Question One, a compelling documentary, explores a pitched battle in Maine over legalizing same-sex marriage — the same issue that Minnesotans will vote on in November
By MORDECAI SPECKTOR
On May 6, 2009, Maine Gov. John Baldacci signed a bill making same-sex marriage legal in the state. However, opponents of the law petitioned to stop [...]

St. Louis Park native Peter Himmelman has been booked for a May 24 return engagement at Minneapolis’ premier jazz club
By MORDECAI SPECKTOR
Peter Himmelman has made his home in southern California for many years, but his hometown gigs, an annual affair for many years, are eagerly anticipated. The St. Louis Park native played his [...]

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander, Knopf, 224 pages, $24.95.
Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER
Nathan Englander continues to go from strength to strength, packing new proof of his distinctive talent into this slender package of eight short stories.
Englander burst to stardom in 1999, with a short-story collection, For [...]

More than 35 photographs representing the theme of ‘community’ were displayed at the Yom Ha’atzmaut event on April 29
By ERIN ELLIOTT BRYAN / Community News Editor
To conclude the first year of the Jewish Lens program, a community-wide curriculum that encourages participants to connect with their Judaism through photography, six organizations from Minneapolis and St. [...]

Well-traveled singer-songwriter from Iowa returns to the Twin Cities on May 10
By MORDECAI SPECKTOR
I met God on the edge of town / Where the wind meets the stillness
Where the darkness meets the light / Where the ocean meets the sky
Where the desert meets the rain / Where the earth meets the [...]

Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed, by Leslie Maitland, Other Press, 512 pages, $27.95.
Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER
Had Leslie Maitland set out to write a gripping romance novel, she hardly could have exceeded this fascinating account of her mother’s life.
Crossing the Borders of Time is more [...]

The Guthrie Theater presents its first staging of a work by acclaimed playwright Donald Margulies
By MORDECAI SPECKTOR
GRETE: All I am suggesting, Mr. Waxman, is that the artist, like the Jew, prefers to see himself as alien from the mainstream culture. For the Jewish artist to acknowledge that the contrary is true, that he [...]

The popular Israeli musician plays the Dakota April 16, while touring with a quartet featuring Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré
By MORDECAI SPECKTOR
It’s not every day you talk with an Israeli superstar.
After a series of e-mails over recent weeks with his manager, the AJW finally caught up with peripatetic and popular musician Idan Raichel, [...]

The Film Society of Minneapolis St. Paul is presenting the 2012 Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF), which runs through May 3 on five screens at the St. Anthony Main Theatre, 115 Main St., S.E., Minneapolis.
The festival includes a “Spotlight on the Middle East” — curated by Alissa Simon, senior programmer at the [...]

Final production of the 2011-2012 season explores the inspiration and struggle between two approaches to the same art
By DORIS RUBENSTEIN
Is there a mystical connection between St. Paul and Canada?
The Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company’s last production, My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, was written by an Ottawa-based playwright; the author of its newest [...]