Nati Baratz's outstanding new documentary chronicles a former disciple's search for his reincarnated Tibetan master. Visually stunning, emotionally gripping and shot over the course of four years, Unmistaken Child follows a sacred quest through the eyes of a remarkable attendant.

After twenty-six years of isolated meditation in a mountain cave, Lama Konchog became one of the greatest Tibetan masters of our time. When he passed away in 2001 at age eighty-four, the Dalai Lama instructed his shy, devoted disciple Tenzin Zopa to search for his master's reincarnation. This “unmistaken child” must be found within four years, before it becomes too difficult to remove him from his parents' care.

Tenzin entered the service of Lama Konchog at age seven, at his own request, and was with his master continuously for twenty-one years. The loss of his teacher leaves Tenzin bereft and utterly lonely. He is further unsettled by the unexpected responsibility of carrying out the highly secretive search for his spiritual father, who is now expected to be embodied in a little boy, and may be anywhere in the world.

His search crosses countries, passing through starkly beautiful mountains and small villages that appear to have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Assisted by astrology, signs from dreams and the whispers of villagers, Tenzin travels by helicopter, mule and foot. When he comes upon an apparent contender, the documentary accompanies Tenzin and his young charge through the mysterious procedures that may confirm the reincarnation. We have seen similar tests before in films like Martin Scorsese's Kundun; to witness the real thing is even more magical.

While Unmistaken Child brings to light a rarely seen aspect of the Buddhist faith, the true revelation is Tenzin's journey as a man. We come to know him as modest and shy, but with a delightfully impish sense of humour. He appears to be of another time and place, yet lives profoundly in the present. Alone on his quest, he is only able to share his thoughts and feelings with filmmaker Baratz. Tenzin's simple honesty and unselfconsciousness make the viewer a privileged partner in his passage to the next phase of life.


watch the trailer - www.youtube.com?v=SiBe1h2Qleg

Showtimes are:
Today and Thursday:
2:00 PM | 4:20 PM | 6:40 PM | 9:00 PM
Starting Friday:
12:30 PM | 5:15 PM | 7:30 PM

Join us this spring in our own Rubenstein Theatre for the return of this sell-out series. Beginning in June, we debut an array of award-winning films and documentaries from around the world. Speakers and performers add insight and entertainment to this annual event. Films are shown Wednesday evenings at 7:30pm and Thursday matinees at 2:30pm.

Israeli films featured in the festival -
* THE LITTLE TRAITOR
Based on the novel by Amos Oz, Panther in the Basement, this uplifting film is set in Palestine in 1947, just a few months before Israel becomes a state. The story revolves around the poignant friendship of a young boy and a British officer whose relationship is judged harshly by friends and neighbors. Starring Alfred Molina and Theodore Bikel.
* STRANGERS
An accidental meeting sparks an improbable romance between an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman in this critically acclaimed film set against the backdrop of the World Cup soccer finals in Berlin. As they get to know each other, the two lovers are tested by their differing cultures, pitting the reality of politics against hope. Contains mature subject matter.
* NOODLE
Miri, a twice widowed flight attendant, has her life turned upside down when her Chinese housekeeper disappears, leaving a six-year-old son behind. A touching comic-drama about two human beings, as different as Tel Aviv is from Beijing, on a remarkable journey together to find their way back to a meaningful life.
* MAX MINSKY & ME
A delightful comedy set in contemporary Berlin. Nelly, a bookish bat mitzvah candidate, wants to be on her school basketball team so she can meet her prince charming. She recruits a reluctant coach who offers her athletic training and ultimately, his respect.
Closing Night Bash!

On Dec. 12, "$9.99," a beautiful stop-motion animated film by Israeli filmmaker Tatia Rosenthal, will be released in American theaters, having already played to great acclaim at the Toronto and Rome film festivals.
The film is a bit of an existentialist, surrealist story — an animated "Synecdoche, New York," if you will — that was weaved together from several short stories by revered Israeli writer Etgar Keret (who himself co-won Cannes' Camera d'Or last year for the Israeli film "Meduzot").
(Scott Feinberg, "The Envelope" Blog, theenvelope.latimes.com)

Based on the Short Stories of Etgar Keret, $9.99 is a stop motion animated feature which offers slightly less than $10 worth about the meaning of life.


