A moment of auspicious transatlantic coincidence: while the Jewish Museum Berlin features an exhibit of jazz photography by two Jewish photographers, Francis Wolff and Jimmy Katz, New York’s Lincoln Center is showing “In the Best Possible Light: Herman Leonard’s Jazz,” featuring the work of another Jewish photographer who covered the same era, and shot many…
Celebrations for the 70th birthday of legendary jazz label Blue Note Records are taking place at an unlikely venue. The Jewish Museum Berlin is tooting its horn with an exhibition of photographs by two of Blue Note’s Jewish photographers, Francis Wolff and Jimmy Katz. Wolff, a Berlin native, helped found the label in 1939, along…
When it comes to the Festival of Lights, there is no shortage of gift schmaltz. Since the Forward first published festive holiday picks under the headline “Give the Gift of Kitsch” in 2005, schlock options have grown exponentially. The phenomenon originally explored in these pages has expanded to include such winners as the new Latka…
“The Jazz Baroness” is a made-for-television documentary that traces the background and mutual influence of the inventor of Bebop, Thelonius Monk, and his great supporter, muse and mentor — Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, also known as Nica Rothschild. Abandoning her husband, children and famous banking family in the late 1940s, she came to New York…
A new exhibit at The New York Public Library for the Performing Art — “Revolutionary Voices: Performing Arts in Central & Eastern Europe in the 1980s” — brings together a vast archive of documents that give texture and depth to the artistic climate of the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s. From scripts covered in censors’…
When Argentine artist Mirta Kupferminc escorts her mother, a Holocaust survivor who fled her homeland of Hungary in the wake of World War II, to view exhibits of her work, she sometimes worries that her mother will find the material too disturbing, too reminiscent of her experiences during the war. After all, Kupferminc bases much…
In Vienna, on the night of Saturday, November 7, the Sports Club Hakoah, also known as Hakoah Vienna, held a gala ball to celebrate its 100th anniversary. The evening’s entertainment included a bare-chested acrobat whose midair gyrations, on a swath of purple cloth hung from the ceiling, suggested both the precarious nature of Jews in…
Once underestimated in favor of his more acclaimed artist friends, like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890) is now finally the man of the hour, honored with two major exhibits: Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention, which runs from November 15 to March 14, 2010, at…
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