​The Photographers’ Gallery in London continues its retrospective of the iconic work of Helen Levitt through Feb. 22, 2022.
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A crowd has gathered at one spot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art installation of 20th century masterworks of photography. People of all ages, even the children who have been brought to the museum under protest, are spellbound by a modest 20-minute black and white silent documentary filmed on the sidewalks of East Harlem and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. This is a first encounter with Helen Levitt’s “In the Street” (1945-46) for most, who watch unincumbered by the essays and expert interpretative analysis that have contributed to the work’s reputation. Curators, critics and poets have proclaimed Levitt to be one of the era’s greatest artists. What is it about “In the Street” that has the power to capture and transport them so completely? 

Daughter of a Russian Jewish immigrant, Levitt (1913-2009) was raised in Brooklyn, where she attended, but did not complete, high school. Turning to photography in her early 20s, Levitt was influenced throughout her lifetime by the politically charged work of both earlier photographers like Lewis Heine, who depicted the hardened children of Manhattan’s Five Points district, and perhaps Paul Strand, remembered for his early portraits of the city’s street people, as well as dozens of her own contemporaries and colleagues. Ben Shahn’s photos and paintings of children were certainly known to her. Any point of view inherent in her selection of subject matter was tempered by the somewhat detached aesthetic of her mentor, the genius Henri Cartier-Bresson. Her friend, Walker Evans, left a legacy of Depression-era portraits whose static gravitas was rejected by Levitt, known for the kinetic exuberance of her work.

“In the Street,” made in collaboration with cameraperson Janice Loeb and James Agee, the celebrated author who wrote the film’s opening title, could also be viewed through the lens of peripheral sources like Italian Neo-Realist cinema—just being screened in New York during those years—early Soviet newsreels or even some of the experimental short films that attracted audiences to Manhattan’s art cinemas. 

Steeped in the gritty ambiance of New York’s tenement neighborhoods, “In the Street” is almost anthropological in its view of their inhabitants. An unconscious comparison between real life and its Hollywood treatment drives the search for truth. What the camera records—the tired, the elderly dog walkers, the attentive but haggard mothers, the alcoholics and the mentally ill, the men whose faces become roadmaps of their violent pastimes—is the distillation of an experience that is alien to most.

The lingering takeaway involves sequences with children, unkempt and dressed in tattered castoffs, engaged in play. Affectionate or savage, brazen or mysterious, their repartee is one that reveals an intimacy that can develop among those who encounter the same trials and who find release in each other’s company, perhaps mirroring the life Levitt had known during her own youth. 

Maurice Sendak’s brief comment about the photographer and her perspective on the world conveys a lot: “Helen Levitt’s clear-eyed view of children’s street life is sympathetic and brutally honest. She takes children on their own terms and sees the extraordinary paradox of their lives, watching them duck and dive between total fantasy and hard reality.”

Although a large portion of Levitt’s negatives, contact sheets and prints disappeared when her studio was burglarized during the 1970s, it is possible to discern the variety of her methods from existing materials. Sometimes she photographed her subjects clandestinely, at other times they confront the camera to pose for her.

The London exhibit also includes a selection of Levitt’s later work in color, dating from the 1970s, which conveys, according to art historian Julie Hrischeva, “an urban sense of disconnection that … [unlike pictures by Diane Arbus or Garry Winogrand] maintains true affection for her fellow New Yorkers.”

​Simon Barazin is an architect and interior decorator whose renovation of the 20-year old Barzilay Café in Tel Aviv’s Hashmal Garden district has elevated the standard coffee shop to a new level of design aesthetics, visually redolent of Donald Judd’s geometric sculptures and Dan Flavin’s light works. Installing specially treated glass windows that optimize the changing qualities of the natural light flooding the cafe throughout the day, Barazin reconfigured its three spaces—kitchen, roasting room and seating area—to exploit the reflective surfaces of made-to-order seating, brightly colored illuminated tables and gleaming metal countertops, for a Barzilay experience that is artsy, fun and inviting. Glass partitions allow for customers in the main room to see and smell the coffee being roasted.

The owner of his own firm specializing in design and spacial experience, Mr. Barazin studied at Israel’s famous Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, where he is now a teacher.

This month, Theater J, part of the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C. has enabled audiences across the country to register and enjoy free dramatic readings of new English versions of two early 20th century Yiddish plays at https://theaterj.org/yiddish-theater-lab/.

