Curacao shul offers venue with Caribbean flavor
Buzzy Gordon is a travel writer who writes frequently about Jewish communities around the world.
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March 14, 2008
Unique party planning isn’t chopped liver
Some things never change, or do they? Bar and bat mitzvah parties overwhelmingly follow a recipe that everyone assumes is written in stone, said Gail Greenberg, creator of mitzvahchic.com. The only room for creativity, people think, is to have a unique theme.
So why are people stuck? Greenberg attributed people’s unwillingness to change due to pressure, unspoken or not, from peers and parents.
“For the most part, people are afraid of doing something different,” she said.
It’s either fear that friends will think badly of them if they shirk their proper role or worry that grandparents don’t want to be embarrassed in front of their friends by any crazy ideas.
And yet, a few adventuresome families are breaking with the “chopped liver sculpture party” and its accoutrements of loud music, DJ, dancers, candle lighting — invented by a caterer, by the way — and an array of desserts (today’s top runner being Dippin’ Dots, tiny pellet-size ice cream balls).
Sometimes, families are pressed to try something different because a formal party does not make sense for their child.
Walter Spiegel, whose wife, Sharon, planned their son’s bar mitzvah at Jeremy’s summer camp, said his son was not particularly mature at 13 and had no interest in a formal party. However, since the family loved to camp, the weekend with guests in cabins, service in an outdoor chapel (until it rained) and a casual party with country line dancing and a hayride was comfortable for him.
The biggest downside of the camp experience was the planning required, having given up the synagogue infrastructure. But as is reported by many families who try something a little different, the Spiegels’ friends told them it was the best bar mitzvah they ever attended.
Other people replace the typical bar mitzvah party with low-key alternatives, either a Kiddush luncheon for the congregation or an informal meal at home, plus a separate party tailored to what children like to do — not necessarily dancing and party games.
Leslie Belay said that probably 90 percent of families in her synagogue celebrate without the typical fanfare. She attributed their willingness to avoid a lavish party to her rabbi’s stand for meaning and against ostentation.
After the renovation of the social hall, the rabbi laid the groundwork for lower-key celebrations. As Belay remembered it, the rabbi suggested that celebrations maintain the ruach, or spirit, of the congregation — keeping down the expense and inviting fellow congregants to a party that took place right after the service.
As a result, Belay observed, “nobody is feeling pressured to spend up. The pressure is to celebrate authentically without being ostentatious.”
In most places, though, the bar mitzvah party formula remains an immovable fortress, evolving little and usually more focused on the hosts than on the guests, who are usually parked at big tables, making awkward chitchat with people they don’t know.
While Karen Echeverria admitted that the bat mitzvah she planned for her twin daughters was “out of the box to the expensive side,” she kept her guests’ experience front and center.
“Most successful parties are where the guests have a great time, not the hosts,” she said.
Echeverria was determined to serve the mixed needs of her expected guests — elderly relatives who would not want to stay up too late; children who needed to be entertained; Orthodox relatives who would have to come late to the June shindig; and friends who would prefer quiet conversation to loud music.
She used a model she had learned from cruise ships, where people crisscrossed a central lobby and visited surrounding rooms, each with a different flavor and interesting activities — she took over a country club and created four separate venues. One room had lots of couches and a jazz band; another held a casino with games and a magician; a third was set up as a nightclub room with platform seating; and the last offered virtual reality games, where kids could create videos of themselves playing electronic sports.
In Greenberg’s book, “Mitzvah Chic: How to Host a Meaningful, Fun, Drop-Dead Gorgeous Bar or Bat Mitzvah,” she would like to see more people throw out the formula and experiment. For people who are worried about what their friends think, Greenberg suggested that a little creativity can go a long way.
“I’ve always assumed in my life,” she said, “that you get a better reaction when you surprise people in a pleasant way.”
Michele Alperin is a freelance writer and a former life-cycle editor for MyJewishLearning.com. She has a master’s degree in Jewish education from the Jewish Theological Seminary.
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Books: Why choosing rationally might not be so easy
“Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely (HarperCollins, $25.95).
Dan Ariely is an MIT professor who served beer in a brewery and dressed in a waiter’s outfit as part of his research into decision making. A leading behavioral economist, Ariely has heightened abilities to observe what’s going on around him, from tiny details to the big picture. His uncommon findings and their wider applications are presented in “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions” (HarperCollins). Recently the book debuted on The New York Times Best-Seller list at No. 5.
Ariely has written an engaging book of social science with an eclectic, original approach. His work draws on psychology and economics, and he leads readers through the back-stories of his research. His personal back-story, which he alludes to in the book’s introduction and elaborates on in an interview, is unforgettable.
