Sara Erde, Caramelo’s lead vocalist, was raised in a Jewish folk music-loving family in Brooklyn. Her Spanish friends convinced her to start dancing flamenco at an early age. She went on to act in off-Broadway shows, and then met guitarist Jed Miley, a Seattle native who studied flamenco guitar in Spain. The resulting [...]

Michael Tilson Thomas, the grandson of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, wrote, hosted and conducted The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater. The show was broadcast in March on PBS’ Great Performances and was released on DVD on Tuesday. Recorded in April 2011 in Miami Beach, it stars Judy [...]

Works by Jewish-Mexican artists Salomon Gorshtein and Sandra Felemovicius, a father and daughter, are featured in From Bricks to Brushes that is on display through May 6 in the Tychman Shapiro Gallery at the Sabes JCC in St. Louis Park. The exhibit includes pieces in a variety of media, but lines, geometric shapes [...]

As this page from the “New American Haggadah” (Little, Brown and Company) notes, Elijah the Prophet will herald the coming of the messianic era. Jonathan Safran Foer edited, and Nathan Englander translated this attractive new telling of the story of our exodus from Egyptian bondage and the birth of the Jewish people. The [...]

Amid the mundane lives of Tel Ilan villagers, strange things are happening. Esteemed Israeli author Amos Oz ventures into Kafkaland, at times, in his new collection of stories, Scenes from Village Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Unexpected and inexplicable events transpire at climactic moments in these eight stories. Oz is a world-class writer, so [...]

St. Paul artist Joyce Lyon shows photographs, drawings and text in an exhibit, Dialogue in Place, Volume II, at Form + Content Gallery in Minneapolis. Lyon collaborates in the show with Andrea Thoma, an artist from Leeds, England, who presents video, photographs and abstract paintings. The two artists have maintained an ongoing e-mail [...]

Josh Ginsburg’s star is rising in the jazz world. The talented, Brooklyn-based composer and bassist, who has played with a host of jazz luminaries over the past dozen years, has a new album, Zembla Variations (Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records), which showcases his felicitous writing and prodigious chops. Drummer Rudy Royston and pianist George [...]

Acclaimed Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld returns again to his homeland, the European killing fields of the 20th century, in his new novel, Until the Dawn’s Light (Schocken). His story, skillfully translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green, follows Blanca, a Jewish high school student in Austria, who marries a gentile laborer and [...]

Mona Lyn Reese has been composing professionally for more than 35 years, including a stint as composer-in-residence at the Minnesota Opera from 1991-1999. Her most recent album is a dramatic oratorio titled Choose Life, Uvacharta Bachayim, an interfaith commemoration of the Holocaust, which Reese composed with librettist Delores Dufner, OSB. The ambitious work was recorded [...]

Photographer Gay Block’s amazing retrospective book, About Love (Radius Books), begins with early portraits from her suburban Houston, Texas, Jewish milieu. Block then shifts her focus, in this collection of photographs and films — five films on two DVDs are included — to Miami’s South Beach and its colorful residents. The beautiful, large-format [...]