Yale Strom

Ever since multiculturalism came into vogue in the late 1980s, more and more artists have been making works about their ethnic heritages. Such a task can be either liberating or limiting--as choreographer John Malashock and composer Yale Strom recently discovered. Asked by the three-year-old San Diego Jewish Festival to create a new dance, Malashock enlisted Strom, and the two artists found themselves walking a narrow line in trying to make a "Jewish" work.

"L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin!" tells a cross-cultural story as dizzying as its title. Energetic and informative, albeit more than a little haphazard, Yale Strom's new documentary explores an unexpected aspect of the intertwined 20th century histories of the Soviet Union and the Jewish people.

"L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin!" tells a cross-cultural story as dizzying as its title. Energetic and informative, albeit more than a little haphazard, Yale Strom's new documentary explores an unexpected aspect of the intertwined 20th century histories of the Soviet Union and the Jewish people.

Ever since multiculturalism came into vogue in the late 1980s, more and more artists have been making works about their ethnic heritages. Such a task can be either liberating or limiting--as choreographer John Malashock and composer Yale Strom recently discovered. Asked by the three-year-old San Diego Jewish Festival to create a new dance, Malashock enlisted Strom, and the two artists found themselves walking a narrow line in trying to make a "Jewish" work.

Oren Rudavsky and Yale Strom's warm and bracing hourlong documentary "At the Crossroads: Jews in Eastern Europe Today" (at the Monica 4-Plex) is preceded--very effectively--by two 10-minute travelogues, "Jewish Life in Cracow" (1939) and "A Day in Warsaw" (1938), which reveal the richness and diversity of Jewish life in Poland that existed since the 12th Century but was all but obliterated by the Holocaust.

Yale Strom's "Carpati: 50 Miles, 50 Years" is every bit as irresistible and poignant as "The Last Klezmer," his portrait of Leopold Kozlowski, Eastern Europe's last remaining prewar master of klezmer, Jewish folk music.

The Sunset 5's Cinema Judaica series continues Wednesday with a one-week run of Yale Strom's "The Last Klezmer," which introduces us to the ebullient, irresistible Leopold Kozlowski, Eastern Europe's last remaining prewar master of klezmer, Jewish folk music. We not only witness Kozlowski's tireless efforts in ensuring the survival of klezmer but also accompany him from his home in Krakow on his first visit in more than 40 years to his hometown outside Lvov in the Ukraine.

In a six-part "Rhythms of the World" program ranging from Appalachia to Spain on Saturday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, one artist in particular brought world-class status to the final Dance Kaleidoscope program. Liam Harney easily, joyfully showed why he was twice declared a world champion Irish step dancer, bounding in effortless flight, tapping out speedy and intricate rhythms, accenting beats with clicks of his heels in the air as well as on the floor.

Although John Malashock makes dances just as restless, sinewy and eclectic as any by his postmodern counterparts, there's also a rugged, heroic beauty to them that links him to the generation of modern dance pioneers. Based in San Diego for the last eight years, this former Tharp dancer brought his accomplished seven-member company to Bovard Auditorium at USC on Tuesday for a three-part program in the early-evening "Spectrum" series.

There is a story at the top of the second half of "The Dybbuk" at the San Diego Repertory Theatre that describes a tightrope walker's high-wire feat spanning a river. If only, concludes the rabbi who tells it, if only people would put as much effort in developing their souls as they do their soles. In every way, this is the message locked in S. Ansky's undimmed turn-of-the-century classic.

In Hebrew, the name of the Shomrei Torah Synagogue in West Hills means Guardians of the Torah, which seems fitting to documentary filmmaker David Notowitz. "It's the most appropriate name you could have," Notowitz said after accepting a Torah--a large, parchment scroll bearing the handwritten words of the five books of Moses--from Shomrei Torah Rabbi Elijah Schochet.

"A wedding without klezmer is worse than a funeral without tears." --Eastern European Jewish proverb Over the past decade, the revival of klezmer music has made it a fashionable ornament to Jewish weddings and bar mitzvahs, as well as the occasional concert stage. But few American performers of this once-thriving Eastern European musical tradition can match Yale Strom's boast of having played a Jewish wedding with authentic klezmer musicians in rural Romania.