When he speaks of human irrationality, Ariely means the distance from perfection. He looks at why people are usually tempted by two-for-one specials when only one item is needed, might steal an occasional pencil from the office, have trouble turning down second helpings even when dieting or get stuck trying to eliminate possibilities in order to make decisions.
In his research, Ariely examines how people make decisions in daily life, and he shows how mistakes are both systematic and predictable, repeated over and over again. His method is to carefully watch people, pick up on the errors they’re making and then take these observations back into the lab for measurement and study. With colleagues, he conducts clever experiments that probe habits of shopping, eating, saving money and procrastinating, along with temptations to do small-scale lying, cheating and stealing. He then relates his findings to everyday life, and suggests how they might be applied — taking into account how people really behave — on a larger scale to social, political and financial policy.
“Social science is about us. I’m fascinated by mysteries so close to ourselves,” he said in an interview late last month, on the day before the book’s official publication.
The Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and at the Media Lab, where he heads the eRationality research group, Ariely is also a researcher at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. He wrote this book while he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The 40-year-old author is affable, energetic and thoughtful, with a worldview that’s somewhat unorthodox.
In one experiment, Ariely and two colleagues used chocolate to look at how people made choices when something was offered to them for free. Their tools were Lindt Truffles and Hershey’s Kisses, offered at reduced prices. When both were offered at a small cost, most people chose the more expensive truffles, but when the truffles were offered at a further reduced price and the kisses were free, most chose the kisses.
He explains how most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is free, the downside is easily forgotten. The idea of something being free provides a kind of emotional charge, so it seems even more valuable than it is.
Ariely ties the interest in “free” to the fear of loss — there’s no possibility of loss, or the sense of having made a bad decision, when something is free. He suggests that the concept of free can be applied to social policy, by making certain medical tests free to encourage people to take them, and by eliminating registration fees for electric cars to encourage people to drive them.
Ariely traces his career interests, and his particular skills in observation, back to a horrific accident in Israel. As an 18-year-old new soldier who had just joined a Nahal unit, he was with another soldier in the apartment of his commanders, who had left ammunition there, when a flare — the kind of bomb thrown to light up a battlefield — exploded. Ariely was very close to the flames and was badly burned in a matter of seconds; he backed up, only to have to run through the flames to escape. More than 70 percent of his body was seared with third-degree burns.
For the next three years, Ariely was hospitalized, with repeated surgeries (some without anesthesia because his heart and lungs weren’t functioning well), painful daily treatments to replace the bandages and intensive physical therapy. Toward the end, he could leave Tel HaShomer Hospital on occasion, dressed in an elastic suit and mask that attracted many stares.
Through all of this, he was keenly aware of everything going on around him, wondering why certain decisions were made about his treatment and that of the patients around him, noticing which nurses were most gentle and which weren’t and trying to anticipate their schedules. And he read medical journals.
“I was trying to gain some control back,” he says.
Feeling separated from society he began to observe what were once daily routines as though he were an outsider.
When he was able to leave the hospital for extended periods, he enrolled at Tel Aviv University, although over the next five years he had to return frequently for additional surgery and treatment.
Wanting to understand how to better deliver painful and unavoidable treatments to patients, he began doing research. At first, he thought about becoming a doctor, as he had seen “great models and those who completely missed the mark” and felt he would do well. However, he was advised that he wouldn’t be able to operate and that it would be very hard to serve as a doctor while facing his own medical challenges.
In 1993, he came to the United States to attend graduate school, and went on to receive a doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a doctorate in business from Duke University. He explains that his work is now somewhere in between those two disciplines.
Looking back, he says that the injury was a “powerful, painful and prolonged experience, but it has also provided one of the most central ‘threads’ of the way I understand myself and others — and it has also sparked many of my research interests.”
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Mideast allegory becomes roommate musical
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has stymied generations of statesmen and commentators, so why not try a witty song-and-dance musical?
Such was the thought of playwright Oren Safdie and composer-lyricist Ronnie Cohen, and the result of their collaboration is “West Bank, UK,” which opens March 21 at the Malibu Stage Company.
The protagonists are Israeli Assaf Ben-Moshe Benvenisti and Palestinian Aziz Hamoud, and their battleground is a rent-controlled flat on London’s West Bank.
Assaf (Jeremy Cohen) returns to the flat after being dumped by his German girlfriend, only to find that in the meantime Aziz (Mike Mosallam) has moved in.
Their landlord, named NYC, is an American and, like his country’s State Department, urges the two men to work out their differences and learn to live together in harmony.
Assaf and Aziz find it difficult to submerge their differences, then discover a common bond in their fondness for Middle Eastern food and dislike of — what else — America.
But their temporary friendship proves fragile and is tested by various visitors, including a male and female suicide bomber, and a hard-line religious woman, personifying West Bank settlers.
