At a glance, the scene in the Ari Grashin Memorial Gymnasium at Seattle Hebrew Academy on the afternoon of Sept. 17 seemed like a bit of a non sequitur. The assembled students and faculty swayed and clapped to the music being produced by a tanned and hip-looking keyboard player andContinue Reading
Editor’s note: Since this piece was published, director and playwright Charles Waxberg, who had joined the company as artistic director, has since left in what Waxberg called an amicable parting. The paragraph about Waxberg has been removed from this story. Roughly translated, the Hebrew word “balagan” denotes a state ofContinue Reading
Funny, I took the CD New Shabbos Waltz, David Grisman and Andy Statman’s sequel to their Songs of Our Fathers, for a “Jewish” album, but the digital know-it-all that popped up on my screen calls it “Country.” Indeed, the title track, all twangy mandolin, slide guitar, and thumpy bass, isContinue Reading
After Amy Levy’s suicide in 1888, Oscar Wilde wrote the following about her novel, Reuben Sachs: “Its directness, its uncompromising truth, its depth of feeling, and, above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make it, in some sort, a classic.” A classic, it seems, that very few outsideContinue Reading
In 1937, my grandfather was traveling on a train from Germany to Switzerland. Next to him sat an officer in the SS. The officer recognized my grandfather, as the two had fought together in the trenches for Germany during World War I, where my grandfather was awarded the prestigious IronContinue Reading
“I haven’t seen people in Seattle this excited about anything,” says my date to the new Mel Brooks Broadway musical Young Frankenstein, which had its world premiere in Seattle at the Paramount Theatre on Aug. 7. The lights have just gone out on the final scene, in which Dr. FrederickContinue Reading
Life is a Test, the latest book from Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, opens with a quotation: “All that befalls us in this world, the good as well as the bad, are tests.” It is with this sentence that the legendary Jungreis propels the reader into a life-transforming journey of self-discovery andContinue Reading
Helen Weber wanted to know how — “how Germany and the other countries did what they did” in the Jewish extermination campaign, Operation Reinhard and the “Final Solution.” Being a writer for more than 60 years, she set out to learn all she could, to delve into the background andContinue Reading
If a life examined is worth living, as Plato reminded us, then surely it is worthwhile to examine the lives of the following three contemporary women and four fictional — or fictionalized — female characters. Arlene Blum’s memoir, Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life (Harcourt, paper, $14) — first published inContinue Reading
Balkan Beat Box, Nu Med, JDub Records Many years ago, a Hebrew school teacher explained that while the United States was a melting pot, in which people from all over the world came with the goal of blending together into a monolithic culture and achieving the American dream, Israel wasContinue Reading
Since 1994, Michelle Goodman has been thumbing her nose at people who tell her to get a job. Now the Seattle-based writer and editor has become an evangelical freelancer — not that she has abandoned her Jewish background and converted — she is proselytizing her “Anti-9 to 5″ lifestyle. “IContinue Reading
As I write this, BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston has passed more than 100 days of captivity since his kidnapping. Yet he is presumed to be one of the lucky ones — likely he is still alive. In the first half of 2007, 47 reporters and eight media assistants wereContinue Reading
At first blush, the idea of a musical about a Nazi-controlled Jewish ghetto sounds like something out of an early draft of Mel Brooks’ The Producers, if not the mind of Franz Kafka. Terezin, currently in a limited run at the Village Theater’s small First Stage Theater in Issaquah, isContinue Reading
Short-story aficionados have new choices in three interesting and very different collections with Jewish themes. Fans of veteran crime novelist Fran Kellerman will be pleased to find two previously unpublished works from the Decker/Lazarus series (featuring an observant, crime-fighting couple) in The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights (Warner,Continue Reading
Crazy Love It’s often said that real life is stranger than fiction. The stunning documentary Crazy Love is proof of that adage. In New York City in the late 1950s, Burt Pugach, a successful ambulance-chasing attorney, fell hard for a glamorous young woman named Linda Riss, whom he approached afterContinue Reading
A simple Sunday-school song born in Seattle, “I Have a Little Dreidel,” barely begins to spin the big story of its composer, Samuel E. Goldfarb. Goldfarb’s enormous legacy, in this city’s Jewish community and beyond, will be celebrated in song and story on Sunday afternoon, June 10 at Temple DeContinue Reading
Daniel Levisohn Assistant Editor, JTNews Wendy Marcus was waiting patiently at home on the morning of May 18 for a delivery. After almost a year of planning, reading manuscripts and copy-edit after copy-edit, the inaugural issue of Drash, the Northwest’s first Jewish literary review, was supposed to have arrived atContinue Reading
Marc Salem can “read” the serial numbers on a bill in your wallet, stop his own pulse and guess a word you’ve picked from a book. Striding about the stage with a mischievous smile, eyebrows waggling, he seems to pluck audience members’ names and personal information out of thin air.Continue Reading
“We’re making history,” says Music of Remembrance Artistic Director Mina Miller. For its spring 2007 concert, called “Forbidden!” Music of Remembrance, the Seattle-based organization that commissions and performs music from or based upon the Holocaust, has commissioned a new work on a neglected subject: the persecution of gay men inContinue Reading
Michelle Goldberg writes in the new afterword to her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism that everything fell apart so quickly. Just one year ago, the Christian right was at the apex of its power. Today, its leadership has been humiliated in a series of scandals and itsContinue Reading
