By Gwen Orel
The Golem was created, legend says, to protect Prague’s Jews. Things didn’t exactly work out right and a new puppet production eloquently tells the story on stage.
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By Gwen Orel
Itamar Moses likes to ramble and so do the characters in his new play, ‘Completeness.’ He credits his Israeli parents for raising him to appreciate a ‘culture of arguing.’
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By Gwen Orel
Belfast’s Kabosh Theatre, a site-specific performance company commissioned writer Gavin Kostick to help create “This Is What We Sang,” the story of a fictional Belfast family over four generations. After writing the play, Kostick signed the Ireland Palestinian Solidarity Campaign petition, boycotting travel to Israel until the Gaza blockade is ended. Kostick told me he signed for humanitarian reasons, and to start a conversation but the fact was not supposed to come out until later in the fall, well after the run of “This Is What We Sang.”
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By Gwen Orel
When church groups go on field trips, do they heckle the bus driver?
“NO! WRONG WAY!” kvetched the back of the Congregation B’nai Israel (CBI) bus, when the driver went towards I-78 not down Vauxhall but, inexplicably, down Valley.
My brother, and many other ex-Millburn N.J. New Yorkers, met us at the Jewish Museum for a private showing of “Modern Art, Sacred Space: Motherwell, Ferber and Gottlieb.” The exhibit is entirely made up of CBI art, and a model of our synagogue. I grew up with this art.
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By Gwen Orel
One of the most striking things about “Conviction,” a new adaptation of Oren Neeman’s play by Mark Williams and Ami Dayan (who also stars), is the impassioned, dreamy description of Jewish rituals by the 15th-century Spanish priest Andrés González (Dayan) as he learns them from his beloved, the Jewess Isabel. The exhilaration in his voice and the wonder on his face as he describes falling in love with Judaism, and Isabel, remind us how easy it is to take Jewish ritual for granted.
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