Archive

A Wonderful Audience in Laguna Woods

I have always found the expe­ri­ence of speak­ing about the sub­ject of the book, Sephardic Jews and relat­ed top­ics (i.e. Cryp­to Jews, Jews and the Age of Dis­cov­ery, Notable Sephardic Women, etc.), always reaf­firm­ing. This past Fri­day, 1/29, was par­tic­u­lar­ly ener­giz­ing as I shared the evening with over 100 per­sons, all but a few chronologically […]

Another play, this time in Albuquerque

Back in 1007, I arranged for Robert Ben­jam­in’s PARTED WATERS to have a staged read­ing by the Ari­zona Jew­ish The­ater Com­pa­ny at the annu­al con­fer­ence of The Soci­ety for Cryp­­to-Juda­ic Stud­ies in Phoenix. To my knowl­edge, that was the first pre­sen­ta­tion of the play in any form. Last March, the Ari­zona Jew­ish The­ater Com­pa­ny offered the […]

“Palestine, New Mexico”: Crypto Judaism and More

Cryp­to Judaism, one’s own or oth­ers’, has inspired works in lit­er­a­ture, film, music and lit­er­a­ture. I saw and was delight­ed by a work of the­ater this week that grew out of Play­wright Richard Mon­toy­a’s explo­ration of his fam­i­ly’s poten­tial Sephardic Jew­ish roots, “Pales­tine, New Mex­i­co,” at Los Ange­les’ Mark Taper Forum.  My delight came from the […]