Arts and Culture

NEW YORK (JTA) — In Larry David’s fake real-life world on the HBO sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he is tapped by Mel Brooks to take over the Zero Mostel-Nathan Lane role of Max Bialystock in the megahit Broadway adaptation of “The Producers.” Just as Max and accountant Leo Bloom… Read more »

Lacey Schwartz's film 'Little White Lie' tells of her discovery in adulthood that her father was black.

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) — When Lacey Schwartz celebrated her Bat Mitzvah more than two decades ago in her hometown of Woodstock, N.Y., a synagogue-goer turned to her and said, “It’s so nice to have an Ethiopian Jew in our midst.” Never mind that Schwartz, a striking 37-year-old with long… Read more »

Many schools assign students a summer break reading list to complete for the fall. Beyond the assigned list, some students may also want an enriching reading experience during their free time. JNS.org suggests 14 Jewish-themed classic, eccentric, and fun books for the 2014 summer break. While some selections are well-known… Read more »

Jeff Haskell

        Invisible Theatre will kick off its Sizzling Summer Sounds cabaret series at Skyline Country Club with “Borscht Belt Boys and Girl,” featuring Jeffrey Haskell, Jack Neubeck and Katherine Byrnes, July 9 and 10 at 8 p.m. Susan Claassen, director of Sizzling Summer Sounds and creator… Read more »

“The Storyteller,” life-size bronze sculpture by David Unger

Tucson sculptor David Unger will have a one-man show July 4-31 at Bill Hester Fine Art in Santa Fe, N.M. The show will feature more than 30 of his bronze sculptures, and Unger is particularly excited about his life-size piece, “The Storyteller.” “The Storyteller” can hold children in its… Read more »

Here are some hot summer reading suggestions from your AJP editors. For me, the public library is an Aladdin’s cave of treasures waiting to be discovered. A recent find on a recommended reading display was “Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment,” a 2009 title by A.J. Jacobs, author… Read more »

A photo of Sara Kaplowitz Greenberg in the early 1940s is surrounded by a few of her beloved shul hats. (Courtesy Jewish History Museum)

The Jewish History Museum’s summer exhibit, “Skullcaps and Shul Hats,” which runs through June 30, focuses on two family collections of head coverings. One is a collection of elegant shul hats worn by Tucsonan Nicki Lasky’s mother, Sara Kaplowitz Greenberg. They range from “fascinators,” small, often feathered decorative headpieces,… Read more »

Rose Cabat, “Feelies,” c. 1960s-1980s, porcelain, collection of the artist (Carissa Castillo)

                                    The Tucson Museum of Art is presenting “Rose Cabat at 100: A Retrospective Exhibition of Ceramics,” through Sept. 14. Cabat, who lives in Tucson, is considered one of the most important… Read more »

Agata Trzebuchowska as Ida Lebenstein, right, and Agata Kulesza as Wanda Gruz in the Polish film "Ida." (Courtesy photo)

(JTA) — After reburying the bones of her parents in a neglected Jewish cemetery, a soon-to-be Polish nun quietly crosses herself with earth-covered fingers. A devout and introverted young woman, Ida Lebenstein had learned only days earlier that her parents were Jews who were murdered by Polish Christians. As… Read more »

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, at far right, receives the Genesis Prize on May 22, 2014 at the Jerusalem Theater, where he is joined onstage by, from left, ceremony emcee and former "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; the chairman of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky; and the chairman of the Genesis Prize, Stan Polovets. (Milner/Genesis)

JERUSALEM (JTA) — There were ballerinas, a full dance ensemble, soloists, a harpist, a video tribute to Jewish luminaries in multiple fields, a multimedia orchestra performance celebrating the enduring light of creation, a speech from the prime minister, stand-up from Jay Leno, and an audience packed with top Jewish… Read more »

Philip Roth receives an honorary doctorate at the Jewish Theological Seminary's commencement in New York on May 22, 2014. (Ellen Dubin Photography)

(JTA) — “What is being done to silence this man?” an American rabbi asked in a 1963 letter to the Anti-Defamation League. He was talking about the novelist Philip Roth, whose early novels and short stories cast his fellow American Jews in what some considered a none-too-flattering light. Fast-forward… Read more »

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — At a Paris café after the war, a young publisher is quickly falling in love with an adorable Jewish author he just met as she discusses her still-unpublished book. It is an intensely private account based on a personal diary that recounts her amazing survival of… Read more »

(L-R) Bebe Fischer, Ina Shivack, Hilary Lyons and Billie Maas in Arizona Onstage Production’s ‘25 Questions for a Jewish Mother’

Part memoir, part stand-up routine, “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother” will feature two segments by local residents when it comes to Tucson this month. Comedienne Judy Gold and playwright Kate Moira Ryan weave actual interviews with Jewish mothers across the United States with memories from Gold’s childhood and… Read more »

“Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West” by Harriet Rochlin was recently republished by the Authors Guild and iUniverse. The book, which covers 13 Western states, was called “Social history at its best, entertaining, engaging, and filled with little known information about famous and not-so-famous Jewish pioneers,”… Read more »

Tucsonan Nora Sevy enjoys PJ Library books (Courtesy Libby Quinn)

The PJ Library program in Southern Arizona is expanding and will now be available for all families raising Jewish children through 8 years of age. When the program launched in Southern Arizona in 2009 it was available for families raising Jewish children from 6 months through 6 years of… Read more »

Members of the Philadelphia-based "Butterfly Project" perform in Terezin, the very place where the characters they portrayed had been imprisoned during the Holocaust. (Londa Salamon Photography/www.londaphotography.com)

 PRAGUE (JEWISH EXPONENT) — When the applause faded, the 32 young actors remained on stage in silence. Some of them hugged. They looked at each other, their faces filled with amazement and disbelief — the circle was complete. The Philadelphia-based troupe had brought the words of Terezín’s children back… Read more »

Bebe Fischer, Ina Shivack, Hilary Lyons, Billie Maas (Patrick J. McArdle)

Arizona Onstage Productions is holdinga contest for two monologues to be performed in “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother,” by Kate Moira Ryan and Judy Gold, which will run for three weekends beginning May 9at the Temple of Music and Art Cabaret Theater. Email your essay, “My best memory… Read more »

In a photo from the late 1940s, Rabbi Osher Levitan (right) supervises production of Passover matzah at the Streit’s matzah factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

For the past year, filmmaker Michael Levine and producer Michael Green have been documenting the story of the last family- owned matzah factory in America, the Streit’s matzah factory on New York’s historic Lower East Side. The result is “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream” , a feature length… Read more »

The cast of ‘Olive and the Bitter Herbs,’ (L-R): David Alexander Johnston, Eric Anson, Susan Claassen, Susan Kovitz and Jack Neubeck (Tim Fuller)

Actress Olive Fisher, known for her “Gimme the Sausage” commercial, is a classic New York curmudgeon at war with the world in general and her next door neighbors in particular. Her closed-off life is shaken by the appearance of a ghost in her mirror, but that’s the least of… Read more »

The cast of “Love, Loss and What I Wore,” (clockwise from top left): Avis Judd, Carley Elizabeth Preston, T. Loving, Carlisle Ellis and Carrie Hill.

Five women explore identity and relationships in “Love, Loss and What I Wore,” a play by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, based on the best-selling memoir by Ilene Beckerman. In monologues that are by turns comic and bittersweet, the characters recall prom dresses and cowboy boots, parents and lovers,… Read more »