Rabbi Daniel Brenner

  The old Reese’s peanut butter cup jingle is the perfect description for the Bill T. Jones – Fela extravaganza on Broadway: “Two great tastes that taste great together” FELA! is absolutely delicious — amazing choreography by Jones combined with spectacular direction overall. And Antibalas honors Fela’s music with their own deep grooving sounds — electrifying. Both the actors playing Fela and his Mother deserve Tony Awards — stunning performances. Mindblowing. The only negative in this play is the heavy-handed…

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Shrapnel in the front row During the war between Hezbollah and Israel last summer, I called my cousin who lives in a small suburban town north of Tel Aviv. “It is surreal,” she said. “The children are going back and forth from the bomb shelter to the pool.” Israel’s paradox is well known — on the one hand, it is a war-scarred nation in a region increasingly populated by religious extremists who own explosives. On the other hand, it is…

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I just finished devouring Amos Oz’s Chekov marinated 1991 novel Fima. (a Father’s Day gift — thanks Shosh) The novel is about a divorced poet-political commentator-abortion clinic receptionist who happens to be the son of a cosmetics magnate. His name is Efraim – hence the nickname ‘Fima’ and he stumbles about Jerusalem and eats quite a bit of bread with jam. Most importantly, he waxes poetic about the legacy of the ’67 war and what it has done to the…

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Last night I saw Lisa Kron’s play “Well” – a play on Broadway about a Jewish girl growing up in Lansing, Michigain whose mother believes in two things: Allergies and racial integration. The piece was deeply funny – especially the part of her mother, played on stage by a woman seated on a Lazy-boy recliner. But more important than the inventive staging of what is basically a one woman memoir based show was the central idea — the “through line”…

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Short thoughts on the short film The Pity CardDirector – Bob Odenkirk I would file Odenkirk’s 12 minute film, playing at the Sundance Festival, next to the ‘survivor’ episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the ‘tolerance museum’ episode of South Park and Sarah Silverman’s ‘Jesus is Magic’ as a prime example of the new format of ‘post-holocaust’ comedy -comedy that pokes fun of the sanctity of holocaust memory. The film speaks to a particular post-holocaust museum/holocaust education paradox: The American Jew…

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About a dozen years ago, at a Pina Baush dance performance at Brooklyn Academy of Music, I had something close to a religious experience. It was hard to describe – but the dancers, encircling a massive pile of red carnations, created such an ecstatic movement of beauty and wonder and celebration that I felt as if I had entered a dream. A delightful dream. Cirque Eloise , the Candian company whose piece Rain I saw today in Princeton, just took…

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The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness Author: Joel Ben Izzy Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill Publication date: November 7, 2003 Reviewed by Daniel S. Brenner In lecture six of The Varieties of Religious Experience, the Sick Soul, William James quotes Robert Louis Stevenson -“There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.” James adds that…

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