Sneak Peek: Kaytek the Wizard Puppet Show

Check out the cool behind the scenes images of Brian Hull’s production of Janusz Korczak’s magical story!

Script and Direction by Brian Hull

Music by Sarah Hart

For more information, visit www.brianimations.com

Advertisement

Exhibition focuses on book burnings

By Mary Thomas

Reports last week of the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature to Mario Vargas Llosa invariably mentioned that 1,000 copies of his first novel, “La Ciudad y Los Perros” (“The Time of the Hero”), were burned by the Peruvian military, which found the book offensive.

A Florida pastor almost caused an international meltdown recently by threatening to burn copies of the Koran. In 1988 a fatwa declared by an Iranian cleric threatened the life of author Salman Rushdie for writing “The Satanic Verses.”

Book burnings and denouncements are not a thing of the distant past, and that is one cautionary of the exhibition “Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings,” which opens today at the  American Jewish Museum, Squirrel Hill.

The show was organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C,, and at 7 p.m. Tuesday Tim Kaiser, the museum’s director of educational resources and Wexner Center, will give a free talk, “Behind the Scenes: Background and Development of Fighting the Fires of Hate.”

Historic treasure of Jewish life and culture gifted to UC Berkeley

by Jose Rodriguez

One of the world’s preeminent collections of Jewish life, culture and history will have a new home at the University of California, Berkeley, starting this fall, campus officials and the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley announced today (Monday, June 21).

The 10,000-piece collection of precious music, art, rare books and historical archives – part of the Magnes Museum since its founding in 1961 – will be transferred to UC Berkeley over the summer. The collaboration will partner a world-class collection with a world-class university, complementing the school’s academic offerings, raising the profile of the Magnes collection, and making it more accessible to scholars.

The transfer is being made possible by gifts totaling $2.5 million over five years from philanthropists Warren Hellman, Tad Taube, and the Koret Foundation. These gifts will ensure that the acquisition is built on a solid and self-sustaining financial model.

Review of Curious George Exhibit at Jewish Museum

by John Zeaman

Curious George, the impish monkey who is always getting in trouble, made his picture-book debut in 1941. Today that book is in its 71st printing, and George is one of the classic characters of children’s literature.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the serious attention the culture has been paying of late to children’s books, George is also now the star – or co-star – of an exhibit, “Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H.A. Rey,” at the Jewish Museum.

This is a cross-generational show of a type that the Jewish Museum has proved very adept at. As with previous exhibits on author-illustrators Maurice Sendak and William Steig, it simultaneously caters to children and adults. For the children, the gallery has been dressed up with fake doorways and building facades that recall the Paris of the first George book. Halfway through there’s a kids reading area with pillows and heaps of picture books by the Reys.