Events

Uncovered and Rediscovered: Stories of Jewish Chicago

Uncovered & Rediscovered is an evolving eight-part exhibit that explores the Chicago Jewish experience. The exhibit will unfold over time in a series of changing chapters (each on display for 3 to 6 months), using archival materials, cultural and fine art objects, and audio-visual content from Spertus’ rich and varied holdings to tell tales of Chicago’s Jewish pioneers and politicians, artists and anarchists, authors and entrepreneurs, and even Jewish boxers. Uncovered & Rediscovered is on display in the ground floor vestibule of the award-winning Spertus building and will expand to other areas of the building as it progresses. It is augmented by an interactive media center on the 2nd floor, featuring clips of film and television recordings about Chicago Jewish life. Hours and Admission 10 am- 5 pm Sunday-Thursday (Spertus is closed on Fridays and Saturdays). This exhibit is free to the public.

Place: The Spertus Institute, 610 S Michican Ave, Chicago, IL 60605

Date: 01/01/2011 10:00 AM to 12/30/2012 5:00 PM

Type: Exhibition

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Jonathan Hammer: Kovno-Kobe

"Kovno-Kobe" features Jonathan Hammer's pastels, drawings, etchings and a bifold screen of diverse animal skins tooled in precious metals that reference events in Lithuania during the Holocaust. The work was inspired by an incident in the summer of 1940, following the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, when the Japanese Consul in Kovno, Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara, issued 2,140 handwritten transit visas to Jewish refugees in the city. The series also references the mass murder of Lithuanian Jews following the German invasion in June 1941. Drawing on Dada, Surrealism and Neo-Conceptualism, Hammer employs a visual vocabulary of figurative and semi-abstract forms. The finely rendered and ironically delicate images of his etchings, for example, represent both victims and victimizers, evoking violence, mortality and the disintegration of the self. The works conjure the nightmares of the unconscious – puzzle fragments of humanity shaped by patterned animal skins – while contrasting opulence and beauty with violence and death. One may identify the shower head of the gas chambers, the Angel of Death, the ink blots that read as massed corpses, the ubiquitous trains; and such figures of cultural memory as a Jewish patriarch, Mt. Fuji or the Rising Sun, Japanese symbols. A parallel exhibition, exploring the same themes in new work, "Paranormal Nightlight" is on view at MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects in Chelsea from April 26 through June 2. It is Hammer’s eighth one-person exhibition in New York City and his second with MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects, and features pastels on paper, an installation on slate, and Hammer’s first exhibited canvases. For further details, visit http://www.miyakoyoshinaga.com. Jonathan Hammer is an American artist living in Spain. For 25 years his work has crossed the boundaries of various media and techniques using materials such as exotic skins and porcelain and including books, works on paper (pastels, silverpoints), installation, sculpture, standing screens, photographs and prints. Hammer has had 40 one-person exhibitions (including eight in New York, five with Matthew Marks Gallery) in eight countries, and museum surveys at the Geneva Center for Contemporary Art and the Berkeley Museum. His work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles among others. Hammer is an authority on DADA and has published his critical writing on the subject in Ball and Hammer (Yale University Press, 2002). For further information, visit www.jonathanhammerstudio.com. As a member of the American Association of Museums, The Hebrew Home at Riverdale is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection throughout its 19-acre campus, including the Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. The Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provide educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and visitors from elsewhere. The Home is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric center serving more than 3,000 elderly persons through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday – Thursday, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Art Collection open daily, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Call for holiday hours or for further information, visit our website at http://hebrewhome.org/art.asp This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Place: Derfner Judaica Museum, The Hebrew Home at Riverdale, Bronx, NY 10471

Date: 04/29/2012 10:30 AM to 7/29/2012 4:30 PM

Type: Exhibition

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City Sounds

An exhibit of Jewish musicians and Jewish venues in Columbus Ohio- who played in the clubs, restaurants and lounges of the City? Come visit our exhibit!

Place: Bexley Public Library, 2411 E Main St, Bexley, OH 43209

Date: 05/01/2012 to 5/31/2012

Type: Exhibition

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Limited run of 'Welcome to America' by H. Leivick

Broadway's Alice Cannon (the original cast of Company and James Joyce’s The Dead), Donald Warfield (Watercolor Crisscrossing) & Dathan B. Williams (Show Boat) will star in this English adaptation of a 1920's Yiddish play about a Jewish immigrant family struggling to assimilate in 1920’s New York City. The play will feature direction from Stephen E. Fried. Joining them in the cast will be Josh Odsess-Rubin, Jessica DiSalvo, Claire Kennedy & Anthony Peeples. WELCOME TO AMERICA centers on Mordechai Maze (Warfield), the patriarch of an immigrant family. A well-respected member of his community back home, he now finds himself working in a sweat shop in Manhattan’s Garment District. Mordechai has a hard time watching his children adopt the habits of American youth. When his daughter elopes with his boss’ son just on the verge of a labor strike, he begins to feel even more out of place in this new world. The production will feature set design by Lee Savage, lighting design by Josh Kernisky and costume design by Alixandra Gage Englund.

Place: New Worlds Theatre Project, The 45th Street Theatre, New York, NY 10036

Date: 05/02/2012 8:00 PM to 5/20/2012 9:30 PM

Type: Exhibition

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The Jewish Woman In America: 1654-2012

In this course we shall discuss the vital contributions that Jewish women have made to American Jewish life, from the time of the first Sephardic arrivals to New Amsterdam in 1654, down to the present. Among the topics we will cover will be women in Colonial Jewish America and in the new Republic, Jewish women during the Civil War, and the important role of Eastern European Jewish women on the Lower East Side of New York and other Jewish ghettos around the country. We will also cover the two great waves of Jewish feminism in American life, first in the 1890's, and later on in the 1960's and 1970's. Among the famous women whose lives we will discuss will be Rebecca Gratz, Eugenia Levy, Phoebe Levy Pember, Emma Lazarus, Mathilde Schechter, Henrietta Szold, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as some notable American women rabbis.

Place: Board of Jewish Education, 501 N. Jerome Avenue, Margate, NJ 08402

Date: 05/10/2012 11:00 AM to 5/31/2012 12:30 PM

Type: Lecture

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