More in ‘theater’

The New York International Fringe Festival, that annual summer smorgasbord of off-off-off-Broadway theater, will include a handful of Jewish-themed plays this year among its 200-odd offerings when it opens tomorrow. For one, there’s Sex and the Holy Land, which began as the undergraduate thesis project of playwright Melanie Zoey Weinstein, now 23. Inspired by organized ...

Ferenc Molnar, a Hungarian Jew, was one of his country’s “great literary figures through the first half of the 20th century,” according to today’s New York Times, and in the 1920s he and his actress-wife partied with the Gershwins and Vanderbilts on a trip. Yet the fog that descended over Eastern European Jews in the ...

Every Holocaust museum visitor has likely encountered examples of the Nazis’ ghastly “recycling” of human bodies: gold teeth melted down, cremains used for fertilizer. So why is the Nazis’ alleged use of human fat to make soap so rarely presented alongside these other grotesqueries? That’s the central question of a new play by Jeff Cohen, ...

• There is, apparently, an “entire marketplace” of Bernie Madoff tchotchkes. For those who lost their fortunes, they’re no doubt as comforting as “Bushisms” calendars were to Democrats a few years back. [NYMag]
• But is the con man’s wife suffering unduly? The poor woman can’t even get highlights. [NYT]
• And it still doesn’t seem quite ...

• The Anne Frank Trust UK commissioned a picture projecting what the Holocaust victim would have looked like at 80, for some reason. Her half-sister saw the picture and thinks Frank would have looked more “bitter and disappointed.” [Telegraph]
• The Traveling Jewish Theatre has stopped wandering. It’s now The Jewish Theatre, San Francisco. [S.F. Chronicle]
• ...

Solomon Mikhoels as King Lear
The Moscow Yiddish Theater was founded as an actors’ studio in Petrograd in 1919 and moved to the new capital of the Soviet Union a year later. There, under the guidance of director Aleksey Granovsky, it emerged as the shining symbol of a secular Yiddish-speaking culture. The Theater quickly gained an ...

Scene from The Dybbuk, 1937.
Alok Tewari (as the Rabbi) and Paula McGonagle (as Leah) in Betrothed, 2007.
In the early 1900’s, Russian ethnographer S. Ansky ventured into shtetl territory, armed with a wax cylinder recording device and camera, to document a fading, if still vibrant, world. There he discovered the tale of the dybbuk, a wandering ...

In 1936, the novelist and critic Ludwig Lewisohn was asked to name the world’s ten greatest living Jews. The resulting list, which ran in The New York Times, included Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, and Louis Brandeis. Lewisohn deemed only one writer great enough to be included in this illustrious company: Sholem Asch.

The Polish-born ...

Stacie Chaiken and Jonathan Goldstein in The Master of the House
Early in Shmuel Hasfari’s The Master of the House, an argument begins to boil between Yoel, a middle-aged bear of a journalist, and his attorney wife Nava. Nava would like a top-to-bottom remodel of their crumbling Bauhaus-style apartment; Yoel, who grew up in the apartment, ...

Left to right: Ryan Ogburn, Ricky Ashley, and Seth Zibalese singing about being a geek, in the world premiere of “13.” (Photo: Craig Schwartz)

“I gotta tell you, Rabbi, when you’re a geek, it’s the loneliest thing in the world,” sings Evan, the teenage protagonist of composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown’s new musical, 13. Transplanted ...