Contact B'nai B'rith

1120 20th Street NW, Suite 300N Washington, D.C. 20036

info@bnaibrith.org

202-857-6600

PictureCheryl Kempler

Who isn’t a Mayim Bialik fan? It’s tough not to be impressed by a woman whose deftly deadpan antics as The Big Bang Theory’s Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler, a Ph.D. neuroscientist, are informed by her real life education as a Ph.D. neuroscientist. 

To learn more about her, legions of devotees—seemingly of all demographics and faithsare logging on to her new website Groknation.com, a name referencing the 1960s cult science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Bialik writes about all aspects of her multi-layered life, from her Jewish background and love of Israel, to parenting, the arts, and her special vegan diet.   

Readers may be surprised by the frankness of Bialik’s posts, the most recent focusing on the ways in which her adherence to Jewish ritual became a source of comfort after her father’s death: 

Life goes on; it has to. But saying Kaddish every day has allowed me to step out of the ‘life goes on’ part of my day to enter a sanctuary (literally!) where I again am a mourner, and I feel again that life can’t go on because it’s OK to feel that way. It’s healthy to hold that tension in your brain. Grief is dissecting life going on from life not going on again and again.”

And… no, Bialik will not divulge anything about Amy’s response to Sheldon’s Big Bang proposal on the site—unless you don’t like to laugh, you’ll just have to catch the season premiere.



Join the crowds coming downtown to New York’s glitzy new Whitney Museum of American Art for a look at 29 year old Rachel Rose’s prize-winning works during her solo show from Oct. 2, 2015 to Feb. 7, 2016 in its Kaufman Gallery, where her installation “will physically engage with the architecture of the museum’s new building.”   


Educated at Columbia, Yale and London’s Courtauld Institute of Art as an art historian and painter, Rose became known for using innovative materials like gel and transparent plastic paper to produce brilliantly colored, glistening forms suggestive of biological organisms or marine animals.

Fusing the conceptual and the sensual, her critically acclaimed videos, including A Minute Ago and Sitting Feeding Sleeping, are thoroughly original constructions bringing together film clipsfrom sources including YouTube, vintage movies and the artist’s own footage of zoo animalsthat address big questions about life and death, and explore the sometimes uneasy relationships between nature, culture and advanced technology.  

Picture

Rachel Rose, Everything and More (still), 2015. HD video. Courtesy Pilar Corrias, London


Also Read:


Cheryl Kempler is an art and music specialist who works in the B’nai B’rith International Curatorial Office and writes about history and Jewish culture for B’nai B’rith Magazine. To view some of her additional content, Click Here.