The trailer will be featured in the LA Times Envelope - latimesblogs.latimes.com

Hey
Director: Guy Ben Shetrit
Music Video, Israel, 3 min
A Sci-Fi Fantasy journey of a little girl with a special pet friend, a huge toad. This is a full 3D animation music video for the song 'Hey' by Eatliz band.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR ISRAEL
2008, 90 mins. Directed by Ari Folman.
Dreamlike and personal, this unique and affecting animated feature (by one of the creators of the TV series In Treatment) looks at war through the memories of soldiers who fought as young men. Folman brilliantly uses animation as a window into the subconscious. (Rated R for violence, nudity and sexual content)

11th annual festival of international film, music, dance and food, celebrating the cultural diversity of Queens Description:
11th annual festival of international film, music, dance and food, celebrating the cultural diversity of Queens
Wednesdays from July 15 through August 19, 2009
Pre-screening performances begin at 7pm
Films begin at sunset

Come to Socrates Sculpture Park and sample regional cuisine from neighborhood restaurants, picnic on the grass as the sun sets over the city, enjoy performances by local musicians and dancers and, as the sky darkens, see exceptional international films on a large-format screen - all set against the spectacular backdrop of the Manhattan skyline.

The Naumburg Orchestra, under the baton of Stephen D'Agostino, will feature Israeli clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein.
Program:
Leó Weiner (1885-1960), Divertimento No.1, op 20 for strings (1934)
Wolfgang A. Mozart (1756-1791) Clarinet concerto in A
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major D. 485 (1816)
Alexander Fiterstein, clarinet soloist, is a recent winner of of the 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Alexander Fiterstein, "Fiterstein played with a beautiful liquid clarity." The New York Times
Since 1905, the Naumburg Orchestral Concerts has continuously presented free, outdoor classical music concerts to New Yorkers of all walks of life. Named after founder and philanthropist Elkan Naumburg, who donated the Naumburg Bandshell to New York City in 1923, and inspired by his own love of music, the series seeks to stimulate and encourage new and expanded audiences for classical music in the informal and beautiful setting of Central Park.
Today, the concerts feature promising new talent and promote the professional development of young composers and conductors. It is the oldest such concert series in the United States.

Fresh off their biggest appearance to date at Montreal Jazzfest, Coolooloosh comes to Joe's Pub one of the most prolific venues in the US. Stars such as 5 time Grammy Winner Amy Winehouse have gotten their start at this famed venue. At the invitation of Grammy® nominated engineer/producer David Ivory (The Roots, Patti Labelle, Erykah Badu) Coolooloosh arrived in the US in January of 2008 to record a highly acclaimed album with Ivory at the helm. The release of the album earlier this year, Elements of Sound is their second album and is causing quite a stir.
Suitably named Coolooloosh, a Jerusalemite word for celebration and joy, is precisely what the band exudes with each and every exciting performance. Wooing fans around the world with their intelligent blend of genres, Coolooloosh masterfully melding Hip Hop, Rap, Jazz, and Funk, is one of Israel's most popular groups, and are one of the very few well known emerging acts that can pull it off. Consistently, pushing the envelope, the band is destined to break internationally.

The South Asian superstar, Bollywood icon, and judge of Indian Idol KAILASH KHER moves “among styles without hesitation, adding elements of folk, reggae and rock to Indian pop…(he) has a voice as appealing as it is
thrilling.” (Wall Street Journal) Comprised of five NYC-based Israelis, ELECTRO MOROCCO combines buzzing guitars with synths and beats to concoct a dance floor friendly mix of retro rock,
Middle Eastern folk, and warped electro.

The Ariel String Quartet, Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence will perform in Caramoor's Spanish Courtyard
Program:
Mozart ~ Chendler ~ Mendelssohn
The Ariel Quartet is a string quartet,founded in 1998,in Jerusalem, by musicians associated with the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Its current members are:
Sasha Kazovsky - violin
Gershon Gerchikov - violin
Sergey Tarashchansky - viola
Amit Even-Tov - violoncello
They debuted at the Jerusalem Music Centre in February 2000, and have performed in major venues in Israel and in the Daniel Days Festival in Holland (1999). Later that year they participated in a workshop coached by Michael Tree and in summer 2000, 2001 and summer 2003 in the Amadeus Summer Course in London, with full scholarships.
In 2002 they performed a recital at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw and participated in the Premio Paolo Borciani String Quartet Competition in Italy. In 2003 the Quartet won 1st prize in the international competition "Franz Schubert And The Music Of Modernity" in Graz, Austria. Further that year they have participated in the first International Music Festival of Limmasol, Cyprus (where they also played in 2004), played in the Koenigsaal in Frankfurt, Germany, and have participated in Itzhak Perlman's chamber summer course under a special invitation. The Quartet are enrolled in New England Conservatory's Professional String Quartet Training.
Caramoor is the legacy of Walter and Lucie Rosen who built the luxurious Mediterranean-style villa and filled it with their treasures. Their musical evenings were the seeds of the International Music Festival of today.
With its outstanding performances, engaging arts-in-education programming, the extraordinary Rosen House, and beautiful grounds, Caramoor is a cornerstone of the cultural life of Westchester County and beyond. Since 1945 visitors have delighted in the exceptional music—from classical to opera to jazz.

