Monday Digest – May 18, 2009

May 19 at 7:30 pm Four Seasons Lodge (preview screening!) JCC Manhattan
Join us for a summer of special Catskill events, kicking off with a sneak preview of this award- winning film. From the darkness of Europe’s death camps to the lush mountains of New York’s Catskills, Four Seasons Lodge captures the final season for a community of Holocaust survivors who come together each summer to celebrate their lives. Followed by Q&A with director. $8.00 Member, $10.00 Non-Member

May 21 at 6:30 pm Conversation & Screening: Imagining the Shtetl The Jewish Museum, NYC
Scholars Jeffrey Shandler and Alisa Solomon join filmmaker Eleanor Antin to consider how shtetl life has been portrayed in film, literature, and popular culture. The evening will include a screening of Eleanor Antin’s film, The Man Without a World. This Yiddish post-modernist creation encompasses the full cycle of shtetl life, complete with abduction, seduction, dybbuks, exorcism, weddings, pogroms, and even the Angel of Death.Member Prices: $10 General: $15; Students / Over 65: $12

May 31 at 1 pm Scenes from Green Violin The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Fransisco
The friendship and artistic collaboration between Marc Chagall and actor Solomon Mikhoels, the guiding force behind Moscow’s groundbreaking Yiddish theater (GOSET), is at the heart of the museum’s current exhibition Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949. This friendship is dramatized in Green Violin, a musical conceived by Rebecca Bayla Taichman and Elise Theron with music by Frank London. As part of this special, free event, director Rebecca Bayla Taichman will be in conversation with Daniel Schifrin, the museum’s director of public programs and writer-in-residence, about her inspiration for Green Violin, as well as the connections between theater and politics in both Russia and the United States over the last century. Free with admission to the Museum

June 4 at 8:00 pm J. Edgar Klezmer The JCC in Manhattan
“J. Edgar Klezmer: Songs from My Grandmother’s FBI Files” premiered to a sold-out house at Dixon Place last year and became a Time Out New York Critics Pick. A musical documentary theater piece based on declassified documents, the show is set on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, examining the life and Cold War time capsule of Dr. Adele Sicular, grandmother of Metropolitan Klezmer & Isle of Klezbos drummer/bandleader Eve Sicular. Combining myriad archival finds, oral history and family gossip, this piece uses theater, multi-media projections, original music and lyrics to investigate the dealings of government agents and Eve’s pianist/psychiatrist/activist grandma. Tickets $15 JCC members, $20 Non-Members

June 15 at 7:30 pm Theodore Bikel: The First 85 Years Carnegie Hall, NYC
85th Birthday Celebration with Friends and Colleagues
Throughout an extraordinary career as a legendary actor, musician and activist, Theodore Bikel has played an influential role in the shaping of American theater, folk music, film and television, culminating in remarkable contributions to the landscape of Jewish culture. On June 15th, he will be joined by Arlo Guthrie, David Krakauer, Peter Yarrow, Alan Alda and others at this celebration presented by the Juvenile Law Center. Tickets from $30 – $500

May 14 – June 21
Paintings and Collage by
Shanee Epstein at the 404 Gallery
Brooklyn NY