FALL 2017

 Art Opening Fall 2017

Thursday, October 26th, 7:00 - 9:00 PM

Hillel at UCLA 

Free and Open to the Public

CLICK HERE TO RSVP

Featured Artworks:

For more information on these exhibits, please click here 

Staged Reading: "Suddenly, a Knock at the Door"
by Robin E. Goldfin, based on stories by Etgar Keret

Monday November 20, 2017, 7:00 - 9:00 PM

Lenart Auditorium at the Fowler Museum at UCLA

“I can’t do it like this!” protests the writer EITAN KATZEN to the BEARDED MAN, the SURVEY TAKER and the PIZZA DELIVERY woman who have come knocking at his door.  Brandishing weapons, they make the stakes clear: a story or your life!   So the writer held hostage to these three strange muses begins to weave his tales, played out on the stage by the same characters that are holding him captive.

Left Image: From left to right: Antonio Minino, Alyssa Simon, Jeffrey Swan Jones, Kenneth Talberth, Gilad Ben-Zvi, Oren Neiman, Elanna White, Stephen Thornton.
Right Image: From left to right: Elanna White, Kenneth Talberth, Jeffrey Swan Jones. 

One of Israel's most celebrated writers, Etgar Keret is the author of six collections of stories that have been translated into more than 30 languages. In the U.S., his work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine and The Paris Review.  He has also been a frequent contributor on NPR's This American Life. 

This event is presented by The Dortort Center for Creativity inthe Arts at UCLA Hillel in collaboration with the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at UCLA, the Jewish Women's Theater, and the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.

 WINTER 2018

"Hélène Berr, A Stolen Life":

An exhibit created by the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, France

Wednesday January 24, 7:00 - 9:00 PM

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While revealing a true premonition of the inescapable, this subtle testimony is exceptionally poetic, has rare literary qualities, and carries a universal dimension that regards and questions every human being with sincerity. The exhibition however goes beyond the framework of Hélène Berr's journal and personality, as it broadens the context of the Occupation and addresses largely the persecution of the Jews in France. With the support of photographs archives, films, interactive animations and maps, this exhibition shows how the daily lives of Jews had been impacted by these terrible acts of violence.

This exhibition was designed, created, and distributed by the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, France (curators Karen Taieb and Sophie Nagiscarde), with the guidance of Mariette Job (niece of Hélène Berr), and made possible through the generous support of SNCF.

Co-sponsored by Hillel at UCLA and the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.

 SPRING 2018

Annual Student Photo Contest

Annual Student Fine Art Show

FALL 2018

 

Concert: Ensemble for These Times - Émigrés & Exiles in the Film Industry and Los Angeles

Opening date: Sunday October 14th, 2:00PM @ Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades

Free and open to the public

Website: http://www.e4tt.org/

Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) is a Northern California-based new music chamber group whose mission is to bring new, nearly new, forbidden, and forgotten music to light, focusing on 20th and 21st century music that is relevant, engaging, original, and compelling: music that resonates today and will speak to tomorrow. E4TT’s “Jewish Music & Poetry Project” focuses on works by composers who were exiled or killed in the Holocaust, as well as music with texts by Jewish women poets or by women composers.

The Villa Aurora at 520 Paseo Miramar is located in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles and has been used as an artists residence since 1995. It is the former home and refuge of the German-Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta after they fled from the Nazis in the 1940s. The Feuchtwangers bought this Spanish-style mansion in 1943 for only $9,000, the annual salary of a school teacher. The house was a popular meeting place for artists and the community of German-speaking émigrés. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote six of his historical novels in this house.
 

This event is co-sponsored by: 

Art Opening:

The Space Between Symbols by Corrie Siegel

An artist, curator and educator, Corrie Siegel is committed to using the arts as a method of personal philosophic exploration as well as a tool for community building.  Siegel’s works often explore identity and experience within a global system of communication. She plays with personal limitations of knowledge and understanding by using highly detailed observation, and involved processes for collecting and rendering her subject matter.  She has exhibited her work throughout the United States as well as internationally. Her projects have been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, Mousse Magazine, and Flash Art International.  Siegel is a founding member and co-director of Actual Size, an artist collective and gallery. Actual Size collaborates with established and emerging artists to activate the exhibition space and engage the public.

Artist's Statement: 

The cut paper works that comprise this series are created through overlaying text in a matrix to obscure the original message and reveal a pattern composed of symbols. Intricately detailed, the work is inspired by micrographic art by Hebrew scribes who sculpt, skew and stretch letters to create dynamic and textured compositions. The artist chose to dissect texts written in German including Hitler's "Mein Kampf". Through using the form of a traditional paper-cut, these loaded texts are abstracted and cut into fragile lace.

The paper-cut was once exceedingly common in Ashkenazic-Jewish homes, reaching its height of popularity in the 19th century into the early 20th. Paper-cuts served religious and other ritual needs, such as indicating the direction of prayer, remembering family deaths, holiday decoration, and warding off the evil eve. Artists adapted the cut paper technique that Jewish merchants had met through their travels to the Far East in the 14th century as well as the 17th century German paper-cuts, which were known as Scherenschnitt (scissor-cuts). In 1345, Rabbi Shem-Tov ben Yitzhak ben Ardutiel wrote The War of the Pen Against the Scissors. In this Hebrew text he recounted an occasion in which his inkwell froze on a cold winter’s evening. In order to continue his studies he resorted to cutting the letters out of the paper. 

Created by Hebrew scribes in the late 9th century while transcribing the Masorah, which includes a system of marginal biblical notes that counted and listed textual details, this style of forming minute text into imagery enabled scribes to render images without blatantly violating Jewish law forbidding representation. This art form spread with the Jewish diaspora and evolved within the local cultural milieus. Micrography exemplifies the Jewish tradition of retaining identity while adapting to and affecting the local culture. Micrography also demonstrates the enduring Jewish pursuit of interpreting and navigating their evolving traditions.

 WINTER 2019

Louis Davidson's extraordinary photographic study of "Synagogues of North America"

Mission of Louis Davidson's SYNAGOGUES360: SYNAGOGUE 360provides a visual record of Jewish culture, showing and preserving synagogues by means of interactive 360 degree panoramic photos. It invites you and future generations to view the interiors of Jewish places of worship, which are clear and irrefutable indicators of the state of Jewish culture, architecture, art and stature in their communities throughout the Diaspora. Each synagogue is literally a “sign of the times” and window into the Jewish past and present.

Time, weather, political and demographic shift inevitably erode cities and buildings. These along with occasional upsurges of violent anti-Semitism, have been particularly thorough erasers of the physical evidence of Jewish history. SYNAGOGUES360 visually and digitally saves Jewish synagogues, an impressive physical expression of Jewish culture, for this and culture, for this and future generations to see and experience.

Please read this article by Jewish Journal spotlighting Louis Davidson and his photography.