Yoed Nir has captivated audiences worldwide with his virtuosity, and relentless quest to redefine his instrument's boundaries. Mr. Nir combines the best of two worlds. He is a classically trained cellist with the technical and interpretive resources to draw whatever kind of music he wishes from his instrument , recorded in more than 200 albums, performing around the world with top singers and musicians.
Bargemusic
July 31
Program:
The Six Bach Suites for Solo Cello and Beyond, Part 1 (Part 2 will take place August 7)
Bach Suite No. 1 for Unaccompanied Cello in G Major, BWV 1007
Suite No. 3 for Unaccompanied Cello in C Major, BWV 1009
Suite No. 5 for Unaccompanied Cello in c minor, BWV 1011
World of Cello, Improvisation for Electric Solo Cello (A fusion of Middle Eastern and Jewish flavors and influences combining classical and world music)
Aug 7
Program:
Bach Suites for Solo Cello and Beyond, Pt. 2
Bach Suite No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello in d minor, BWV 1008
Suite No. 4 for Unaccompanied Cello in E-Flat Major, BWV 1010
Suite No. 6 for Unaccompanied Cello in D Major, BWV 1012
World of Cello, Improvisation for Electric Solo Cello (A fusion of Middle Eastern and Jewish flavors and influences combining classical and world music)
Aug 16
Program:
Mozart Trio in C Major for Piano, Violin and Cello, K. 548
Ravel Sonata for Violin and Cello
Schubert Trio No. 1 in B-Flat Major, D. 898

Origins:
The artists in Origins approach the use of primal materials such as clay, fiber, wood, aluminum, stone, and soil, as mediums that have arrived in the present day with a tremendous amount of tradition attached to them. Handcrafted qualities and personal sensibilities are emphasized as well as work that addresses the value and beauty of our diverse ecology and its fragility. There is a reverential simplicity to the use of some materials as with artists such as Andre, Heizer, Long, Laib, and Schneider, where there is little or no embellishment of stone, wood etc. There is also a focus on the human figure as a locus of expressive possibilities: Bhabha, Bourgeois, Landau, Mendieta, Silver, Smith and others. Whether metaphorically presented or disfigured, shrouded, or animated, the body is offered as a spiritual totem, a monument to corporeal identity.

image above:Sigalit Landau
Mother with Peacock Baby (from the endless solution), 2005
Paper with iron armature
Courtesy of Richard J. Massey collection

Mary Koszmary (Nightmares), a film by artist Yael Bartana, explores a complicated set of social and political relationships among Jews, Poles, and other Europeans in the age of globalization. Using the structure and sensibility of a World War II propaganda film, Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) addresses contemporary anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Poland, the longing for the Jewish past among liberal Polish intellectuals, the desire among a new generation of Poles to be fully accepted as Europeans, and the Zionist dream of return to Israel.


image above:Yael Bartana,
Mary Koszmary, 2007
16mm film transferred to video
10 min., 50 sec.
Courtesy of the artist, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Foksal Foundation Gallery, Warsaw

For “Younger Than Jesus,” the first edition of “The Generational,” the New Museum’s new signature triennial, fifty artists from twenty-five countries will be presented. The only exhibition of its kind in the United States, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” will offer a rich, intricate, multidisciplinary exploration of the work being produced by a new generation of artists born after 1976. Known to demographers, marketers, sociologists, and pundits variously as the Millennials, Generation Y, iGeneration, and Generation Me, this age group has yet to be described in any way beyond their habits of consumption. “Younger Than Jesus” will begin to examine the visual culture this generation has created to date.

image above: Keren Cytter, Der Spiegel, Digital video, 5min, 2007

Object Factory: The Art of Industrial Ceramics is the first major U.S. museum exhibition to survey contemporary innovation in industrial ceramic production, exploring how artists and designers are reviving interest in ceramics through collaborations with the industry.
15 artists from Israel are presented:Ami Drach, Dov Ganchrow
Elisha Tal, Eyal Cremer, Danny Lavie, Johnathan Hopp, Sarah Auslander, Maya Vinitsky, Maya Shapira, Sahar Batsry, Yuval Tal, Alon Meron, Dror Benshetrit, Elisha Tal.

image above:
Elisha Tal
Light Tree, 2003
Porcelain
Photo: Eyal Cremer

(Le) Poisson Rouge Art Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its third exhibition by renowned installation artist Itamar Jobani. The show will consist of works conceived by Jobani and installed specifically with the architecture of (Le) Poisson Rouge in mind.
In the present exhibition “Tectonic Collisions,” Itamar Jobani creates a new body of work, which is composed of sculptures, woodcuts and video installations. Similar to his previous pieces, these present works deal with the direct and inescapable connection between man and earth. Jobani’s sculptures are constructed from tens and often hundreds of layers of wood in the technique of topographical models. Accordingly, these sculptures function not merely as human figures, but also serve as a metaphor for land-regions or territorial entities.
Jobani was born in Israel in 1980, and currently lives and works in New York.

image above: Itamar Jobani

Gestalten presents the outstanding work of visionary typographer, graphic designer and artist Oded Ezer for the first time. He explores the anatomy of letters through his almost scientific approach to type design and creates Hebrew and Latin characters and alphabets that integrate elements atypical for font design. This book documents his type art and typographic experiments as well as his refined graphic designs, logos and unique font designs. This publication showcases his remarkable creative output and offers a rare insight into Ezer’s design process.