The musical had its premiere at New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theater and was received by reviews ranging from warm applause to downright raves.
Safdie and Cohen “do an excellent job of avoiding the most obvious pitfalls — partisanship, preachiness and political naivete — even if they get bogged down in allegory,” The New York Times wrote.
The Wall Street Journal judged “West Bank, UK” as “a caustically witty four-person musical with a Middle Eastern-flavored score that succeeds in wringing hard-nosed fun out of clearly serious matters … [a] smart little show that works.”
Safdie and Cohen met as graduate students at Columbia University in the early 1990s and seemed fated, by background and inclination, to collaborate from the beginning.
Both their paternal grandparents arrived in Palestine in the early part of the last century, Safdie’s from Syria and Cohen’s from Yemen. Both their fathers “intermarried” with Ashkenazi women and achieved fame in different fields.
Safdie’s father is the renowned architect Moshe Safdie, the designer, locally, of the Skirball Cultural Center. Cohen’s father is composer Avshalom Cohen, whose songs are familiar to every Israeli child.
While still at Columbia, Safdie became a producer at New York’s small West End Gate Theatre and put on Cohen’s first effort, “Sliced Tomatoes.”
The two men subsequently joined talents for the well-received “Jews & Jesus,” a musical about interfaith dating.
Safdie’s best-known play is “Private Jokes, Public Places,” a comedy about architecture, and he wrote the screenplay for the movie “You Can Thank Me Later” with Ellen Burstyn.
Now in their early middle age, the two collaborators have even come to look alike.
Talking about his current play, Safdie said that his two protagonists “reflect the personalities of their countries … at times they try to live together, they even get along for a while, then they split apart, and the outside world intrudes. The trick is to present the two men as individuals, not stereotypes.”
Safdie finds some encouragement in the warm friendship that has developed between the two lead actors, though Jeremy Cohen is a staunch Zionist and Mike Mosallam is a devout Muslim.
“However, they never discuss politics off-stage,” Safdie observed.
Performances of “West Bank, UK” are March 21-April 13, Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons, at the Malibu Stage Company, 29243 Pacific Coast Highway. $20-$25. For reservations, call (310) 589-1998.
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Mitisek and Co. expand boundaries of opera with puppets, poetry and ‘Frankenstein!!’
Critics have called the Long Beach Opera (LBO) “daring,” “unconventional” and “innovative.” While all those are accurate, another word that perhaps better describes the company is “playful.”
Still, one wonders how the seasoned, classically trained LBO musicians reacted when their artistic and general director, Andreas Mitisek, unveiled a box of plastic toy instruments. The toy saxophones and tiny flutes will be played by band members as part of contemporary composer H. K. Gruber’s bravura work for orchestra and singing narrator, “Frankenstein!!” Set to witty and often wacky poems by H.C. Artmann, the piece will be presented at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center March 14-16.
“It’s really funny to get a box of toy instruments,” Mitisek said. “But our orchestra really appreciates what we do, because they get to play what they don’t get to play anywhere else. They know they will have some challenges and new music.”
Described as “a ‘pan-demonium’ for chansonnier and orchestra,” “Frankenstein!!” makes up the second half of a concert that also features Richard Strauss’ 1897 melodrama for voice and piano, “Enoch Arden,” based on a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Actor Michael York performs the demanding vocal parts in both works. Luckily, he clearly has a fine sense of humor — he played Basil Exposition in all three “Austin Powers” movies and worked with Richard Lester in the 1970s.
According to Mitisek, who is Viennese, the musicians will perform “Frankenstein!!” on multiple instruments in Gruber’s 12-piece ensemble version — scored for strings, piano, brass and woodwind players. Simon Rattle and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra gave his original version for large orchestra a whirl in 1978, with, according to music critic Paul Griffiths, Gruber as soloist in a “vampirical vocalizing of horror-comic ditties.”
If all this sounds a bit “out there,” even by LBO standards, last month the company staged Ricky Ian Gordon’s song cycle “Orpheus and Euridice” at the Belmont Plaza Olympic pool in Long Beach, with the pool setting re-imagined as the River Styx �”entrance to the underworld. And last year’s haunting, claustrophobic production of Grigori Frid’s monodrama for soprano, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” took place in parking garages at Sinai Temple and in Lincoln Park.
So given this history, maybe staging Gruber’s eerie comic-book world is a return to earth for Mitisek and the LBO. At least the work is being presented in a theater with properly cushioned seats, not on metal bleachers.
But did we mention the puppets? Strange and unique as Gruber’s work was conceived to be, leave it to Mitisek to kick it up another notch by adding the Long Beach-based Rogue Artists, a group specializing in masks and puppetry.
Gruber’s piece is not normally performed with puppets, but that didn’t restrain Mitisek’s own wacky imagination.
