Gaucho’s “Pearl,” released last month on Porto Franco Records and launched at the Jewish Music Festival of Berkeley, Calif., is the perfect accompaniment to a lazy autumn afternoon. Channeling the sounds of 1930s Paris, the San Francisco-based sextet plays the kind of gentle, sometimes-jubilant, sometimes-melancholy swing that doesn’t make you want to get up and…
On October 12, Paris’s Cité de la Musique opened a new exhibit, “Lenin, Stalin, and Music” which includes much fascinating material about the fate, and often the plight, of Russian Jewish musicians. With the benefit of hindsight it’s difficult to see why any Jews stayed in Soviet Russia. However, a brilliantly concise and well-illustrated exhibition…
When Claudine Faifer unwrapped the 165 oil paintings that arrived at her Miami Beach home last May, the first thing she thought was, “ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod!” There, among the vibrant scenes of clowns, carnivals and cafés, were 65 erotic images painted by her father, the late Jacques Faifer, a little-known artist whose colorful works capture…
Occasionally, the legend surrounding a work of art takes on a life of its own: I can’t hear Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” for instance, without imagining the riot that it caused at its Paris premiere (a scene that’s all the more scandalous given the oppressively tomb-like atmosphere of most classical music concerts, which makes…
The Jewish museum (Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme) in Paris greets its visitors with massive tombstones dating back to 11th century. There are also frail parchments, medieval megillot, newspaper clips of the Dreyfus trial, and dim brass ritual objects. Imagine then, the shock and delight inspired by the exhibit that landed there this spring,…
In the English-speaking world, psychoanalyzing Yiddish, and the way it is spoken, is often done with a dollop of humor, as in “Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods” by Michael Wex, appreciatively reviewed by the Forward. French Jews, on the other hand tend to approach the subject comparatively soberly, as…
Researchers interested in poking through the library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris or the Hungarian Jewish Archives in Budapest may no longer have to leave their laptops to do it. The rich cultural heritage of European Jewry was recently recognized by the European Commission with a grant to Judaica Europeana, an organization that…
Will somebody please teach Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak how to use Travelocity or Orbitz? Barak, leader of the Labor party that has spent decades fighting for social equality, managed to rack up a hotel bill of 96,000 euro for a visit by him and his entourage to the Paris Air Show in the summer…
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