Ten leading designers have been commissioned to develop new uses for sustainably grown and harvested materials in order to tell a unique story about the life-cycle of materials and the power of conservation and design. The featured designers and places include Yves Behar/Costa Rica; Stephen Burks/Australia; Hella Jongerius/Mexico; Maya Lin/Maine; Christien Meindertsma/Idaho; Isaac Mizrahi/Alaska; Abbott Miller/Bolivia; Ted Muehling/Micronesia; Kate Spade/Bolivia; and Ezri Tarazi/China. On view will be the prototypes, drawings, and finished product created by the designers. The exhibition is co-curated by renowned graphic designer Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt. This is the debut venue in a national tour of the exhibition, organized by The Nature Conservancy.

Prof. Ezri Tarazi (born in 1962) is an Israeli industrial designer and educator for design, born in Jerusalem. He has owned Studio Tarazi design office since 1996 and acted as chair of the Masters Program in Industrial Design (M.Des) at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem since 2004.

Image above: Ezri Tarazi

Nivi Alroy’s work examines the ever-changing relationship between inner and outer spaces. She explores the tension between the intimacy of the private domain – whether the human body or the domestic environment – and the intrusive forces that threatening to alter it.
The central installation piece also titled “Fruiting Bodies,” is an architectural organisms depicted as a shattered landscape. Here, pure, white porcelain strewn with cracked and crumbing houses spills out of a drawer as another milky wave embedded with fragmented houses strives to complete this flow.
Nivi Alroy was born in 1978 in Israel. She received her BFA from Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem. She spent two years in Paris, where she attended the Atelier 17 printmaking workshop. In 2005 she received the AICF fellowship and moved to New York City. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts with an MFA in 2007. Most recently, Alroy was selected as a 2008-2009 A.I.R. Fellow and was chosen by Smack Mellon for their “hot list.” This is her first solo exhibition in New York City.

image above: Nivi Alroy

featured artists:Elinor Milchan, Christina Kruse, Tatyana Murray, Eve Bailey
Elinor Milchan walks through luminous fields with her photographic works. With a technique that she developed herself, she brings her light to touch the observer whether the images are in larger-than-life format or closer to the human scale. The eye looses its familiar habits, taken away by opposing currents, colorful streams and sensual waves. Whether they are named “LightLands” or “UrbanLands” these abstract scapes urge the viewer to surrender to their grandeur.

image above:Elinor Milchan, Near the Port #1, 2008

The International Artists Residency is a three week residency program for international visual artists in upstate New York.
Israeli artist Liat Livni lives and works in Tel-Aviv, Israel. She has completed her Masters of Fine Arts degree at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, in 2007.
Livni brings her works to life by illustrating, pasting and cutting using a utility knife. Her work is rich with aesthetics that are clean of any color, while the meticulous cutting gives her pieces a formative wholeness.
The images she produces deal with the question of place and culture. They blur the boundaries between what is artificial and what is natural, and between what is manmade and what is created by nature.

image above:Liat Livni
Fortress, 2009
Veneer and ink on paper

X Initiative will host Keren Cytter’s first major survey in the United States. Born in Tel Aviv and currently living in Berlin, Cytter creates movies that appropriate and transform different cinematic genres, such as film noir, melodrama, documentary, and soap opera. Often set in cheap domestic interiors, Cytter’s films depict dysfunctional families and alienated friends on the verge of nervous breakdowns. The exhibition will include the US premiere of her new movie Four Seasons, 2009, presented alongside a selection of her videos and a group of drawings never exhibited In America. Cytter conceived the project as an immersive experience in which synchronized videos will alternate on different screens and lights will suddenly illuminate her drawings, creating a theater of images in the exhibition space.

Keren Cytter has had solo exhibitions at CCA Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu (2009), Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008), and MUMOK, Vienna (2007). Her work was included in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, and will be featured in the upcoming 53rd Venice Biennale.

