Theater Notes
Naomi Pfefferman
July 9, 1998
When the Jewish Women\’s Theatre Project askedSusan Merson to write its first commissioned play last year, theactress/writer recalled a bizarre TV news item.
Category
Entertainment
Mideast
Eric Silver
July 2, 1998
Richard Strauss\’s opera \”Salome\” had its Israelipremière in Tel Aviv this month. Strauss, who died in 1949,served, however briefly, as a cultural official in Adolf Hitler\’s Nazi administration. The season, by the visiting Kirov Opera from St.Petersburg, was an unchallenged hit. Strauss has been forgiven,perhaps because he had a Jewish daughter-in-law and soon learned thefolly of his ways.
Defending the ZOA
Jewish Journal
July 2, 1998
What marks the passage from girlhood to womanhood in our society? If sex is integral to a definition of womanhood, how do parents and educators help girls deal with the challenges it raises? What is the role of social institutions — the media, churches and synagogues, schools — in shaping sexual self-image and even desire?
Broadside Ballads
Jewish Journal
June 25, 1998
Travel back with us to 1950. For two weeks that June, a snappy tune from the newborn State of Israel, \”Tzena Tzena,\” was No. 1 on America\’s pop charts. It was sung by the Weavers, a folk quartet led by a leftist troubadour named Pete Seeger.
Watch Your Language
Charles Marowitz
June 18, 1998
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, with front-runners such as T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry and Archibald Macleish, there was a concerted effort to revive language in the American theater. The buzzword was \”heightened speech\” and, although all of these writers essentially wrote verse, producers tried to steer clear of the word \”poetry.\” They sensed that American theatergoers would recoil from any attempts to have anything as exotic as that foisted upon them. Just as, at around the same period, when they were risking capital on shows like \”The Most Happy Fella\” and the early works of Gian Carlo Menotti, they avoided the word \”opera.\” Music-drama seemed a safer rubric.
Up Front
Michael Aushenker
June 11, 1998
If anyone was preordained to be a rabbi, it was Jackie Mason. Born in Sheboygan, Wis., in 1937, the Yiddish-accented comedian comes from four generations of rabbis. All three of his brothers are rabbis. And, once upon a time, Mason himself was a rabbi, teaching Talmud in far-out places like Lathrop, Pa., and Walden, N.C.
George Jean Nathan:
Charles Marowitz
June 11, 1998
Between about 1910 and 1939, no one in the theater made a move without consulting George Jean Nathan. In the midst of scriveners, hacks and stringers, Nathan was the real thing: an erudite theater critic with more than 20 books to his credit, a fabled association with H.L. Mencken behind him (they co-edited \”the Smart Set\”) and a range of European-bred tastes that gave him a sophistication that few of his colleagues could rival. He not only promoted the early Eugene O\’Neill, but was a close friend of the playwright\’s and his staunchest champion. He elucidated G.B. Shaw for the masses and created the appetite that eventually established Sean O\’Casey.
The Arts
Naomi Pfefferman
June 11, 1998
Lisa Cholodenko\’s edgy debut film, \”High Art,\” won a screenwriting award at Sundance and made the Directors Fortnight at Cannes.
Cover Story
Arthur Hertzberg
June 4, 1998
Can one speak of a \”national character\”? Whileacknowledging that the practice has a pernicious side, Rabbi ArthurHertzberg, in his provocative, if mislabeled, new work, points outthat many books speak of national character and are readily acceptedand praised. For example, Luigi Barzini\’s book on the Italians,numerous modern works on the nature of the Russian people, or workson the character of the Greek or Roman peoples in antiquity all seemharmless exercises in interpreting the culture of another. While itis true that plumbing the \”Jewish character\” is an enterprise thathas been twisted by malevolence, particularly in the last century,that does not mean that certain traits cannot be said to distinguishthe Jewish people throughout their history.
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