“Gruber calls it ‘instrumental theatre,'” Mitisek said. “I think it’s an open art form, and it’s also something very Long Beach Opera-like, expanding the boundaries of whatever we do.”
So the conductor turned to the Rogue Artists Ensemble. In 2005, the group collaborated with Opera Pacific on a story about puppets that interact with human stagehands while performing Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle. The title: “Das Püppet.” One of their more recent projects is an original adaptation of “Mr. Punch,” a dark graphic novel. “They have a vein for the macabre,” Mitisek said. “They are not regular puppeteers — their aim is not little-kid shows.”
Tyler Stamets, the 27-year-old associate artistic director of Rogue Artists, agrees. While his favorite parts of the show are “the toy instruments that have a crazy, whimsical feel that lends itself to the type of work we do,” he says “Frankenstein!!” is not for kids.
“It’s great for teenagers of the ‘Simpsons’ generation,” he said. “But it’s not sweet and sunshiny.”
Readers can sample some of Artmann’s deceptively simple poems “after children’s rhymes” online.
Mitisek also sees the work as appealing to adults.
“Being childlike is something to keep in our lives,” the 43-year-old conductor said. “[Gruber’s] piece appeals to the sophisticated adult in us and also to the fun part that we, hopefully, still keep from our childhood.”
For Mitisek, staying “young at heart and mind” is crucial. As for Rogue Artists, they don’t have to “stay” young; they still are. And it was Artmann’s comic-book references to Batman, Dracula and Superman, among others, that resonated most with them. Founded in 2003 at UC Irvine, the company came together when Stamets met Patrick Rubio, one of the two lead designers for the “Frankenstein!!” project; the other is veteran puppeteer, Joyce Hutter.
“We’ve been heavily influenced by that [comic-book] style,” Stamets said, “and this is a great chance for us to put some of that work on stage. Andreas has given us free rein to build on these ideas to make it all come to life.” Indeed, to create this Frankenstein, the Rogue Artists, like the LBO, are “pushing it to the extreme.” They will be using everything from shadow puppetry projected onto large screens to 10-feet tall puppets. Spoiler alert: one of the culminating theatrical moments in “Frankenstein!!” shows how the monster comes together out of objects scattered about the stage.
Of the several different styles of puppetry the Ensemble will present, one is Bunraku, an early 19th century Japanese art in which a puppet is so large it requires three people to manipulate it.
“It’s not just one person with his hand in a sock,” Stamets said. “We work with puppets on the scale of Walt Disney and Cirque du Soleil, but without the budget.”
According to Mitisek, the composer’s title, “Frankenstein!!” may be a bit misleading, since only one of the poems is set to music about that fabled 19th century monster. “But they all have that flavor,” Mitisek said, “a poem about Little Miss Dracula and comic-strip heroes. It’s all a little nightmarish and scary.”
One of the key elements in any production of “Frankenstein!!” is the “chansonnier,” in this case actor Michael York, who will also be intoning Strauss’s tragic story of “Enoch Arden” in the show’s curtain-raiser with pianist Lisa Sylvester.
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Books: Pot-smoking antihero proves cathartic for her creator
Twenty-nine-year-old Dahlia Finger, the antihero of Elisa Albert’s debut novel, “The Book of Dahlia,” has an inoperable brain tumor and an attitude.
Before her diagnosis, Dahlia spent her days smoking pot, watching cheesy movies and eating toaster pastries in the Venice, Calif., bungalow her father bought her. She lazily considered getting a life, although she was convinced that life sucks. After learning she has cancer she confronts her mortality — between medical marijuana bong hits — with the assistance of a “self-help” book, “It’s Up To You: The Cancer To-Do List.” (Her diagnosis, she is convinced, is “negativity.”)
She also scrutinizes her past for causes of her cancer, including her absent, selfish Israeli mother, her well-meaning but ineffectual father, her cruel older brother (a clergyman she nicknames Rabbi Douchebag), and her own propensity for grudge-holding, as if “the wrongs had piled up, a clusterf— of wrong. In her brain.”
The 29-year-old Albert, who has earned mostly laudatory reviews for her irreverent fiction about disaffected Jews, didn’t want Dahlia to experience a cliched kind of redemption.
“I resisted the temptation to make her too likeable,” said Albert, who grew up on the Westside.
“I didn’t want her apologizing for herself in any extended way, because we don’t do that in our private thoughts. I didn’t want to minimize the extent of her private rage and hurt to make her more palatable to John Q. Reader.”
Rather, Albert said, “the narrative is pointing a finger, in the form of Ms. Finger, at the limits of our empathy, at the shortcomings of those who are supposed to protect and guide us, and at the culture of shallow, relentless positivity.”
