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In Queens, a Jewish mourning ritual inspires a performance about memory
(New York Jewish Week) — What happens to the places that are no more? To the people who have died? To the events that meant so much but cannot ever reoccur? Is there a way to bring the intangible power of vanished spaces into the physical world?
On Friday, May 19, dancers, musicians, orators and spectators will come together for a performance of “Site: Yizkor” at King Manor Museum in Jamaica, Queens to explore these and other questions.
The brainchild of multimedia artist Maya Ciarrocchi and composer Andrew Conklin, the performance takes its name from the Jewish memorial service that is recited on major holidays. It combines live and pre-recorded readings with improvised music and dance, encouraging the performers and audience to summon their loved ones into the room, to commune with them in an intimate and visceral way.
“It’s about trying to make roots in a place, to map it, and also to honor the dead and the ghosts — not just the ghosts of people, but the layers of buried history, too,” Ciarrocchi told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s like, if you go to a small chapel in Italy and then realize it’s on three layers of pagan temples [and other] sacred sites.”
Ciarrocchi, who is of Ashkenazi Jewish and Italian descent, has long contemplated the spaces her own family lost and how that loss has impacted her lived experience as a queer Gen X New Yorker. “My grandparents were immigrants who tried to establish a home in the new world. My mother has had difficulties finding a place [within the] establishment,” she said. “Plus, growing up on the tail end of the AIDS plague, I really didn’t have any queer mentors. It did create an unmooring, a feeling of being ungrounded.”
Multimedia artist Maya Ciarrocchi. (Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
The impetus for this specific piece was a confluence of events — people and places disappearing while remaining present in Ciarrocchi’s consciousness. In 2015, she lost both her mother-in-law and an elderly neighbor, the 1930s radio star Elia Braca Rose (aka Lynne Howard). “I was thinking a lot [during that time] about the things we leave behind,” said Ciarrochi. “Especially as I witnessed my neighbor’s apartment [getting] dismantled. I was grieving. Her children took things, the neighbors gathered things, the [demolition] team came in. There was something so devastating about all her history being sucked out of the apartment.”
She and her wife moved a year later, emptying out the apartment she had been raised in, a space in the Westbeth artist’s community. All this upheaval summoned grief and thoughts of the power of rites and ritual.
Yizkor, which means “may [God] remember” in Hebrew, is traditionally performed four times a year — on the three pilgrimage holidays of Shemini Atzeret, Passover and Shavuot, and on Yom Kippur. The communal Yizkor service includes a moment of private reflection during which worshipers can read a prayer that includes the name of a lost loved one and their relationship to the person praying.
“This particular viewpoint is inherently Jewish, but it’s a universal experience of displacement, loss, grief,” Ciarrocchi said. “Really, we’re doing a ritual together. And it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from; we’re doing this together. Hopefully it brings everyone in, and we can have feelings together. The best way to connect with people is to have conversations with them, to open up space for people to hear each other. I hope that this project can do that.”
Each performance is site specific: Previously, “Site: Yizkor” has been performed at the Chutzpah! Festival in Vancouver and at the Roza Centre for International Art and Cooperation in Ruszcza, Poland, a short distance from where Ciarrochi’s grandmother’s house was burned to the ground during a pogrom.
For the New York iteration, the artist has created a series of videos incorporating drawings and maps specific to King Manor Museum, the former country estate of Rufus King, a 19th-century politician and early abolitionist. The museum says its mission is to highlight King’s antislavery activism and to “promote social change in today’s world.”
“Site: Yizkor” began taking its latest form a few weeks ago with a writing workshop, viewed by the artists as integral to the creative process. Participants were invited to respond to prompts such as “describe a vanished place of personal importance” and “describe your dreams of the future.” The artists then take these reflections and incorporate them into the performance.
The music, born of Conklin’s extensive work in the worlds of folk, bluegrass and traditional music, is improvised live from a graphic score. Similarly, the choreography contains specific modules and instructions but remains open to the interpretation of the performers.
“We come up with a score together but it’s a really open structure,” Ciarrochi said. “An element of a score for dancers might be to ‘walk the periphery of the house connecting with each other.’ You can do a lot of things inside of that, but that is the structure. Because these are skilled improvisers, they’re going to make that happen.”
“This particular viewpoint is inherently Jewish, but it’s a universal experience of displacement, loss, grief,” Ciarrocchi said of the piece. “Really, we’re doing a ritual together.”
“Site: Yizkor” will take place at King Manor (150-03 Jamaica Ave.) in Jamaica, Queens on Friday, May 19 at 8:00 p.m. Register here.
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The post In Queens, a Jewish mourning ritual inspires a performance about memory appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’
(JTA) — In the fall, a video of Nick Fuentes criticizing Donald Trump drew the praise of progressive ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
“Finally getting it Nick,” Bowman commented, apparently recognizing some common ground between himself on the left and Fuentes, on the far right, who said in the video that Trump was “better than the Democrats for Israel, for the oil and gas industry, for Silicon Valley, for Wall Street,” but said he wasn’t “better for us.”
