By Joel Schechter
Camille Pissarro was renowned as an Impressionist landscape painter. A new exhibit explores the lesser-known sides of this Caribbean-born Jew and anarchist.
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By Joel Schechter
San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum is paying tribute to the expatriate writer Gertrude Stein with an exhibit of photographs, paintings and sculptures that focuses more on her friendships, her celebrity and legacy than on her poetry or novels.
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By Joel Schechter
On April 8, 1935, congressional legislation created the Works Progress Administration, which developed millions of jobs for the unemployed. WPA agencies placed 8.5 million Americans on the federal payroll, including hundreds of Yiddish actors, writers, scene designers and theater directors hired for the administration’s Federal Theatre Project. On the 75th anniversary of the WPA and the FTP, unemployment is too high once again, and the benefits provided by the 1930s relief programs deserve reconsideration, as well as a tribute.
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By Joel Schechter
The United States government bankrolled some of the most innovative Yiddish stage productions in the 20th century when it paid the salaries of actors, writers and directors under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. One of the first plays funded by the WPA can still be seen on film almost 75 years later. The 1935 production of prominent Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin’s 1892 play “The Yiddish King Lear” will be screened in Manhattan at CUNY’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center on December 15.
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By Joel Schechter
As if to raise a curtain on the coming celebration of Maurice Sendak, the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum has unveiled a probing, multidimensional exhibit showing the back story of the children’s author and illustrator, whose “Where the Wild Things Are” is about to open as a major motion picture.
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