In the novel Decameron, Giovanni Bocaccio wrote about life in the mid 14th century time of the Black Death. So how do we spend our time in a similar period? [Oliver Pollak, Ph.D]
Escape to Wyoming, my personal Decameron Read More »
Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Lifestyles, Oliver Pollak, Travel and Food
When Ali Velshi speaks, change the channel. Better yet, MSNBC could arrange it so that Velshi can only speak at a street corner.Saturday morning, at 9:45, I experienced an absurd, surreal display of Velshi’s creepy concept of broadcast journalism. If Velshi lived in Russia, he would fit in well writing for Pravda. He offended Jews and other supporters of Israel. Velshi strung together a string of facts and brazen lies while neglecting to supply relevant context on a news program he hosted to conjure up a not-so-creative Israel-bash-a-thon. [Bruce S. Ticker]
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi’s reporting biased against Israel Read More »
Bruce Ticker, Middle East, Theatre, Film & Broadcast
Sybil Koven, lovingly known as Bubbe to her children and grandchildren, was my dear friend. Every Saturday morning after I finished playing tennis, we would sit on her balcony overlooking San Diego Bay and gossip about our families and friends, the best and worst restaurants, politics, the symphony, religion and kitchen appliances. While we chatted, huge gray U.S.Navy ships often glided silently by, going to or from war with flags unfurled and sailors in dress uniforms proudly lining the rails at parade rest. At times they seemed so close that we could reach out and touch them. [Ira Spector]
While Yoav Talmi was Music Director of the San Diego Symphony, the orchestra made seven recordings, testaments to the high level the orchestra had achieved during his tenure. The first recording, in 1993, featured music by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943). [Eileen Wingard]
Following careers of Yoav Talmi and other SDSO alumni Read More »
Eileen Wingard, Music, Dance, and Visual Arts
Columbia University historian Victoria de Grazia, who has written extensively about women in Fascist Italy (How Fascism Ruled Women), and America’s imperial drive to spread consumer capitalism abroad (Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe), has written a book where its title and subtitle are telling two different, but overlapping, stories. [Mitchell J. Freedman]
Leading Italian fascists and their Jewish lovers Read More »
Books, Poetry & Short Stories, International, Jewish History
Rips spent over two decades at the Flea. Dealers, pickers, and vendors had colorful names, backgrounds and vignettes — Jokkho, the Dane, the Diops, the Prophet, the Cowboy, Kervorkian and the more normative, Paul, Frank, Bobby, Mike, Morris, Sophia, and Ethel, the latter being a specialist in Judaica, especially Menorahs, who started as a man and transformed into a woman. The author is the standout character. [Oliver B. Pollak]
Flea markets, bargains, and the obsession of collecting Read More »
Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Oliver PollakInon Barnatan, Israeli-born director of the La Jolla Music Society’s Summerfest, has announced a scaled-down festival featuring six concerts, August 21-29, all to be streamed on the internet. They are reasonably priced at $15 a concert and feature seven outstanding artists. [Eileen Wingard]
La Jolla Music Society re-imagines its Summerfest Read More »
Eileen Wingard, Music, Dance, and Visual Arts, San Diego County
Here are streaming Jewish lectures from Sunday, Aug. 16 through Friday, Aug. 21. {Laurie Baron, Ph.D}
Streaming Jewish Lectures (Aug. 16- 21) Read More »
Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Lawrence Baron, Theatre, Film & Broadcast, USA
It’s Hanukkah in August as we take a look at two enjoyable holiday stories. [Marcia Berneger]
Children’s books for early Hanukkah shoppers Read More »
Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Jewish Religion, Marcia Berneger
The author, born in 1990, earned her Mathematics degree from Middlebury College and completed an MFA in fiction at Columbia University in 2018. The novel is set in crisis plagued New York around 9/11 2001. The author drops almost poetic hints; “Lower Manhattan opened its gates to the general public again…a light northward breeze perfumed the air with drywall dust and soot…we looked south and saw the great gap tooth against the gullet of the sky.” We were at war, from where would the next terror come? [Oliver Pollak, PhD)
A book reviewer’s search for Jewish stories Read More »
Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Oliver Pollak, Travel and Food
The bountiful new book, Rita Blitt: Around and Round (Tra Publishing, 2020), looks back at the long and prolific career of this notable American artist. If Blitt’s work is about anything then it is about the exuberance, the joy, the sometimes almost mad ecstasy of creative spontaneity. Much of her work is suffused with a kind of wild and kinetic extemporaneity, which seems to resound with a forceful but unforced “Yes!” – a Yes to life, a Yes to the world, a Yes to the here and now, the living moment pregnant with infinite possibility. Her gestural art is dynamic, uninhibited, and no less sensuous for being abstract. In the improvisational, rhythmic musicality of her paintings, Blitt expresses with unerring directness the energy and intensity of embodied imaginative experience. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]
Spontaneous Lines: The Art of Rita Blitt Read More »
Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Music, Dance, and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-Meir
The Encinitas, California-based Leichtag Foundation expressed shock and sadness over the Aug. 4 explosion that destroyed most of the port of Beirut, Lebanon, killing more than 150 people and leaving thousands homeless. “Responding hospitals, already stretched thin due to COVID-19 are now at overcapacity,” reported Charlene Seidle and Sharyn Goodson, respectively the Foundation’s executive vice president and vice president for philanthropy and organizational development. [Our Shtetl San Diego County column by Donald H. Harrison]
Leichtag Foundation urges Beirut relief donations Read More »
Donald H. Harrison, Ken Stone, Middle East, Music, Dance, and Visual Arts, Stephen D. BryenAuthors want to be read. We write because we are compelled and think we have something to say. Authors need readers, publishers need purchasers and subscribers. The SDJW editor invites readers to “Leave a Comment” and post it. Comments are usually favorable. Readers can also correspond directly by email. [Oliver B. Pollak]
Yes, indeed, we get and want letters Read More »
Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Business & Finance, Oliver Pollak, San Diego County
Oscar Orleans is a university-educated refugee from the Congo, who made his way to Israel, and in this mystery novel serves as a consultant to the Tel Aviv police department in cases involving other Black Africans, regardless of from which part of the sub-Saharan continent they came. (Donald H. Harrison)
A modern African-Israeli tale set in Tel Aviv Read More »
Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, International, Middle East