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Art, Culture & Media

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the oldest and largest Jewish festival in the world, has embarked on an ambitious plan to bring the Festival into the technological 21st century. The New Media Initiative will increase access to the 1,200+ films that have already been screened at the Festival, with plans to add new titles annually including a section for new online shorts. Ultimately, the site will feature stills and trailers, program notes, clips of panel discussions with filmmakers, articles on film and Jewish media, and much more. The Festival will also use the site to engage both a physical and online community. As part of this effort, the Festival is working with Reframe, a project of the Tribeca Film Festival, along with the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University.

In 1979, nearly 100 Eastern European Jews — men and women who survived the Nazi death camps — pooled their funds to buy a 44-acre bucolic retreat in the Catskills which they dubbed Four Seasons Lodge. There they spent summers swimming, cooking, dancing, and playing cards, surrounded by others who implicitly understood their pasts and their pain. Many had lost their families during the war but created a new family in the Catskills.

Two years ago, New York Times reporter Andrew Jacobs wrote about Four Seasons Lodge as part of a series on Catskills summer life. He decided to make a film about their story. Jacobs enlisted Albert Maysles to be the Director of Photography and the likes of Tony Kushner to serve on his advisory board. The result is a cinema-verité look at a season at the Lodge, capturing this lively group in all their glory — laughing, celebrating, bickering, mourning, and remembering. Hovering over the narrative is the possibility that that this may be the last summer at the Lodge.

In June 2008, the film premiered at the Silverdocs Film in Washington, DC where it received tremendous reviews. In recent months it has screened to sold-out crowds in the Bay Area and the Hamptons and it is about to embark on the international festival circuit.

Israel: Portrait of a Work in Progress, a project of photographer and social anthropologist Frederic Brenner, seeks to explore Israel as both place and metaphor. Brenner is best known for his work Diaspora, the result of 25 years of searching in 40 countries to create a visual record of the Jewish people at the end of the twentieth century. Diaspora was a major exhibit at the Brooklyn Art Museum and has toured nine other cities in America, Europe, and Mexico, and was published as a two-volume set of photographs and texts.

Now Brenner is turning his attention to Israel. Brenner is inviting 10-15 acclaimed photographer-artists from 10 different nationalities to immerse themselves for up to six months in Israel. Most of the artists are not Jewish and few have ever visited Israel. More than "just another" photographic project, this collaborative effort seeks to provide a penetrating vision of Israel as a living organism and to provoke a conversation about the complexity of its history, its daily life, and its symbolic power.

Julius Rosenwald, the CEO of Sears during the early part of the 20th century was one of the great American business leaders of that time. He was also an important philanthropist. The child of German Jewish immigrants, Rosenwald met Booker T. Washington early in his career and decided to direct much of his philanthropy toward the African American community. Rosenwald was instrumental in bringing attention and millions of dollars to a variety of projects – from building 5,300 primary schools for blacks in the rural South to awarding fellowships to gifted African Americans including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Jacob Lawrence among many others. Now, 70 years later, the Spertus Museum in Chicago is organizing an exhibition that features more than 60 works of art by Rosenwald Fellows as a way to highlight Rosenwald's contributions and to explore this important period in American art. The exhibition, A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, will run from February 6 – August 16, 2009 at the Spertus Museum in Chicago and then travel to the Allentown Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, and the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey.

Photo: Rose Piper, Slow Down Freight Train (detail), 1946-47, oil on canvas, Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ackland Fund, 91.8. Image © Rose Piper, 1946.

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