Keren Cytter’s exhibition is supported in part by Artis – Contemporary Israeli Art Fund, New York and Tel Aviv.

image above: Keren Cytter’s , Vinyl, 2009

MFA Now Executive Director, Adam Rogers, Project Advisor, Judy Chicago, and Praxis International Art cordially invite you to Identity, Self II, an exhibition celebrating the awardees of the 2008 MFA Now International Painting Competition. This exhibition includes the work of emerging artists from Austria, Ireland, Israel, Germany, Korea, and Switzerland. The artists will be in attendance at the opening reception.We congratulate the awardees of this year's competition and look forward to celebrating their success. Please join us!
Israeli artist featured: Noa Charuvi and Hagit Barkai.

image above:Hagit Barkai, Vomiter 2

Metamorphosis is a captivating journey into the hearts and minds of a talented group of artists with unique backgrounds and experiences. The works explore the possibilities beyond our ordinary perception, keying into personal insights, metaphysical concepts and timeless mysteries beyond each corner is a new way of perceiving the world that will electrify fans of contemporary art.
Guy Nelvand lives in Israel and has painted Christian churches as well as a large battle picture of the Jews defending Jerusalem from the Romans, at the Masada Museum.
Gayl Sharabi lives and works in Israel and holds a Master’s of Science in Microbiology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

image above:Guy Nelvand, On the Red Sea Shore, oil on canvas

Among the most influential designers of our time, Ron Arad (Israeli, b. 1951) stands out for his daredevil curiosity about technology and materials and for the versatile nature of his work. Over the past twenty-five years, he has produced an outstanding array of innovative objects, spanning from the limited to the almost unlimited series, from carbon fiber armchairs to polyurethane bottle racks. This exhibition will be the first major retrospective of Arad's design work in the United States. A designer and an architect, trained at the Jerusalem Academy of Art and at London’s Architectural Association, he has also designed memorable spaces, some plastic and tactile, others ethereal and digital.

Arad relies on the computer and its rapid manufacturing capabilities as much as he relies on the soldering apparatus in his metal workshop. His beautiful furniture can even receive and display SMS and Bluetooth messages from mobile phones and Palm Pilots. Idiosyncratic and surprising, and also very beautiful, Arad's designs communicate the joy of invention, pleasure and humor, and pride in the display of their technical and constructive skills. The exhibition will open in Paris in the fall of 2008.

The exhibition is organized by Paola Antonelli, Curator, and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, Curatorial Assistant, Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and is co-organized with the Centre Pompidou and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

image above: Ron Arad. Lolita. 2004. Manufactured by Swarovski. Photo courtesy Ron Arad Associates

Liliana Livneh is well known by her Women-Caryatides, the metaphor of pillar and the woman carrying many tasks on her head like the capitels of the caryatides in Ancient Greece. In this exhibition will be shown also poems from different poets like Jorge Luis Borges, John Donne, Nathan Zach, Gonzalo Rojas , these works are the inner emotion of a reader transformed in forms. The material , the touchable and sensorial aspect is the nexus to the idea, then the use of bare linen cloth and delicate paper to describe the strength of fragility.

Hours:Monday to Friday 11am -5pm

image above:Liliana Livneh,Requiem of a Butterfly (Poem of Gonzalo Rojas) mixed media on paper

an illustrated lecture by Dr. Lucille A. Roussin, Professor and Attorney, on Archaeological Excavations in Historic Sepphoris.
The ancient city of Sepphoris stands on a hill virtually in the center of the rolling hills of the Lower Galilee. The area had been continuously occupied since the Iron Age, but the foundation of the city can be attributed to Herod Antipas, who rebuilt it from its ruins after its destruction by Varus, the Syrian governor. In the first century C.E. the city was known as "the ornament of all Galilee," and in the second century C.E. the city became the seat of the Sanhedrin, the central legal and spiritual council of the Jewish people.
The city's continuing importance during the third and fourth century, A.D. is evident from the grand public building that has been excavated since 1987 by the University of South Florida Excavations at Sepphoris. The building contains one of the largest series of polychrome mosaic pavements in a single building yet uncovered in Israel. These mosaics are particularly interesting because they exhibit a high level of artistry and a wide range of stylistic influences from the major centers of mosaic production around the Mediterranean.

Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life surveys the explosion of new Jewish rituals, art, and objects that has occurred since the mid-1990s. This period is defined by the urge to discover beauty and meaning in first premises--the roots and ruptures--when ritual could be radical. This attitude of innovation is shared by a wide range of artists inclusive of generation, nationality, and religion.

Participating artists include Jonathan Adler, Oreet Ashery, Helène Aylon, Hadassa Goldvicht, Deborah Grant, Tobi Kahn, Sigalit Landau, LoVid, Virgil Marti, Galya Rosenfeld, Ross Barney Architects, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Tobaron Waxman, and Allan Wexler, among others. These contemporary artists and designers focus on Judaism as a lived experience by transforming the physical acts of ritual into new forms.

Outstanding works of industrial design, metalwork, ceramics, video, drawing, comics, sculpture, installation, and textiles from Europe, Israel, and North America reveal the diversity within Judaism. The exhibition will present works in thematic groups and environments that suggest the spaces and situations in which ritual is performed.

