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| Admission: | $20 Members and $25 General (price includes Museum admission) | ||||||||||||||
| RSVP/Reservations: | To purchase tickets by phone call 415.655.7881. | ||||||||||||||
| Contact: | <a href=mailto:info@thecjm.org>info@thecjm.org</a> or 415.655.7800 |
About the Program
Josh Kornbluth, the renowned playwright, performer and former host of KQED's "The Josh Kornbluth Show," will debut his new one-man show, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum . An icon of Bay Area performance, Kornbluth based his show on the Contemporary Jewish Museum's exhibition Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered. The show offers a humorous and penetrating take on the ten cultural luminaries like Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, Golda Meir, the Marx Brothers, and Gertrude Stein painted by Andy Warhol in his famous 1980 series, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century. Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews? is also an investigation into the nature of contemporary identity, the complex texture of modern Jewish life, and the limits of biographical categories in an era of constant artistic and personal reinvention. Be prepared for Kornbluth's rigorous and irreverent mix of autobiography, music, philosophy and improvisation.
Josh Kornbluth is the author and performer of the celebrated monologues Love & Taxes, Ben Franklin: Unplugged and Citizen Josh, among others. The Washington Post called Ben Franklin: Unplugged a "poignant and penetrating father-son saga that completes a trilogy that deserves to stand with the best of the Jewish father-son sagas in our theatre." In 2001, Kornbluth along with his brother Jacob Kornbluth made the movie Haiku Tunnel about which The Los Angeles Times wrote: "A sly and captivating comedy of imaginative leaps and gently orchestrated pandemonium...Kornbluth can make anything killingly funny." From 2006 to 2008 he hosted the weekly KQED-TV program "The Josh Kornbluth Show," interviewing such figures as Annie Leibovitz, Alan Alda, Helen Mirren and Michael Tilson Thomas.
Special Guests
Opening Night - Saturday, January 10: 8 PM
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Saul Perlmutter, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, will join Josh Kornbluth after this performance for a discussion of the life and work of Albert Einstein.
Saul Perlmutter teaches physics at UC Berkeley, and is an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he heads the Supernova Cosmology Project. It was this team, along with the High-z Supernova Search Team which found evidence of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is of Jewish descent.
In 2002 Perlmutter won the Department of Energy's E. O. Lawrence Award in Physics. In 2003 he was awarded the California Scientist of the Year Award, and in 2005 he won the John Scott Award and the Padua Prize. In 2006 he shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, as well as winning the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize.
Perlmutter and his team shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, a $500,000 award, with Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University and the High-Z Team for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe.
January 11: 3 PM
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Tirza True Latimer, Chair of Visual and Critical Studies at California College of Arts, will join Josh Kornbluth after this performance for a discussion of the life and work of Gertrude Stein.
Tirza True Latimer has published work from a lesbian feminist perspective on a range of topics in the fields of visual culture, sexual culture, and criticism. She is coeditor, with Whitney Chadwick, of the anthology The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, and the author of Women Together / Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris.
She also is an independent curator whose recent exhibitions include Acting Out: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (2005, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley; Frye Museum, Seattle; Jersey Heritage Trust, Isle of Jersey) and Unexpected Developments (2006, PLAySPACE, CCA, San Francisco). She is currently collaborating on a major exhibition about the life and afterlife of Gertrude Stein, which will be organized by the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco.
Tirza's teaching, like her research, explores the intersection of visual and sexual cultures. Her interests include the emergence of lesbian and gay visual communities in early twentieth-century Paris, collaborative and participatory art practices in contemporary art, new genres of public art, the visual politics of identity, art activism, and the history of photography. She is co-chair of the Queer Caucus for Art, a College Art Association-affiliated society.
January 11: 7 PM
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Susan Griffin, an award-winning writer and poet, will join Josh Kornbluth after this performance for a discussion of the life and work of Sarah Bernhardt.
Susan Griffin is the author of A Chorus of Stones, the Private Life of War, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award. She is the author of many other books, including The Book of the Courtesans, A Catalogue of Their Virtues, which explores a side of women's history that until recently has been hidden, and Woman and Nature, the now classic work that helped inspire eco-feminism, and which was published in a new edition by Sierra Club Books in 2000. Griffin's essays on gender and society were collected in The Eros of Everyday Life, in 1994.
She has published several volumes of poetry. Unremembered Country won the Commonwealth Club's Silver Medal for poetry in 1987. In 1998 Copper Canyon Press published Bending Home, Poems Selected and New 1967-1998 which was a finalist for the Western States Art Federation Award.
