Art & Lit

For Judith Malina, place has always been a state of mind.  This tiny giant of the theatre world has epitomized the life of a nom

Hazel Karr first contacted JWA because she wanted to add some biographical details to the article in the online Encyclopedia about her grandmother, Esther Kreitman. We struck up a correspondence with her and suggested she write a blog post about the differences between between her mother's artwork and her own.

Hazel Karr comes from a family steeped in art and literature. Her grandmother Esther wrote journal articles, translations, and novels, including the autobiographical  Der Sheydim Tants (Deborah) in 1946. Esther’s brothers were Issac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, and Israel Joshua Singer, who wrote extensively in Yiddish. Esther’s son Maurice Carr had a long career in journalism in Paris and Israel; his wife was Hazel’s mother Lola; the daughter of another Yiddish writer (A.M. Fuchs), she painted throughout her life.

In this post, Hazel Karr searches for the meaning in her mother's paintings and in her own.

The room was filled with an open, excited energy.

Anita Steckel was 82 when she died last March. But Anita, her many fans would insist, was way younger than most of us will ever be.

It was fitting that Gloria was born on Independence Day. She was a firecracker: sharp, witty, energetic.

When Nora Ephron was young, she wanted to be Dorothy Parker.

When I was young, I wanted to be Nora Ephron. I still do.

Reading Adam Kirsch’s excellent piece in Tablet on Isaac Bashevis Singer reminde

Jojo Lazar is a Boston-based multimedia visual and performance artist with a dizzying http://jojolazar.tumblr.com

The news of Adrienne Rich’s death yesterday at age 82 sent me immediately to my bookshelves and an extended swim through the currents of words she has left behind. All writers believe in the power of words—and maybe especially poets, whose words are fewer and so carefully chosen—but for me Rich’s writing particularly and persuasively argued for the ability of words, language, expression to create new realities, to change the world.