Image above:Oreet Ashery (b. Jerusalem 1966)
Dancing with Men, 2003/2008
Mini DV, color with sound, 5 min. 22 sec.
Courtesy of the artist, London

In the past decade, contemporary artists have taken video in new directions since its birth as an artistic medium in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when most experiments focused on formal aspects of the medium. Today, artists are exploring a wider spectrum of cultural issues and incorporating genres such as documentary, narrative, and autobiography. Rite Now presents videos produced between 2001 and 2008 that explore secular and sacred rituals in a new framework, documenting inventive spiritual practices, reimagining old stories, and proposing new rituals altogether.
Israeli artists: Lior Bar, Tamar Ettun, Hila Lulu Lin, Dafna Shalom.

image above: Hila Lulu Lin, (Israeli, b. 1964) and Levi Zini, (Israeli, b. 1953)
Understood, 2002
Digital video
19 min.
Courtesy of the artist

Slash: Paper under the Knife takes the pulse of the international art world's renewed interest in paper as a creative medium and source of artistic inspiration, examining the remarkably diverse use of paper in a range of art forms. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded.
Selected artists will be commissioned to create site-specific or site-referential works, and others will be invited to create work onsite in MAD's three artist studios that will subsequently be installed in the exhibition.

Shaul Tzemach received both his B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. The artist began exhibiting his work in 2000, and has continued to show at museums and galleries in Israel. This is his first New York showing.

image above:Shaul Tzemach,
Concretion/Conglomerate, 2005-2007
Cut paper
Collection of the artist
Photo: Studio Warhaftig Venezian Ltd.

An exciting new work by Israeli choreographers Avshalom Pollak and Inbal Pinto will once again dazzle and amaze. Also on the program and back by popular demand is Pilobolus’ first collaboration with Pollak and Pinto, Rushes, a display of striking choreography complete with dancing chairs which promises to be just as thrilling as its first incarnation at the ADF in 2007.
“The purest Pilobolus experiences have involved metamorphosis - one image merges into another, organically, poetically, inexplicably.”
- The New York Times

Ticket Price
$59, $35, $19
Joyce Members $44; $26
Please note: prices are subject to change based on demand

Artistic Director Andrea Miller, former dancer with Ohad Naharin’s Ensemble Batsheva, leads with her New York City-based company of fearlessly physical dancers, recently named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2009. Gallim Dance, known for movement that is witty, theatrical, and explosive, performed on Inside/Out, the Pillow’s free outdoor performance space, in 2008. They return to perform Miller’s latest work, Blush, set to a score as quirky as her choreography, with music by Manyfingers, Wolf Parade, Radiohead, and Chopin. The New York Times says the work “features a highly physical movement style that buckles torsos and lashes limbs in exhilaratingly illogical fashion.”

Lincoln Center Festival '9 presents the return of contemporary dance company, Emanuel Gat Dance, which will perform the North American premiere of "Silent Ballet," and the New York premiere of a new duet, "Winter Variations" danced by Emanuel Gat and company member Roy Assaf. Both works are Lincoln Center co-commissions.
Photo by Agnès Mellon

Israeli Folk Dancing: Instructional and Open Sessions -
Instructional Session: Learn today's folk dances through instruction and review. Geared toward those with little to some knowledge of Israeli folk dance. Choose either First Steps or Second Steps.
First Steps: Become acquainted with the basic steps and styles of Israeli folk dance. Wednesdays, Ongoing, 7pm-7:30pm.
Second Steps: Instruction for those with some knowledge of Israeli folk dance. Wednesdays, Ongoing, 7:30pm-8:15pm
Open Session: Dancing for everyone! Open dancing with instruction of more advanced repertoire. Wednesdays, Ongoing, 8:15pm-12:45am
This program is presented by the Bronfman Center for Jewish Life.

“Special, strange, and peculiarly potent,Extraordinary.” —Variety

One night in Beirut in September 1982, while Israeli soldiers secured the area, Christian militia members entered the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and began to massacre hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians. Ari Folman was one of those Israeli soldiers, but for more than twenty years he remembered nothing of that night or of the weeks leading up to it. Then came a friend’s disturbing dream, and with it Folman’s need to excavate the truth of the war in Lebanon and answer the crucial question: what was he doing during the hours of slaughter?

Challenging the collective amnesia of friends and fellow soldiers, Folman painfully, candidly pieces together the war and his place in it. Gradually, the blankness of his mind is filled in by scenes of combat and patrol, misery and carnage, as well as dreams and hallucinations. Soldiers are haunted by inexplicable nightmares and flashbacks—snapping, growling dogs with teeth bared and eyes glowing orange; a recurring image of three young men rising naked out of the sea to drift into the Beirut battlefield. Tanks crush cars and buildings with lethal indifference; snipers pick off men on donkeys, men in cars, men drinking coffee; a soldier waltzes through a storm of bullets; rock songs fill the air, and then yellow flares. The recollections accumulate until Ari Folman arrives at Sabra and Shatila and his investigation reaches its terrible end.