A finalist for the 2019 O’Neill Theater Center Festival in Waterford, Connecticut, Alix Sobler’s Miriam, is a reworking of Miryam, Peretz Hirschbein’s 1905 drama about a prostitute—a frequent subject for the Yiddish stage, strongly influenced by European Realist theater in that era—originally published in Hebrew. Known as the “Yiddish Chekov,” the prolific Hirschbein (1880-1948) is best remembered for his classic Green Fields. Featuring an all-female cast, it focuses on the lives of three women, who forge a bond as they reveal their unfortunate histories and look forward to a better life. Laley Lippard directs actresses Felicia Curry, Diane Figueroa Edidi and Kimberly Gilbert. Miriam can be seen live via Zoom on Sunday, June 7, at 5:00 pm, and will available from Monday, June 8 until midnight, Wednesday, June 10.
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Allen Lewis Rickman has translated and adapted One of Those (1912) by Polish poet, playwright and author Paula Prilutski (1876-19??), which will air on Thursday, June 18 at 5:30 and will be streamed until midnight, Sunday, June 21. Its premiere performance in Warsaw was mounted by the legendary actress-manager Esther-Rokhl Kaminska, mother of Ida. Despite its grim narrative, this proto-feminist story of Judith, a rebellious young woman who suffers the dire consequences of her actions, is supposed to be very funny. Kevin Place will direct an ensemble, tba.
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Alix Sobler’s play Sheltered won the 2018 Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition. A graduate of Brown University, she received her MFA in playwriting from Columbia University in 2017. Playwright, director and actor Allen Lewis Rickman has adapted, directed and written Yiddish supertitle translations for New York’s Folksbiene and New Yiddish Rep. 

You’ve seen him in many guises: the Frankenstein monster, the Incredible Hulk, even as the heart-breaking protagonist of Diane Arbus’ photograph, Jewish Giant with his Parents in the Bronx. But even in his original guise, his dramatic, but very soulless persona, he just can’t be kept down. He is the Golem, whose name and brief and violent existence in the Prague ghetto continues to resonate in novels by authors including Elie Wiesel and I.B. Singer, poetry, plays, comics, operas, ballet and an early film classic whose imagery inspired several generations of those seeking to capture the monster’s persona. 
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Legends vary regarding the larger than life male creature, but one of the most prevalent attributes its creation to the 16th century by Rabbi Loew of Prague, a mystic who in at least one version of the folktale had the power to enervate inanimate clay by means of cabalistic rituals and prayers. Controlled by combinations of Hebrew letters imbued with magical powers, the super strong Golem could destroy any enemy and would be ready to do so in times of trouble. Incapable of thought, the Golem could only obey orders, that is, until it didn’t.  

Now wonderfully restored with color added, the early German expressionist cinematic feature, The Golem (1920), directed by and starring Paul Wegener in the title role (which can now be viewed on YouTube) depicts Loew as a medieval sorcerer who not only violates God’s law by creating life, but does so by calling on the devil for his help. When he loses control over the Golem, the monster violently turns against the Jewish community, wreaking havoc. Characteristic of German films of this era, the use of stylized two-dimensional sets – the endless stairs and crumbling architecture of the nearly animate ancient ghetto – is what sets this movie apart.

An actor who worked for the great Jewish theater director Max Reinhardt, Wegener had become obsessed with the Golem legend in 1913 and had based several of his films on the story.

While thousands of graphic art aficionados are familiar with the many guises of the comic book Golem, his giant form packs the greatest wallop when it can be experienced in three dimensions. California-based artist Joshua Abarbanel created his first small-scale Golem in 2013 for a Los Angeles gallery show centered around sacred texts. The multi-media artist remembered that “I spent a lot of time thinking about the subject and experimenting with Hebrew letters for both their aesthetic forms and various word associations. Eventually the Golem story came to my mind, especially the version in which the Golem is ‘activated’ and ‘deactivated’ through the power of Hebrew letters.” In this work, Abarbanel fuses the Golem’s physical and metaphysical natures; his sculpture is constructed from a dense wooden latticework of calligraphy referencing its magical birth and unique mission.
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The artist’s monumental, Golem-size version commissioned by Berlin’s Jewish Museum for its 2016 show devoted to the mythic creature will soon be on view again in the city of Worms, where it will be on display at Rashi House for SchUM on the Rhine – from Medieval Era Into Modernity, a city-wide celebration of the region’s Jewish heritage.