to the Terezìn concentration camp in Czechoslovakia between 1940 and 1945, more than 30,000 died within its walls. The majority of those who did not perish from the conditions of Terezìn survived, only to be sent to Auschwitz. When the war ended, only 17,247Continue Reading
Seattle artist Joan Rudd’s sculptures translate her Jewish heritage into visual form. Her pieces reflect a living culture and a shared memory. “Each of my sculptures has a story,” she says. “I sculpt to capture special moments of connectedness between people, to capture a geometric unity of form and composition,Continue Reading
Spanning three nights, six hours and 350 years, the PBS series “The Jewish Americans” is an ambitious project by any measure. And yet, despite the swath it cuts through the January TV schedule, it is not a landmark program of lasting significance. Veteran filmmaker David Grubin concocts a blend ofContinue Reading