The result is a gripping reconstruction, a probing inquiry into the unreliable quality of memory, and, above all, a powerful denunciation of the senselessness of all wars. Profoundly original in form and approach, Waltz with Bashir will take its place as one of the great works of wartime testimony.



About the Author

ARI FOLMAN, a Tel Aviv–based filmmaker, wrote, produced, and directed the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir. His two previous feature films, Saint Clara and Made in Israel, both received numerous Israeli academy awards, among them best film and best director for Saint Clara, which also won the People’s Choice Award at the 1996 Berlin Film Festival. In addition, he produces and writes for television, including for the Israeli series In Treatment, which was remade in the United States for HBO.
DAVID POLONSKY was the art director and chief illustrator for the animated film Waltz with Bashir. His illustrations have appeared in every major Israeli daily and magazine. He has created animated short films for Israeli television, received multiple awards for his children’s book illustrations, and teaches at Bezalel, Israel’s prestigious art academy.

David Polonsky will be arriving for a tour in the US for promoting the book. stay tuned for more information!

Koren Shadmi was born in Israel, where from his early teens he worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for various magazines. At 17 He had his first graphic novel published, followed by another book collecting his work from children's magazines. He proceeded to serve as a graphic designer and illustrator in the Israeli Defense Force.
Upon completion of his service he relocated to New York to study in the School of Visual Arts, where he acquired his bachelor degree.His graphic work has appeared in numerous international anthologies, and his books 'Cours Interieures' and 'Dissymetries' have recently been published in France. He has also participated in various national and international art shows, most recently in the 2007 israel biannual.
Koren's illustration work had appeared in publications such as: Spin Magazine, BusinessWeek, the Village Voice, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, the Progressive and many others.


www.amazon.com=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229621159&sr=1-1

Published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2007, Exit Wounds—a tale at once mystery and romance—introduced North American readers to the colorful and tightly woven narrative by Rutu Modan and was included in Time and Entertainment Weekly’s “best of” lists. Jamilti and Other Stories collects the cartoonist’s short works, which lead the reader through unexpected turns of plot and unusual character portraits. Some are darkly fantastical and unsettling, such as the unraveling of a serial-killer murder mystery, or her accounts of an infatuated plastic surgeon and his sanitarium, and a mother back from the dead with dubious healing powers. Others are more attuned to surprising discoveries that shape personal identity, as in the story of a tragic past that lies within a family’s theme hotel, or that of a struggling musician who hopes an upcoming gig will be his big break. In “Jamilti,” Modan addresses political violence with a suicide bombing that shakes up a day in the lives of a young couple.
Review

Praise for Rutu Modan:

“The real glory of Exit Wounds is Modan’s artwork. Her characters’ body language and facial expressions, rendered in the gestural ‘clear line’ style of Hergé’s Tintin books, are so precisely observed, they practically tell the story by themselves.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Modan’s spare, affecting lines and charged dialogue add up to a tragicomic take on family and identity, Grade A–” —The Washington Post

And the Rat Laughed is a unique book. Unlike other Holocaust-related books that focus on the historical horrific events, this novel deals with the act of remembering them. It resembles a relay race in which the characters transfer memory from one another, while travelling on the axis of time. The book begins in the last day of 1999, when a survivor Grandmother in Tel Aviv shares her tragic life story as a hidden child in a pit, with only a rat for company with her granddaughter. The day after – 2000 already – the granddaughter tells the legend of "Girl and Rat" to her teacher and in 2009 those who heard it through her classmates establish an internet website with poems. From now on this memory is spread all over the world and becomes a myth. In 2099 a future anthropologist discovers it and tries to uncover its mysterious roots. In her research, she reveals the first man who created this myth in the past. Father Stanislaw, a Catholic priest, saved that little Jewish girl (who later became the Grandmother in Tel Aviv) and returned her after the war to her Jewish people. In his personal journal he documented everything, to make sure the world will never forget. The chain of remembearers, therefore, moves from the present to the future and back to the past. The novel is written in 5 genres: story, legend, poems, science fiction and diary, creating a cycle of 150 years. And the Rat Laughed got acclaim for its use of unconventional and original literary devices and became a ground breaker for exploring the act of memory itself. How do we tell our painful story? Does it change while we recall it? How will our next recipient recall it in his own individual way? Is Art the only corridor to transfer emotional memory?

