Joanne Rocklin is obsessed with food. On her 60th birthday, she began summarizing her life with the essentials: \”I love to cook. I love to eat\”. But it\’s her passion for writing that has enabled her to come to terms with her life and her faith.
Writers as varied as Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott have written of the exotic beauty of Jewish women. But what about Jewish men?
\”Aliya: Three Generations of American-Jewish Immigration to Israel\” by Liel Leibovitz.
A couple of years ago, I heard about an oral history project for older gay men and women that resulted in a staged play. I didn\’t see it, but when Bob Baker, the adapter-director, sent out the call for a new cast, I signed up. We listened to each other\’s stories, wrote up the most telling ones and turned remembered conversations into dialogue. After nine months, out came a play.
Published plays — especially those in anthologies — tend to be dismissed by the casual browser as specialty items, of interest only to students of theater history or to actors in search of audition material. Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick clearly had something else in mind when they compiled their lively new collection, \”Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays.\”
Jewish Tango Cabaret — a performance at the New JCC at Milken in West Hills on Saturday, May 13.
A new exhibit at the Zimmer Children\’s Museum shows that when sliced, diced and deconstructed by artists and humanitarians, timepieces can edify, entertain and even inveigh against social injustice.
Persian Jewish actress Bahar Soomekh earned some serious attention last year when she played a young Iranian in \”Crash,\” the Academy Award winner for best picture. She\’s now appearing in an even bigger role — playing alongside Tom Cruise in the thriller, \”M:I:III.\” On the eve of the film\’s debut, Soomekh spoke about growing up Persian Jewish in Los Angeles and about her career.\n
Moshe Hammer\’s pieces look like quirkier, black-ink versions of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The Hebrew letters dance and morph into images based on his intensive studies of commentaries on the sefarim. Apparently, Hammer was feverishly working on such drawings when he took one of his late-night walks to clear artist\’s block in July 2004. He had trekked miles from his Fairfax area apartment when the truck hit him at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Western Avenue, killing him instantly, according to a coroner\’s report.
Each nation has to come to terms with its past. For the Germans, it\’s the Holocaust, and for the French, it\’s their collaboration with the Nazi and Vichy regimes. No one who has not lived under a brutal dictatorship, where the wrong word might mean loss of life or livelihood, is in a position of judgment or superior virtue.
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