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Marcel Marceau, the world’s most beloved mime, was born on this date in 1923 in Strasbourg, France. Born Marcel Mangel, he took the name Marceau (an homage to French Revolutionary general François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers) to hide his Jewish identity following Germany’s occupation of France. Marceau’s father, a kosher butcher, was killed in 1944 in Auschwitz while Marcel and […]
Read MoreAn India Travelogue, Part 5 by Lawrence Bush Click for Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. ONE REASON I was ill-prepared for this trip to India is that my work life with Jewish Currents never leaves me much time for extra-curricular anything. I knew months ago that I would be coming here, as my wife was scheduled to teach for a […]
Read MoreCamille Pissarro, Paul Burlin, Elie Nadelman, Jo Davidson, Abraham Walkowitz, and William Zorach were among the Jewish artists represented at the Armory Show in New York City, which opened on this date in 1913 and introduced America to the avant-garde of the art world. Known officially as the “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” the show […]
Read MorePainter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani died on this date in 1920. Best known for painting elongated, nude women with impassive, mask-like faces, Modigliani became a drug and alcohol abuser who lived a starving artist’s life in Paris until dying from tubercular meningitis at age 36. He was born into a Sephardic family in Livorno, Italy, […]
Read MoreChoreographer Anna Sokolow (1910-2000) debuted on Broadway on this date in 1937 with a program featuring political dance works, including Excerpts from a War Poem, described by a critic as taking “the essence of fascism, embodied in a poem extolling the beauties of war,” only to tear this “ideology mercilessly apart, line by line, exposing a […]
Read Moreby Lawrence Bush To read part 1, click here. I’VE NEVER THOUGHT I could be exhausted by art to the point of barely having the strength to write about it, but my experience yesterday in Venice’s Giardini, the public park where nations of the world have permanent pavilions that house art during the Biennale, has done just […]
Read Moreby Lawrence Bush I’VE NOW BEEN demoted from the consort of a cherished dance educator in Slovenia to a tourist in Venice. (To read about my explorations in charming Slovenia, search “Bopping” in the search engine at right.) But everyone is a tourist in Venice, which is the most visually fantastic city this side of Mars, […]
Read MoreIN ISRAEL AND THE U.S. by Liya Rechtman WHAT DOES IT MEAN to protest when no one is listening? Or when our act of protest is portrayed as running counter to the “will of the people”? As I sit in Jerusalem watching the age of Trump unfold, it can feel like the walls are closing in. Here […]
Read Moreby Tamar Zinn I WRITE in an effort to escape, if only for a short while, the intense agitation and despair that have engulfed me for most of the past year. I have no desire to dwell on the circumstances that brought us here, for that would provide no relief whatsoever. I know that for […]
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