She was a scriptwriter and the narrator for the Academy Award-nominated documentary Berkeley in the Sixties. She has recently written a musical drama called "Canto," depicting the massacre of villagers in Salvador during the 1980s. She is also in the process of co-editing an anthology entitled, Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World, to be published by UC Press in 2008.
Her latest book, Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy, On Being an American Citizen, is about the inner life of democracy, and is the third volume of her social autobiography that began with A Chorus of Stones.
Named by Utne Reader as one of a hundred important visionaries for the new millennium, Griffin has been the recipient of an NEA grant, a Macarthur Grant for Peace and International Cooperation, and an Emmy Award (for her play, Voices.) She has taught at Pacifica Graduate Institute and the California Institute of Integral Studies.
January 17: 8 PM
Michael S. Strunsky, the nephew of the late Ira and Leonore Strunsky Gershwin and the sole Trustee and Executor of the Ira Gershwin Musical Estate, will join Josh Kornbluth after this performance for a discussion of the life and work of George Gershwin.
In 1985, after his uncle's death, Strunsky began assisting his Aunt Leonore in the management of the Gershwin musical estate. After her death in 1991, Mr. Strunsky took over control of how, and under which circumstances, Gershwin's compositions are utilized, marketed and performed.
Strunsky is also the sole Trustee of the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Strunsky Philanthropic Fund. The Fund has provided funding for the Spring Festival of the San Francisco Symphony, which, under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, has pleased audiences with renditions of twentieth century music and an in-depth study of the Mahler symphonies. Strunsky provided the seed money for the Emmy Award-winning PBS program In the Fiddler's House starring Itzhak Perlman, which brought Klezmer music to the attention of the American public, and the PBS Broadway series, which also earned an Emmy Award.
Mr. Strunsky is also the Trustee of the Leonore S. Gershwin Trust Fund for the Benefit of the Library of Congress, which supports the Music Division of the Library, the Gershwin Room, and various performance programs highlighting the fabulous collection of music, manuscripts and memorabilia held there. An Ira Gershwin/Library of Congress branch exhibit at the new Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles has been a highly successful pet project of Mr. Strunsky's for the past several years.
Mr. Strunsky mounted a successful campaign from 1991-1998 to convince the Pulitzer Prize Committee to award a Special Pulitzer Prize for Music to George Gershwin.
Strunsky has also arranged grants for many organizations in the fields of arts, entertainment, education and
medicine. Recipients have included the New York Philharmonic, which named a concert series after Leonore S. Gershwin; the BBC for its production of the Trevor Nunn version of the Gershwin opera Porgy &Bess; the New York Public Library Theater on Film and Tape collection which memorializes American shows from Broadway; and City Center' Encores!
Strunsky, the founder of Apersey Construction in San Francisco in 1978, was appointed by San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan to the five-member Airport Commission, as a Vice-President of the Comission has been responsible for the $3 billion SFO International Building expansion and BART's extension to the Airport.
Mr. Strunsky serves on the Board of Governors of the San Francisco Symphony, the Board of Directors of AMSONG, and the Jewish Federation's Capital Planning Committee. He also heads the Construction Committee of The Jewish Home, a skilled nursing facility for the aged.
Michael Strunsky is married to the former Jean Zimmerman, and resides in San Francisco.
January 18: 3 PM
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David Biale, Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History in the Department of History of University of California Davis, will join Josh Kornbluth after this performance for a discussion of the life and work of Sigmund Freud.
David Biale was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and educated at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, the Hebrew University and UCLA, where he received his PhD in History. From 1986 to 1999, he served as Koret Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. During the same period he also served as adjunct professor in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and History at UC Berkeley. In 1999, he was appointed. He has also been visiting professor at UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, Haifa University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lady Davis Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research council.
January 18: 7 PM
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Menachem Creditor, Rabbi at Berkeley's Congregation Netivot Shalom, will join Josh Kornbluth after this performance for a discussion of the life and work of Martin Buber.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor serves as spiritual leader of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, CA. He is founder of ShefaNetwork: The Conservative Movement Dreaming from Within, co-founder of KeshetRabbis: The Alliance of Gay-Friendly Conservative/Masorti Rabbis, and author of TheTisch: a Jewish Spiritual commentary. A published author and popular speaker on questions of Jewish Identity, Leadership, and Spirituality, and one half of Shirav, a Jewish folk-music group, he regularly visits communities around North America and Israel. Rabbi Creditor earned his master's in Jewish Education and rabbinic ordination from The Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Supporters
Education programs related to Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered are generously supported by the Jim Joseph Foundation.