Dahlia is Albert’s latest not-so-nice Jewish character in distress. The protagonists in her short-story collection, “How This Night is Different,” include a teenager perplexed by her own boredom during a youth trip to Auschwitz, a mother who realizes her marriage is “so over” during an inebriated haze at a bat mitzvah, a hipster bewildered by her promiscuous best friend’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism and a woman who worries about her Passover yeast infection. In the collection’s final story, written in the form of a mock letter to Philip Roth, Albert claims to be a “lobotomized Philip Roth writing chick-lit.”
The sardonic tone of her work is often matched by the dire circumstances of her characters.
“When things seem bleakest, the decisions we make — wittingly or unwittingly — define us,” Albert said. “I check in with characters at precisely those moments, because that’s when things happen, when people turn things around … or don’t.”
“The Book of Dahlia” is, in a way, a response to such a time in Albert’s life. When she was in her mid-teens, her oldest brother, David, then working toward his doctorate in astrophysics at Tufts University, was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor (his response was upbeat, which, in part, led Albert to “create Dahlia in all her negative glory, a reaction against just how positive and strong he was”).
At the time, Albert said, she was already depressed: Her parents’ marriage had been in the process of a slow (if amicable) unraveling, her father had spent long periods away on business, and Albert saw herself as a social misfit and “chronic underachiever” at Harvard-Westlake School, Los Angeles Hebrew High School and Camp Ramah. Her Jewish activities were mandatory and alienating: “I just didn’t seem to be capable of being what I was supposed to be in those settings — which was amenable to the party line and really excited about growing up and marrying somebody Jewish,” she said. “And while camp purported to be about Jewish identity, it was actually about who had slept with whom, as in any social context.”
Albert eventually found camaraderie and a calling in the creative writing program at Brandeis University; all the while she watched her brother undergo treatment and remission and, finally, a cancer relapse. He was 29 when he died in hospice care at home in Los Angeles in 1998.
“I was 19 and completely unequipped to process or deal with his death,” she recalled. “Writing this book was a way of belatedly trying to address the specter of those events. As I was barreling toward the age David was when he died, I thought it was necessary to revisit this thing and think about what it means to be a 29-year-old dying of a brain tumor.”
A few years ago, Albert began amassing “piles of books” on death and dying, which in turn helped her create the fictional Dahlia. Especially helpful was Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor,” which describes cancer, in Western literature, as “the kind of disease that evil, jerky people get … which makes them ugly and dark and fold in on themselves as they die.”
Albert also read “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Tolstoy’s novella about a man whose family refuses to acknowledge his illness.
“He’s wasting away, and the thing that pains him more than the fact he’s dying is that others around him won’t be straight with him about it,” she said. “All he wants is someone to sit with him and hold his hand and level with him: ‘You’re dying, you’re facing this, it’s going to happen.'”
“I was interested in these ideas, and in the theme as reflected through my own experience with my brother,” she said. “One of the clear memories I have, of the time, is saying to my parents, ‘You know, David’s going to die, of course,’ and they were furious with me. It was like, ‘How dare you suggest this,’ which was an obvious reality to me but couldn’t be articulated or expressed somehow. Of course I don’t begrudge my parents anything they did; they really did the best they could. But a terminal brain tumor is a terminal brain tumor. I can remember having that reality denied and tucking it away in my mind in order to come back to it later.”
Albert continued to be profoundly affected by her brother’s death. While enrolled in the master’s writing program at Columbia University, she met a childhood acquaintance whose brother also had died young — and rushed into a whirlwind courtship.
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Video pioneer dances with feminine personas
As a little girl growing up in New York City, Eleanor Antin went with her mother to see a performance by the world-renowned Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. “I can still see the dancers in my mind, leaping across the stage,” she said. “I absolutely loved it.”
Years later, as a conceptual and performance artist starting to attract attention for humorous, provocative and boldly feminist works, Antin started experimenting with video equipment as a means of crafting her “most fabulous female self. This was, of course, a ballerina,” she said. “Today, maybe that would be a model, but when I was a kid, ballerinas beat models. To my mind, they still do.”
The influence of Antin’s mother, a Yiddish actress and aficionado of the Russian ballet, plays an important, if indirect, role in “Caught in the Act,” one of Antin’s signature video works to be included in the Getty Center’s “California Video” survey exhibition, March 15-June 8. For Antin’s mother, in addition to putting money aside for dance performances, made sure her daughter received ballet training from Russian teachers.
“She used to give me all sorts of arts classes,” said Antin, who agrees that her mother embodied a certain kind of Jewishness, as she was “infinitely bound up with leftist politics and a passion for high culture and education. She’d take me to ballet class on Saturdays and then afterward we’d go to the museum.”
