Tu biShvat Holiday Kit

Tu biShvat (notice the 'funny' spelling*) falls on February 4th and if you want to know what it is, how it evolved, how it's celebrated, songs, videos, recipes, crafts, etc. then you should check out Jvillage Network's Tu biShvat Holiday Kit.  It even explains the *correct spelling of this holiday.

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Tu Bishvat is Coming February 4

Roz Chast Drags Us Kicking, Screaming, and Laughing, Into the Land of the Infirm

During the Hebrew month of Tevet there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts and Culture.

The cartoonist’s grahic memoir made many Top Ten lists this year. Here’s what she had to say about it.

By Vox Tablet - Audio Podcast

[Podcast audio below.] Roz Chast is best known for her New Yorker comics—colorful and witty depictions of everyday humiliations and grievances. Often those come at the hands of the people closest to her: family members. In Chast’s recent book, a graphic memoir called Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? that has rightfully earned a place on many annual lists of the year’s best new non-fiction, she tells the story of her parents. In particular, she looks back at how, as an only child, she dealt with their steep decline at the end of their lives—with love and sadness, but also with frustration and guilt. It’s a poignant and often unexpectedly hilarious account and one that confronts head-on a dilemma most of us will face at some point if we haven’t already: figuring out what to do with an elderly relative who can no longer look after him- or herself.

Vox Tablet’s Julie Subrin visited with Chast in her Connecticut home last spring to talk about Chast’s reasons for delving into this depressing terrain and how the daughter of two extremely high-strung and rather humorless Depression-scarred parents stuck in the backwaters of Jewish Brooklyn became a successful and very funny cartoon artist.

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Frederick Wiseman’s Cosmic Joke

The Old Master of documentary film talks about tantrums at London’s National Gallery, his curiosity, and his love of janitors

By Jeremy Sigler|for Tablet Magazine

Never before has such a mixed bag of “documentaries” been so instantly available through digital streaming. But Frederick Wiseman’s films are still hard to find, and equally hard to ingest. Other documentary filmmakers associated with the Cinema Verité movement are inclined to stalk a charismatic subject until something truly unprecedented is caught on film; Wiseman, however, lets the true drama of his subject speak, even if nothing especially dramatic happens. His mastery is in capturing the uneventfulness of everyday life. (Ironically, his films are a treasure trove of mind-boggling, often hilarious occurrences.)

Wiseman is now in his eighties (born in 1930) and has made more than 30 full-length feature films, mainly ingenuously non-opinionated accounts of American institutions (public high schools, factories, the military, and hospitals), most of which originally aired on PBS. His historic contribution to the art of 20th-century cinema is a given, yet each new film retains an innocence and curiosity that thrusts us yet again into a new context. There we may witness another collection of performances by “normal” people who often don’t realize they are “acting” in a movie. In his latest slice of reality, National Gallery, Wiseman immerses his audience in a cinematic “behind the scenes” choreography of the London museum’s blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci show, as well as its magnificent collection of Old Master paintings. Never before has da Vinci been upstaged by painfully long administrative meetings; verbose docents; framers; restorers; museum workers erecting and breaking down galleries, painting walls, installing paintings, polishing floors, tilting lights, and even tending bars—and I almost forgot: hordes of art-loving, googly-eyed museum-goers.

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