Now, Fuentes says there is actually no common ground between him and those on the left.
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler — my problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler,” Fuentes said during his streaming show on Tuesday, which focused mostly on the potential for an American attack on Iran.
He continued, “You have all these left-wing people saying, ‘Why do I agree with Nick Fuentes?’ It’s like, I’m criticizing Trump because there’s not enough deportations, there’s not enough ICE brutality, there’s not enough National Guard. Sort of a big difference!”
Fuentes, the streamer and avowed antisemite who has previously said Hitler was “very f–king cool,” has been gaining more traction as a voice on the right. His interview with Tucker Carlson in October plunged Republicans into an ongoing debate over antisemitism within their ranks, inflaming the divide between a pro-Israel wing of the party and an emerging, isolationist “America First” wing that’s against U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Once a pro-Trump MAGA Republican, Fuentes has become the leader of the “groyper” movement advocating for farther-right positions. The set of Fuentes’ show includes both a hat and a mug with the words “America First” on his desk.
In a New York Times interview, Trump recently weighed in on rising tensions within the Republican Party, saying Republican leaders should “absolutely” condemn figures who promote antisemitism, and that he does not approve of antisemites in the party.
“No, I don’t. I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” replied Trump when asked by a reporter whether there was room within the Republican coalition for antisemitic figures.
Asked if he would condemn Fuentes, Trump initially claimed that he didn’t know the antisemitic streamer, before acknowledging that he had had dinner with him alongside Kanye West in 2022.
“I had dinner with him, one time, where he came as a guest of Kanye West. I didn’t know who he was bringing,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And it was Nick Fuentes? I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Trump flaunted his pro-Israel bona fides in the interview, mentioning the recent announcement that he was nominated for Israel’s top civilian honor and calling himself the “best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, spent the bulk of his show on Tuesday speculating that Trump will order the U.S. to attack Iran, and concluded that “Israel is holding our hand walking us down the road toward an inevitable war.”
The post Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’
(JTA) — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.
In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss’ contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man.
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform
The post Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs
(JTA) — For the second year in a row, Jewish star third baseman Alex Bregman has signed a lucrative free-agent contract with a team that is run by a Jewish executive and plays in a historic ballpark in a city with a significant Jewish community.
Last year, it was the Boston Red Sox. Now, Bregman is headed to the Chicago Cubs — a team whose Jewish fans possess almost religious devotion.
Bregman, who had opted out of a three-year, $120 million deal with Boston, has signed a five-year, $175 million pact with the Cubs. It is the second-largest contract ever signed by a Jewish ballplayer, behind Max Fried’s $218 million contract in 2024. Bregman previously signed a five-year, $100 million extension with the Houston Astros in 2019.
Bregman, who played the first nine years of his career in Houston, has been one of baseball’s premier third basemen over the past decade, with three All-Star selections, a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger and two World Series rings. He’s also heralded for his leadership on and off the field.
Bregman grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he played baseball in high school and also, according to his mother, was once teased while leaving school for a bar mitzvah lesson. His grandfather, the onetime attorney for the Washington Senators whom she said Bregman called “zeyde,” gave him a collection of baseball cards featuring Jewish players.
His great-grandfather fled antisemitism in Belarus and fell in love with sports in the United States, The Athletic reported in 2017, as Bregman hurtled toward his World Series win.
“It’s the fulfillment of four generations of short Jewish Bregmans who dreamed of playing in the major leagues,” his father Sam, now the district attorney in Albuquerque’s county as well as a Democratic candidate for New Mexico governor, said at the time. “The big leagues and the World Series. One hundred twenty years in America fulfilled by Alex in this World Series.”
Bregman has also been vocal about his Jewish pride. He celebrated Hanukkah with a local synagogue in Houston, and following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that launched the Gaza War, Bregman drew a Star of David on his hat during a playoff game and participated in a video of Jewish players calling on fans to support Israel.
Some Jewish fans hoped Bregman’s shows of solidarity with Israel would lead him to suit up for another new squad this spring, Team Israel at the upcoming World Baseball Classic. But Bregman announced this week that he will play for Team USA again. Another Jewish ballplayer, Rowdy Tellez, will rejoin team Mexico, taking two big names off the recruitment board for Israel.
Back in 2018, as Bregman was first emerging as a major star, he said he regretted taking a pass on Team Israel the previous year, when it made it to the second round of play. Suiting up for the U.S. team, Bregman had just four at-bats as a backup player.
Now, he has selected a jersey number for his Cubs era that reflects his aspirations.
“I wore No. 3 because I want a third championship,” Bregman said during his first press conference with his new club on Thursday.
The post Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs appeared first on The Forward.