Created in 1973, “Caught in the Act” juxtaposes a 36-minute video with accompanying still photography and stars Antin as a prima ballerina performing a series of ballet poses for the camera. While the photographs lend the impression that Antin is a trained dancer capable of starring in “The Nutcracker,” the video tells a different story. A talented ballerina, for example, wouldn’t need a pole to help her balance just prior to the 1/125th of a second it takes for the camera to record her while she’s holding her leg in positions like passe or arabesque.
With this work, Antin perfectly “illustrates what the mediums of video and photography can and can’t do,” said Glenn Phillips, senior projects specialist at the Getty Research Institute and curator of the exhibit. “Eleanor was also one of the earliest artists to be using video, so it was important that we include her.”
Consisting of some 50 single-channel videos and 15 installations by 58 artists, the exhibition pays significant attention to the 1970s, when artists like Antin and her poet husband, David Antin, migrated from the East to the West Coast to take up positions in fledgling arts programs.
“I would say there’s a certain humor to the West Coast video of this period, as opposed to video art from New York or Germany, where the work you see is very serious and technical,” Phillips said. “I think that artists like Antin, who came to California, tried things they might not have tried had they remained in a city like New York. They didn’t have the same fear of failure, so they could be more humorous and cocky.”
Speaking by phone from her San Diego studio, Antin, now 73, recalled the early ’70s as an artistic “free-for-all. California suggested this wonderful openness, but while Los Angeles had an arts scene, I was living in San Diego. I was, in a sense, hermetic, but it was a place where I could do all these experiments,” she said.
Born and reared in New York City, Antin first came to San Diego in the summer of 1968, and both she and her husband eventually became professors at UC San Diego. Settling in Southern California also led to the flourishing of her alter egos, such as the King of Solana Beach and Eleanora Antinova, the black ballerina who once danced with the Ballet Russes.
Antin would eventually incorporate video for “narrative purposes,” such as recording the performances of her various personas. “Unlike live performance, I could approximate little movie ways of doing things. But I started using video because it, like photography, had a claim to facticity,” she said. “With ‘Caught in the Act,’ I was interested in the contrast of the moving and the still camera telling two different truths.”
Throughout the decades, Antin has continued to use video, such as in her 1993 architectural installation, “Vilna Nights,” which depicts various inhabitants of a ravaged building in a Jewish ghetto. This particular work also pays more direct homage to the legacy of Antin’s mother, who used to tell her daughter stories about shtetl life “that were nothing like ‘Fiddler on the Roof.'”
When Antin’s mother became ill with Alzheimer’s disease, “it devastated me, and I guess I wanted to make her live as her mind was dying,” Antin said. “The shtetl is part of my Jewish legacy, and every now and then, I’ll say or do something which makes me think, ‘Oh, that’s my shtetl self.”’
Though she hasn’t created any overtly Jewish works in recent years, Antin continues to “feel a strong sense that I’m Jewish. I like feeling Jewish and what that means exactly, well, I don’t worry about that question,” she said. “I was never interested in religion, and I couldn’t tell you when the Jewish holidays are coming, but feeling passionately Jewish has always been one of my pleasures.”
Antin also never seems to stop mining her childhood passions for her own artistic purposes. Her latest work, a series of large-scale photographs that plays with images of Helen of Troy, reflects the artist’s early love for ancient Greco-Roman art and “all those broken, crippled statues I’d see at the Met.”
She’s also working on a “series of conversations between a young Eleanor and Comrade Stalin,” which encompass both text and pen-and-ink drawings. Antin plans to publish the work as a book.
“Stalin and I are walking together in Central Park, and he’s trying to solve all my problems, but really, he’s [screwing] everything up,” she said. “This is definitely related to my mother, to all of her politics and being Jewish.”
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Spring Calendar
Trailer for the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, May 8
MARCH
Sun., March 9
Barrage in “High Strung.” The young, hip cast of Barrage, a contemporary string ensemble, will dish out high-energy virtuosity in their newest show. The international cast features six violinists/vocalists, a drummer, a bass player and a guitarist who will present an amalgam of music, song and dance with a diverse fusion of cultures and musical styles. Join in on the spine-tingling fiddle-fest. 2 p.m. $35 (adults), $20 (17 and under), $10 (Pepperdine students). Pepperdine University Smothers Theatre, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. (310) 506-4522. http://www.barrage.org.
Tue., March 11
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The renowned dance company, founded by a giant of American dance, comes to Orange County for a program that incorporates gospel, jazz and popular music, modern dance and ballet. Highlights will include Ailey’s masterpiece “Revelations,” which has been performed on hundreds of stages around the world and has been received with awe and delight since its debut in 1960. As an added bonus, ticket holders are invited to a free performance preview with a member of the Ailey company, one hour before the show. 7:30 p.m. Through March 16. $25-$85. Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (714) 556-2787. http://www.ocpac.org.
