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Friday January 4, 2008

Shorts: Art

JVibe Awards voting under way online

Voting for the third annual JVibe Music Awards has begun on JVibe.com, companion Web site to the Jewish teen magazine JVibe. Voting ends Jan. 21.

JVibe editors have nominated the most popular artists on the Jewish music scene. Fans may weigh in for Best Jewish Album, New Artist Most Likely to Stick Around, Best Israeli Artist/Group and other categories.

Winners will be announced on JVibe.com in March and profiled in the March/April issue of the magazine. All voters will automatically be entered to win a gift certificate to iTunes. For more information about JVibe, visit www.JVibe.com.

Security barrier art show opens

Bansky, the one-name British celebrity graffiti artist, has mounted a show of artwork painted on Israel’s security barrier.

Several international artists have joined him in stenciling on the gray concrete wall, part of Israel’s security fence that surrounds Bethlehem.

Rohr book award finalists named

Five authors of nonfiction books have been selected as finalists for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

The finalists, announced last week, are Ilana M. Blumberg for “Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books”; Eric L. Goldstein for “The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity”; Lucette Lagnado for “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World”; Michael Makovsky for “Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft”; and Haim Watzman for “A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel’s Rift Valley.”

The Rohr Prize, administered by the Jewish Book Council, includes a $100,000 prize. It honors an emerging author in the field of Jewish literature who has written a book of exceptional literary merit that stimulates an interest in Jewish themes.

The inaugural prize, which considers fiction and nonfiction in alternating years, was awarded last year to fiction writer Tamar Yellin for “The Genizah at the House of Shepher.” — jta

Filmmaker recovers hidden volumes

A documentary filmmaker recently recovered two Nazi-era volumes documenting stolen artworks.

Robert Edsel, whose film “Monuments Men” chronicled the work of art experts to recover and protect World War II-era art and monuments, obtained the volumes from the family of a soldier who had removed them from Adolf Hitler’s home.

Edsel is donating both volumes to the National Archives, which already holds 39 of an estimated 85 volumes the Nazis used to keep track of the treasures they stole. The volumes chronicle the theft of the art from prominent Parisian Jewish families, including the Wildensteins, Kahns, Seligmanns and Rothschilds. — jta

Let Berlin sing-along keep you warm

Dust off your top hat and tails for this one — Oakland’s Temple Sinai is hosting an Irving Berlin sing-along.

“Puttin’ on the Ritz: Songs of Irving Berlin” is the sixth in a series of sing-alongs highlighting the work of Jewish lyricists from Tin Pan Alley. Audience participation will be welcome, and for those less familiar with Berlin’s work, the words will be projected onto a screen.

“Puttin’ on the Ritz” will start 7:30 p.m. Jan. 12 at Temple Sinai, 2808 Summit St., Oakland. Admission is $5-$12.50 at the door. For information, call (510) 547-8080.

ADL exonerates Will Smith

The Anti-Defamation League last week accepted Will Smith’s assurance that he did not praise Adolf Hitler in a recent interview.

“We welcome and accept Will Smith’s statement that Hitler was a ‘vicious killer’ and that he did not mean for his remarks about the Nazi leader to be mistaken as praise,” Abraham Foxman, ADL national director, said in a statement.

Smith “took immediate steps to clarify his words” and condemn Hitler, Foxman said. He added that words “can be twisted by those with hate and bigotry in their hearts.”

The Daily Record, a Scottish newspaper, recently quoted Smith as saying: “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.’”

Many celebrity gossip Web sites posted articles alleging that the 39-year-old actor believed Hitler was a good person. In a statement last week, Smith called that “an awful and disgusting lie,” and said he was furious about his remarks being misinterpreted.

“Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet,” the statement said. — ap

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