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Robert David Jaffee

Robert David Jaffee

Flamenco and tango melodies strike Jewish chords

Ethan Margolis, co-founder of Arte y Pureza (Art and Purity), a Seville, Spain-based flamenco troupe, says three influences stand out as soon as you begin reading about flamenco: Sephardic, Arabic and Indian.

Jewish TV Network brings High Holy Days home with Kol Nidre webcast

It was only a matter of time before hi-tech came to the High Holy Days. This year the Jewish Television Network will webcast Wilshire Boulevard Temple\’s entire Kol Nidre service, the first time viewers will be able to watch such a service live over the Internet.

New Chabad telethon chief follows in his father’s footsteps

Rabbi Chaim Cunin, 33, executive producer of the telethon and CEO of Chabad of California, may represent a movement that dates back to the 1700s, but on a recent August day he wasn\’t wearing a dark frock coat. Instead, he sported casual attire: a blue button-down shirt, a brown tie and a yarmulke, that, when flipped around, bore the trademark dancing rabbi logo.

‘Big Death’ evokes the muse of playwrights past

Mickey Birnbaum recently spent a year as an Inge Fellow in Independence, Kan., boyhood home of the late playwright William Inge, best known for his 1950s plays, \”Picnic\” and \”Bus Stop.\” Birnbaum\’s \”Big Death & Little Death,\” now being staged at the Road Theater Company in North Hollywood, does evoke playwrights of the past, but it is Thornton Wilder, not Inge, whose work has influenced Birnbaum.

Joe ‘Master Blaster’ Weider still going strong

Even at 86 years old, Joe Weider gives you the sense he might have once been one of those Olympians. As he approaches the head of the table inside this wood-paneled room, Weider appears dapper and powerful, his muscular torso still filling out the gray pinstriped suit he wears with a starched white shirt and red power tie.

Feminist ‘Scroll’ unfurled for Weisberg retrospective

Fifteen years since it was last exhibited at the Spertus Museum in Chicago, Ruth Weisberg\’s \”The Scroll,\” a 94-foot mixed-media painting that encompasses the Jewish feminist narrative in mural form, will be displayed at the Skirball Cultural Center as part of a mid-career retrospective of her work titled \”Ruth Weisberg: Unfurled,\” opening Tuesday, May 8.

Creativity for a cause

Esther Netter, CEO of the Zimmer Children\’s Museum, speaks with infectious enthusiasm about her museum\’s upcoming exhibition, \”Show & Tell: The Art of Harmony,\” which opens Sunday, May 6.

Books: Creative minds at work — business, science and the arts

With meteoric technological advances presenting many businesses with crises verging on the existential, there is a growing need for nimble minds able to adapt to changes in the marketplace. Given this environment, it is fitting that Jonathan Feinstein, a professor at the Yale School of Management, should come out with \”The Nature of Creative Development,\” a book that attempts to model the trajectory of creativity within individuals.

Crossroads School thanks its courageous music man

Crossroads School in Santa Monica might not be where one would expect to find the archived works of a celebrated composer who survived Dachau and Buchenwald, especially when one considers that the Vienna-born Herbert Zipper worked as an educator at a variety of institutions of higher learning, including USC and the New School for Social Research in New York. But when Zipper died at the age of 93 in 1997, he left his papers to the K-12 school where he taught musical composition and theory in his retirement years. His relationship with the school was such that co-founder and former headmaster Paul Cummins wrote Zipper\’s biography.

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