“Lessons From Bernard Rudofsky.” In a day and age where body image is the craze, an exhibition of the work of late Austrian-born Bernard Rudofsky will display innovative concepts of the body and fashion in an exhibit presented by the Getty Center Research Institute. Rudofsky, an architect, designer and critic, believed that people in Western society lost their spontaneity to design liberating, not restricting, clothing. Devoting his life to exposing the West to foreign architecture paradigms and unfamiliar customs, this breakthrough artist wrote nine books and more than 100 articles on the subject. View Rudofsky’s work accompanied by a 296-page catalogue with contributions from several talented artists. Tue.-Sun. Through June 8. $8 (parking). The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. (310) 440-7300. http://www.getty.edu/.
“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” It’s difficult to separate the dashing Johnny Depp from Sweeney Todd’s character, after having seen the recent film. Although Depp won’t be on stage at this show, you can still have an up-close-and-personal look at the eerie character in an exciting theatrical performance based on the 19th-century legend of a London barber driven to madness after a judge takes his wife and child away. Sweeney Todd, played by David Hess, plots his revenge with Mrs. Lovett, played by Judy Kaye, who conjures up surprisingly tasty meat pies infused with a secret ingredient. Adapted from a book by Hugh Wheeler, the production’s music and lyrics are by Stephen Sondheim with musical orchestrations by Sarah Travis. 8 p.m. Through April 6. $30-$90. Center Theatre Group’s Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. For tickets and additional show times, call (213) 628-2772. http://www.centertheatregroup.org.
Fri., March 14
“Beaufort.” The Israeli war film “Beaufort” stirred up scads of excitement this year with its Best Foreign Language Oscar nomination. Although the film didn’t win, it won many people’s hearts. Based on a novel by Ron Leshem, “Beaufort” was directed by Joseph Cedar and recreates the events prior to the Israeli troop withdrawal from the Beaufort military base in Southern Lebanon. Led by 22-year-old commander Liraz Liberti, played by Oshri Cohen, the small Israeli cohort of troops become weary of their mission when fellow soldiers are killed and injured. The film takes an in-depth look at the fear and drudgery of soldiers’ daily routines and examines the country’s ambivalence toward the 18-year presence in Lebanon. Playing in two locations: Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills; and Laemmle’s Town Center 5, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino. For tickets and show times, call (310) 274-6869 or (818) 981-9811. http://www.laemmle.com/index.php.
Tori Spelling at Barnes and Noble. Admit it, you have a tinge of curiosity about how Aaron Spelling’s daughter is prolonging her 15 minutes of fame. Since playing Donna Martin on “Beverly Hills, 90210,” the high-school soap-drama that started it all, Spelling has appeared on various reality TV series, wed and borne children and endured a public tussle with her mother over her alleged exclusion from her late father’s estate. Now, Tori Spelling is telling the story like it is with her new memoir, “sTORI Telling,” and today she’ll appear to sign books you can place alongside old “90210” posters. Just don’t expect her to talk about her “poor little rich girl” reputation. 7:30 p.m. Book purchase required for signing. Barnes and Noble at The Grove, 189 Grove Drive, Los Angeles. (323) 525-0366. http://www.bn.com.
“Strauss Meets Frankenstein” at the Long Beach Opera. In a dramatic and different double-bill, actor Michael York will perform Tennyson’s epic poem “Enoch Arden,” about the love and loss that ensues when three friends find themselves romantically entwined. The heartbreak of destiny is deepened by Richard Strauss’ rich, evocative score. The performance changes tone when the audience enters the wild, macabre underworld of Frankenstein where rodents, vampires, werewolves, John Wayne and Superman coalesce in a real monster of a musical. 8 p.m. Also March 15 and 16. $45-$95. Long Beach Performing Arts Center, Center Theatre, 300 E. Ocean Boulevard, Long Beach. (562) 432-5934. http://www.longbeachopera.org.
Pasadena ArtWeekend. During a fun-filled weekend featuring more than 20 exhibitions, performances and cultural activities, Pasadena will host a comprehensive celebration of fine arts, visual arts, poetry, spoken word, music, storytelling and theater. Several cultural institutions will open their doors for “ArtNight,” offering a free peek at their collections. “ArtTalk” features a variety of performances, and the weekend is rounded off with “ArtMarket,” a design open market focusing on the work of students, faculty and alumni from Art Center College of Design and Pasadena City College, which will be available for sale. Sponsored by the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs with the Arts & Culture Commission. ArtWeekend will take place at various venues and times over the course of three days, and all events are free and open to the public. For more information, call (800) 307-7977 or visit http://www.pasadenaartweekend.com.
