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 [...]

Members of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest (JHSUM) recently received the latest copy of the group’s journal. Linda Mack Schloff edited the periodical “Who Knew? Stories Unearthed from the Archives,” which offers fascinating glimpses of Jewish life from bygone days. There is a letter from Annalee Weiskopf Wolff’s mother responding [...]

By DAN PINE
SAN FRANCISCO (j weekly) — For the iTunes generation, Tikva Records’ pop-up Jewish record store in San Francisco probably looks like something out of the Stone Age.
For those born during the Stone Age, the record store is a comforting throwback to the days of vinyl, glorious vinyl.
Open Dec. 1-28 in a [...]

Yuval Cohen, a native of Tel Aviv who plays soprano saxophone, is known to many as one of the 3 Cohens, the jazz ensemble that includes his siblings, Anat, a clarinet luminary on the New York jazz scene; and Avishai, who plays trumpet with the SF Jazz Collective, Keren Ann et al. On [...]

A delightful and hilarious film set in Mexico City’s Jewish community, Nora’s Will (Menemsha Films), is now out on DVD for your home viewing pleasure. The story revolves around Nora’s suicide right before Passover, which brings together her ex-husband and children, a fractious lot. The humor spins off issues of Jewish identity and [...]

Devout fans of Leonard Cohen, the renowned poet from Montreal, will want to fill in the gaps on their record shelf with The Complete Albums Collection (Legacy/Columbia), a box set that includes all 17 of Cohen’s albums, which have been remastered from the original analogue master tapes. The collection celebrates the singer’s 77th [...]

Acclaimed Israeli director Amos Gitai blends family and Israeli history in his unconventional film Carmel, which is now available on DVD from Kino Lorber. With narration by renowned French actress Jeanne Moreau, Carmel begins with Gitai walking along a beach, then shifts to scenes from the Jewish-Roman wars in the first century C.E. [...]

Although she stopped writing about music in the early 1980s, Ellen Willis was an influential rock critic. The first popular music critic ever hired by The New Yorker, Willis provided a feminist perspective on the male-dominated world of rock. Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University of Minnesota Press) collects [...]