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2 weeks ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
I’m not quite an oenophile. I enjoy a good glass of Pinot Noir. But I’ve never been to wine school. Nor have I visited more than a handful of local wineries in my life. However, if I wished to plan the perfect wine trip to Israel, the guidebook I’d want to have is “Wine Journey: An Israeli Adventure.” Written in Hebrew and English, it’s a guidebook to some 170-plus Israeli wineries that welcome visitors.
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1 month ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
One of the two major characters in Noga Flaishon’s stage play “Memoriam” is Rivka, the last Holocaust survivor. The other is Rivka’s granddaughter, Rachel, who is a buyer of memories at the for-profit company, Memoriam. Set in the near future, “Memoriam” portrays a time when a person’s memory can be sold, extracted, digitized and turned into a commodity. Rachel’s company wants to buy Rivka’s Holocaust memories. And they want Rachel to set up the deal.
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1 month ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
It’s never a good sign when a government official, accompanied by three soldiers, knocks on your door after bedtime. In the opening scene of the historical drama feature film “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” the official has arrived to tell the Mortara family that their 6-year-old son Edgardo has been baptized. The official carries an order to remove Edgardo from his Jewish family. The time is 1858. The place is Bologna, which then was part of the Papal States. Pope Pius IX rules.
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1 month ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
In 1935, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee commissioned photographer Roman Vishniac to document impoverished Jewish communities in Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania. The JDC was the world’s largest Jewish relief organization at the time. The JDC sought images that it could use as fundraising materials to encourage Americans to respond to the plight of Jews in Eastern Europe. The Vishniac family had moved to Berlin after the Russian Revolution.
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1 month ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
From the 1920s through the 1970s, the Catskills was the vacation playground for Jewish people. Known as the Borsht Belt, the area was home to a dense concentration of more than 500 resort hotels and hundreds of bungalow colonies in New York’s Sullivan and Ulster counties.
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1 month ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
Early on a Shabbat morning in January 2022, a stranger walked up to the locked front door of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker buzzed the man into the synagogue. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, few people were expected to attend the service in person. The synagogue was set up to live-stream the service. As the Amidah service began, Rabbi Cytron-Walker faced the Ark. Behind him, he heard the click of a gun.
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2 months ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
It was critic Roger Ebert who wrote, “Film is magic.” By that, he was referring to the power of film to create characters, tell stories and immerse us in a different world.. There’s plenty of magic in the French drama, “The Blond Boy from the Casbah.”The story: Jewish filmmaker Antoine Lisner returns to Algiers to screen a feature-length film about his childhood. “Our Algeria was a veritable film set,” Antoine tells his 15-year-old son Thomas.
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2 months ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
Forgiveness is the release of resentment or anger. We all have a choice in this life: to dress ourselves in layers of anger and guilt or dress ourselves in garments of freedom and find forgiveness within. That’s the choice Marie faces in the Israeli film “Seven Blessings” (“sheva brachot”). Marie, a Moroccan Jew, and Dan, an Ashkenazic French Jew, are getting married in Jerusalem.
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2 months ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
The year of 2007 was big for the young Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen. The American opera star grew up singing in the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and HaZamir, the international Jewish teen choir. By the time he was 13 years old, Cohen was serving as an assistant cantor at the East Midwood Jewish Center. That’s the Renaissance Revival-style Conservative synagogue that appears in the television series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Cohen will be in Houston on Monday, Feb. 24.
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2 months ago | 
jhvonline.com | Aaron Howard
People are attracted to each other for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, they marry. They commit to a long-term relationship, to a family. That takes a lot of work. Anna Zeigler’s play “The Wanderers” looks at two married couples who have begun to take each other for granted. First is the ultra-Orthodox couple, Esther and Schmuli. Esther has reached a point in her marriage where she wants a life outside of raising children. Externally, she wants a computer and a job.