Gypsy Kings at Cerritos Center. Starting on the shores of the French Cote d’Azur, the Gypsy Kings fused South American rumba with fiery Spanish flamenco and their colorful blend of rhythms, leading to international success and recognition on the World Music scene. Tonight they “cast their spell” for a Southern California audience. 8 p.m. $45-$100. (562) 467-8818.
A letter to my secular friend in Tel Aviv
This letter is directed to a friend of mine in Tel Aviv and to all those who can relate to what she said to me.
I know you didn’t mean to be insensitive. I know that you seek to be a good person and to improve yourself and the world in your own way.
I’m no angel, either. I admit I
wasn’t as sad or shaken over the suicide bombing in Dimona last month as I was over the massacre at Yeshivat Mercaz Harav.
But I wonder what has allowed you to say, rather glibly, “I’m not so upset by the attack, because I can’t identify with yeshiva community.”
Is it acceptable, even fashionable, to say that you can’t identify with religious Zionist yeshiva students? How is it possible that good people can forgive the sickest of Arab murderers but can’t mourn the deaths of their fellow Jews because they wear knitted kippahs or grow payot?
Or does this reflect the sad reality of the sharp divisiveness of Israeli society, in which we box each other into compartments so that we can’t see one another’s basic humanity? In which we are so self-absorbed that we can’t break our daily routine to care for our countrymen? In which you can’t feel for mothers with Jewish head scarves weeping over their sons’ freshly dug graves; brothers and sisters who will forever face an empty seat at their Shabbat table; teenagers who will have to go back to school to study a page of Talmud without their hevrutas?
Let me tell you why you should feel for these yeshiva students: Because while you don’t identify with them, they identified with you. I’m sure they might have reserved their own, passionate critique of your secular Tel Aviv lifestyle, but they sat in that yeshiva not merely because it gave them joy and a spiritual high, but because they wanted you to be safe.
They deliberately studied in that yeshiva to celebrate the month of Adar, the month in which Jews were saved from a horrible genocide. Because they would have understood that the Arab terrorist and his gang didn’t target them because Jews stole their land, but because they proudly, defiantly celebrated the tradition for which Jews have been murdered, lynched and torched for centuries. It’s a tradition you reject, but which the enemy doesn’t reject in you.
They studied in that yeshiva so that their minds and spirits could be armed with the Jewish pride, wisdom and conviction necessary to spur them to join the best units in the Israeli army and to fight our enemies with valor, so that you can freely enjoy your secular lifestyle, no matter that it’s contrary to theirs.
And if, God forbid, you would have met a similar fate, they wouldn’t have said, “I’m not so upset because I can’t identify with secular Tel Avivians. Let’s go study.” They would have scrambled to that same study hall in which they were mercilessly shot in cold blood, and they would have recited psalms with full emotion in your memory.
Those 15-, 16- and 18-year-olds bore more wisdom and sensitivity than any of those beer-guzzling men who like to pick us up at the bars we frequent in Tel Aviv. And if those pure, wholesome young men had been given the chance to grow up to be their age, they wouldn’t have degraded us by sizing up our bodies, asking for our number, taking us out to get us drunk and fool around, only never to call us again.
Their worst offense might have been persuading us rationally of the beauty of Shabbat, of the wisdom of the laws of family purity, of the wonder of the Land of Israel.
They would have seen past our immodest clothing, not to figure out how to touch our flesh but how to awaken our vibrant Jewish soul, which, by living in this land, has already realized a part of the miraculous Jewish dream you don’t recognize or honor.
I know it’s not always pleasant to be reminded of an identity and religion that is associated with so much limitation, strife, hatred and tragedy. Maybe you don’t like that they tenaciously held onto the Book for which we are being killed. Maybe we should burn the Book, so that our bodies aren’t ripped apart by bullets.
Why bother studying ancient ideas when the contemporary wealth of Tel Aviv is at our disposal — the hot bars on Lilienblum, the stylish fashion boutiques on Dizengoff, that great seafood restaurant on the corner on Ben Gurion? Most of all, why bother caring deeply for people who studied those ideas?
I’ll tell you why you should bother: Because the day is not far off when events in this country will spiral into even bloodier destruction, and you will be forced to turn your focus from a night out on the town or from making love with your boyfriend or from making the month’s rent to the national, physical and spiritual survival that these Jewish boys have sought to secure for you, for us.
I can’t make you believe what I believe, but I hope, at the very least, you can open your heart to people who are different from you, and who, I’m sure, are now praying for you and me in heaven, even as we forget them. For we need their prayers — and we need them far more than they needed us.
Orit Arfa is a Jewish Journal contributing writer based in Jerusalem. Her Web site is http://oritarfa.net/.
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Hip Hop Hoodios: ‘Shalom Obama’ Music Video
I almost missed this one, but thanks to the JTA, here’s our favorite hip hoppers with ‘Shalom Obama!’