Comedian Joel Chasnoff delivers some riffs on the Feast of Tabernacles. There is not that much Sukkot material from stand-up comics, so here you are:

Islamic influence on Jewish art is prevalent in the variety of items on display
By DORIS RUBENSTEIN
Back in 1981 or so, I took a Royal Air Maroc flight from New York City to Montreal. What I thought would be an uneventful trip turned out to be a cultural and historic adventure.
The flight was [...]

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, by Charles King, W.W. Norton, 352 pages, $27.95.
Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER
Chances are pretty good that most of us, or someone we know, can trace a family member back to Odessa.
Famed Odessa, once Russia’s great enlightened and notorious port on the Black Sea — and [...]

The American Jewish World will hold a drawing for a pair of tickets to the Oct. 11 Socalled show at the Cedar Cultural Center, on the Minneapolis West Bank.

Socalled. (Photo: Courtesy of Socalled)

The concert date has been moved up to Tuesday, Oct. 11, from the previously announced Oct. 12 date.
Please send your entry (one per [...]

Taking klezmer into the future, the wildly inventive Socalled makes his first Twin Cities appearance
When I finally connected last week with the multitalented composer and musician Socalled, he was in a Montreal rehearsal space, scoring music for his new show titled The Season.
“I’m making a musical and I’ve never done such a thing before, and it’s with [...]

Here’s a High Holidays video, with the breaking and the shockling bocherim (yeshiva students), from Aish HQ in the Old City of Jerusalem:

Emmy Award-winning producer and Pace University professor Allen Oren’s 40-minute documentary, 18 Voices Sing Kol Nidre, will be screened 3 p.m. CDT Sunday, Sept. 25 on TPT LIFE Channel 2.3 (check local listings).
The documentary explores how a prayer that doesn’t mention God became so sacred. It also shows how the Kol Nidre became a Jewish [...]

AJW Staff Report
The jazz collaboration called James Farm will play two nights, Sept. 20 and 21, at the Dakota Jazz Club in downtown Minneapolis.
The group, which came together in 2009, features Joshua Redman, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed tenor sax players; piano wunderkind Aaron Parks; bassist Matt Penman, a native of New [...]

Celebrated author will appear at Sabes JCC on Sept. 22, as part of Culture Blvd. — Israeli Author Series
By MORDECAI SPECKTOR
Israeli journalist and novelist Ron Leshem was surprised to hear that the American Jewish World reprinted his opinion article on the “tent protest,” the ongoing demonstration for social justice, that has rocked the Jewish state [...]

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson, Crown, 464 pages, $26.
Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER
Watching Hitler consolidate power while America slept was so dismaying to U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd it cost him his health and his position.
Less the thriller its subtitle suggests, but far more [...]