Our Shabbat and holiday home rituals serve as opportunities to join in celebration with family and friends, and can be greatly enhanced through communal singing and music making. In this session, we will learn zmirot (shabbat table songs), niggunim (worldess melodies), and more. We'll also unpack the poetry of these songs and blessings, thinking creatively about the intersection of text and melody. All ages are welcome.
It’s never too early to begin preparing for Pesach! Join artist and curator, Saul Robbins to view and discuss his curatorial project “Projecting Freedom: Cinematic Interpretations of the Haggadah.” This unique project, directed by Rabbi Leon Morris, Founding Director of Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning, engaged 11 noteworthy Jewish film and video artists throughout a year of study and discussion, entrusting them to interpret the Haggadah with their own creative style and intent. The resulting short videos correspond to the 15 segments of the Haggadah, interpreting the liturgy, prayers, songs, and rituals that are the narrative basis for the Passover Seder, the traditional ceremonial dinner of the holiday. An online Study Guide will be available, offering interpretations and provocative questions to engage audiences of all ages.
Jews have been critically influential in the development of the Great White Way and modern musical theater. Coming from Yiddish theater and vaudeville, Jews have succeeded on Broadway in disproportionate numbers, including theater producers like the Shuberts and Joseph Papp and musical innovators such as Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Frank Loesser, Harnick and Bock, Kander and Ebb, Marvin Hamlisch, Stephen Schwartz, and Stephen Sondheim. Join theater critic Alan Smason as he surveys the amazing success of Jews in helping shape Broadway, playing famous recordings gleaned from the past several decades.
Typography is written language presented in aesthetic form to communicate a message to a public audience. Within the state of Israel, the typography of public spaces reflects the political systems of language preferences. Hebrew and Arabic are the two official languages of Israel, and English is used as the semi-official language. Currently, trilingual signage is a commonality of Israel’s urban environment, where letterforms of Hebrew, Arabic, and English are presented to supply a translation of the same information. This session examines the use of Hebrew, Arabic, and English typography within Israeli public spaces and explores language preferences in relation to social and cultural nationalism.
One of the most renowned contemporary artists of his generation, Kehinde Wiley made his initial mark on the art world with bold portraits of African American men posed against vibrant backgrounds and striking confident poses familiar to viewers from canonical works of Western art. In recent years Wiley’s work has gone global, with the artist’s “World Stage” series transporting his signature aesthetic to locales as diverse as China, Brazil, India, and Nigeria. In 2011 Wiley took this project to Israel, recruiting subjects in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Lod. The remarkable portraits that resulted feature sitters of Ethiopian, Mizrahi, and Askenazi Jewish descent, as well as Arab Israelis, all enveloped by intricate backdrops and displayed in custom frames inspired by Jewish papercuts and Near Eastern decorative traditions. Wiley’s World Stage: Israel, exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2012, captures the often overlooked religious and ethnic diversity and interconnectedness of contemporary Israeli society. In this seminar-style session, we will explore these arresting portraits and the issues they engage.
In the 1930s and 40’s Jewish dancing was in vogue. After the formation of the state of Israel a new kind of dancing became very popular, and Eastern European Jewish dancing almost disappeared. "Hava Nagila" is one dance that spans both eras. In this session, we will learn and do both kinds of dances and in that way help revive Jewish dancing.
Photographer, video artist, printmaker, and former dancer, Leona Strassberg Steiner has lived half her life in Israel and half in the United States. In this session we will explore different ways that we may open our hearts and minds to imagine the other (Palestinians, refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan). We will begin our journey by examining some art pieces Leona has created to help us see and accept the other as ourselves. We will then explore the other using different techniques; meditating on openness, and seeing how we ourselves can be seen as the other. If time allows, we will create collages of our experience. No art knowledge is required for this session; the only thing you need to bring is an open heart and mind.
