Currently Browsing: Jan Lisa Huttner
In September 2022, Jan Lisa Huttner, author of Diamond Fiddler: New Traditions for a New Millennium (Why Fiddler on the Roof Always Wins), spoke with Barbara Bayes, the wife of Sammy Dallas Bayes, who sadly passed in May.
Jan Lisa Huttner: How did you and Sammy meet?
Barbara Bayes: Sammy and I met in 1985. I was a performer, dancing and singing in an industrial show for IBM.… read more.
If the holidays can be counted on for one thing – regardless of region or cultural moment – it’s turning back the clock for a month or so, and offering up brightly-wrapped nostalgia. Nostalgia literally means the “pain from an old wound,” but today its connotations include both sentimentality and irreverence for the past.… read more.
You clean up his messes, you make excuses, you do his job, and then you wake up and do it all over again.
Women with brilliant comedic timing take center stage in the current Broadway hit POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive. This raucously relevant play reminds us of the work required behind-the-scenes to ensure that America’s POTUS – aka the President of the United States – appears in total self-control at all times (especially on camera).… read more.
You can’t necessarily change what’s going on, no, but I can say what I think about it. I’m free to do that. And I will.
As a Black woman living in the USA, learning about my history is something that has been heavily contested. The narrative that I have learned about my ancestors is often seen as whitewashed and trauma-filled, focusing on the handful of accomplishments we have made or the trauma we have endured (and the trauma we still going through) through the remnants of slavery.… read more.
Today’s SWAN-of-the-Day is filmmaker Pearl Gluck, one of the first Jewish women to give outsiders a peek inside Ashkenazi Orthodoxy. Although we have many opportunities now – especially in streaming series like Shtisel and Unorthodox – Pearl was a courageous trail blazer.
The following is adapted from the review I wrote of her film Divan for the September 2005 issue of the World Jewish Digest:
Pearl Gluck comes from a large Hasidic family based in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.… read more.
April 24, 2022: Today is Barbra Streisand’s 80th Birthday and I have something very special to share.
From “Tzivi’s March ’09 Spotlight” in Chicago’s JUF News
Barbra Streisand’s Yentl has just been re-released in a brand new 25th anniversary DVD box set. Although much maligned over the years, Yentl is a great and heartfelt work of cinematic art, and I urge you all to watch it again with fresh eyes in celebration of Women’s History Month.… read more.