In 1960s Transylvania where the novel begins, five-year-old Ildiko becomes victim to psychological abuse at the hands of her babysitter, Yutzi, whom she worships and follows everywhere. Though Ildiko's family immigrates to Israel soon after, Ildiko's life continues to be shaped by the secret deep within her; not until many years later is Ildiko able to reveal her story. In flashback fashion, she recounts her horror to her worried husband, who at the novel's start is nearly hysterical with worry about a recent mysterious and possibly violent incident. Only as Ildiko's story unfolds--and with it the parallel stories of her family and her husband--do readers come to understand what has taken place and how Ildiko's story has come full circle. This psychological thriller focuses on family relationships and the aftermath of childhood trauma, and although not a novel specifically of the Holocaust, the narrative is driven by characters whose lives were shaped by it, so much so that those events become a silent character in the book.

Author Suzane Adam was born in Satu Mare, Transylvania, and came to Israel at age 10. She is the author of Mayamiya and Janis’s Mother, which was awarded Israel’s Kugel Literary Prize. She has taught art, creative thinking, image consulting, and computerized commercial presentation. She has also worked as an illustrator and developed games for one of Israel’s largest toy firms.

Acclaimed Israeli writer Gail Hareven, author of The Confessions of Noa Weber, kicks off her US tour with a launch party at Melville House. Gail will read from her new novel before discussing her work with Adriana Jacobs.

Gail Hareven is one of Israel’s leading writers; the author of six novels, three short story collections, plays, a nonfiction book, and two children’s books; and the winner of the prestigious Sapir Prize for "The Confessions of Noa Weber". She teaches writing and feminist theory in Jerusalem. This is her first book to be translated into English, by Dalya Bilu.

Maya Bejerano, a leading Israeli poet, is considered by many poetry readers as a national treasure. She was born in Israel in 1949, and holds a B.A. in Literature and Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University, and an M.A. in Library Sciences from Hebrew University. She has published ten volumes of poetry, and her collected poems, Frequencies, appeared in 2005. She has also published a children’s book, a book of essays, and two short stories collections. Her poems have been set to music, and her work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. She has participated in numerous international poetry festivals, and is the recipient of several poetry awards, including the Prime Minister Award, the Bernstein Award, and the Bialik Award.

The Hymns of Job and Other Poems (BOA, 2008) is the first volume of Bejerano’s work to appear in English translation, thus bringing to the American reader a versatile and original poet.

An Israeli Classic, finally in English!

A work which has thrilled generations of Israelis since 1992 is finally published in English. Valley of Strength by Shulamit Lapid is an enthralling portrait of strength and determined idealism in a harsh land.

Shulamit Lapid was born in Tel Aviv in 1934. She majored in Middle Eastern studies and English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A former chairperson of the Hebrew Writers’ Association, Lapid is the author of many novels, collections of short stories, thrillers, plays, poetry and books for children and youth. She has received the Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature (1987), the International Theater Institute Award (1988), the German Krimipreis (1996) and the Newman Prize.


Translated from the Hebrew by Philip Simpson.

A caravan of Jews wanders through Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century on a heartbreaking quest. Spiritual seekers and the elderly, widows and orphans, the sick and the dying, con artists and adventurers, victims of pogroms who have no place else to go–they are all on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but the journey is filled with unexpected detours and unanticipated disaster.

This magnificent new novel from Aharon Appelfeld (“One of the greatest writers of the age” —The Guardian) resonates with a universality of experience: the will to survive, the struggle to hold on to hope.

An ingenious, witty, behind-the-scenes novel about eight hours in the life of an author.
A literary celebrity is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading from his new book.While the obligatory inane questions ("Why do you write? What is it like to be famous? Do you write with a pen or on a computer?) are being asked and answered, his attention wanders and he begins to invent lives for the strangers he sees around him. Among them are Yakir Bar-Orian Zhitomirski, a self-styled literary guru; Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, a poet (whose work provides the novel’s title); and Rochele Reznik, a professional reader, with whom the Author has a brief but steamy sexual skirmish; to say nothing of Ricky the waitress, the real object of his desire. One life story builds on another—and the author finds himself unexpectedly involved with his creations.

translated by Nicholas de Lange.

From the award-winning author and acclaimed biblical scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg comes a magnificent analysis of the intersections between religion and psychoanalysis.Zornberg puts God and the men and women of the Bible on the couch, offering fascinating insights into the interaction between the conscious and unconscious mind.

About the author:
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is the author of The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Cambridge University. Born in London, she now lives in Jerusalem.

Trapped in the horrors of World War II, a woman and a child embark on a journey of survival in this page-turning true story that recalls the power and the poignancy of Schindler’s List.
GERTRUDA’S OATH is a story of extraordinary courage and moral strength in the face of horrific events. Like Schindler’s List, it transcends history and religion to reveal the compassion and hope that miraculously thrives in a world immersed in war without end.