Art sometimes has a mind of its own. And in artist Judith Joseph’s  case, her art decided to take on a life of its own, as it has evolved and emerged as a 3D, interactive exhibit called The Owing Project. This exhibit invites art viewers to “become participants in a dialogue about the personal, spiritual and societal issues around debt and owing,” according to Joseph.

There are lists of Jewish movies, and lists of Jewish music. But I haven’t seen any lists of Jewish movie music— music in the soundtracks of Jewish-themed movies— so I made my own. Rather than limit myself to a “Top 10,” I decided to go with another Jewish number: 18.

It’s summertime in Chicago: the perfect time for grillin’, chillin’, and One Tree Hillin’. Okay, so I’ve never actually seen One Tree Hill, but it sounded good. Summertime is also the perfect time for great music; and anyone who’s ever seen an outdoor concert knows that certain music just sounds better this time of year.

Every year since 2000, there has been at least one American comedy with a Jewish theme in the theaters. There has never been a decade with more, or more obviously Jewish, material on display on the big screen.

Now that hockey season is over (woohoo Blackhawks!), The Real Housewives of New York concludes tonight, Team Motorboat crossed the Avon Breast Cancer Walk finish line last Sunday and I have no more weddings till the fall, it looks like I’m finally going to have some free time!  (At least until I leave for Israel in three weeks.)

Alex Epstein writes really-really short stories. Most don’t even take up half a page of his newly published quarter-page format book, Blue Has No South. This collection of his latest work was masterfully translated from Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay.

Those of you who’ve read my columns before are likely aware of two things: a) I could probably use a Valium every so often, and b) I have one of the coolest jobs in the world. My career consists of writing, directing, and performing music and comedy— mostly at Chicago’s Second City theater. And my most recent show, “Rush Limbaugh! The Musical” has proven to be not only my most satisfying, but also my most controversial. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Perhaps, the Canadians have young Jewish women figured out better than anybody. Recently, I have become enamored with the show, Being Erica—so much so, that it made my highly selective DVR list a couple weeks ago.

February is African-American History month. And the history of American music is a story of blacks and Jews working in, literally, harmony. Even back in the earliest part of the 20th Century, African-American singer Paul Robeson performed spirituals alongside Yiddish folksong, while the first racially integrated ensemble was led by Jewish bandleader Benny Goodman.

Just saw Avatar at Navy Pier’s Imax theater…LOVED IT!!  Wow!!  As I watched, I kept thinking about how this movie is totally Jewish.  In fact, I think that the movie is so darn Jewish that Mr. Cameron should send a big fat royalty check (to the tune of 1.34 Billion) to JUF.  That would be so great!  (In the meantime, don’t forget to make your JUF donation this year!)

Have you ever not watched a television show because you identified too much with it? When I watched Sex and the City in my 20s, I really enjoyed storylines of older single women in the dating scene. Now that I’m the same age as Sarah Jessica Parker when the series started, I no longer find it (as) funny and kind of depressing.

Becca Willens respects her roots. Growing up in a small Jewish community in Petoskey, Mich. – where hers was one of five Jewish families in town – Willens learned to cherish community from an early age. Now a senior studying costume design at Columbia College, Willens translated her understanding of community into an installation displayed at Spertus Museum. The piece is a response to Spertus’ “What Does It Say to You?” exhibit.

Chanukah music does not begin with “The Dreidel Song” and end with Adam Sandler. There is plenty of great Chanukah music out there suitable for adult tastes. It’s just a little hard to find… until now. So here they are— the Top Ten Best Chanukah Albums for Grown-Ups.

Jews are some of the most famous novelists, and Jews also are some of the most important people in the superhero-type comic-book world. So it’s no big surprise that Jews are some of the most famous, most important people in the genre that conflates the two: graphic novels. What’s surprising is that so many Jewish graphic novelists have focused on Jewish experiences for their subject matter.

Debbie Friedman, Salamone Rossi, Max Janowski, Ben Steinberg, Sheva, Louis Lewandowski … What do all these names have in common? They all have made a remarkable impact on the music of the synagogue. As a Reform cantor, I have always been most drawn to Judaism by its rich heritage of music, and find that many of my congregants share the same strong connection.

Whenever my husband wears a kippah – an admittedly rare occasion – he dons a colorful crocheted circle swirling in blues, yellows and browns. Kippot like his are the work of a handful of Mayan women in Guatemala, who have partnered with MayaWorks, a Chicago-based organization to produce beautiful fair-trade ritual objects, purses and clothing. The colors on my husband’s kippah were chosen by the women of San Marcos la Laguna, a small village on the shores of Lake Atitlan.

Mitch Albom has done it again. With his newest book, Have a Little Faith, he has beautifully penned a book that is insightful, touching, and highly memorable. This is the first non-fiction book Albom has written since his, now classic, Tuesdays with Morrie, notably one of my favorite books of all time. Like his earlier book, Have a Little Faith centers on a figure who Albom had a previous connection with in his life, who then plays a later role as a "teacher of life."

 Have you seen the new Coen brother’s movie A Serious Man yet? For me, watching A Serious Man was like reading Portnoy’s Complaint for the first time.  I found it wickedly funny at times and just plain wicked at others.  Though I mostly liked it, I kept thinking how mortified I would be if anyone besides me were to learn of this story, given that it is so bleak and so unfavorable to the Jewish community and Judaism in general.

Years ago, in acting class, James Sherman met a fellow student actor who worked for an escort agency, where he pretended to be someone’s Jewish boyfriend for an evening with her parents. A Chicago Jewish playwright and now a screenwriter and director, Sherman never forgot about that silly ruse the actor had told him about. Years later, Sherman wrote a play called “Beau Jest,” a romantic comedy stemming from the escort service plotline coupled with some of his own issues with his parents.

Spencer Tweedy is a pretty cool kid—and not just because his dad is Jeff Tweedy, lead singer of Wilco, an alternative rock band based in Chicago. Though he’s only 13, Spencer already has several significant accomplishments under his belt. He started playing the drums at age two, started his first band at age six and now plays with the band Tully Monster. On his 13th birthday, Spencer was dubbed “boy genius” by Rolling Stone magazine after he got to perform a killer drum solo Madison Square Garden during a concert featuring Wilco and Neil Young—not your typical bar mitzvah celebration, but pretty awesome.

With the High Holidays fast approaching, it must be noted that perhaps the most culturally significant contribution to popular music has Jewish roots. No, I’m not referring to Matisyahu, whose dominance in the vast world of Jewish rap is pretty much unparalleled. (No offense meant to early 1990’s rap legends “Two Live Jews” and their smash hit “Fiddling with Tradition”. Any of you who think I’m making this up need to get to iTunes immediately, and spend .99 on “Mertyle the Matchmaker”.)

Working as a performance artist, it didn’t take Susannah Perlman long to discover she wasn’t the only nice Jewish girl trying to make a living by doing things on stage (telling naughty jokes, wearing not all the much clothing) of which her mother did not approve.

I am an incredibly avid reader of fiction, but when I venture into the land of non-fiction, I am usually looking for a book that I can relate to in some way. Thus grew my interest in the debut book of Eddie Sarfaty, a fellow gay Jew. Okay, so Eddie, a comedian who has a steady gig in Provincetown, Mass, is really nothing like me, a cantor. But hey, I did go to Provincetown once for a day, and I loved it!

Although I’m a writer myself, when it comes to reading for pleasure, I tend to dabble in the chick lit section of the bookstore a bit more than a girl should really admit. But hell, give me sunshine, a beach and a pastel paperback and I’m as happy as a clam. Lucky for me, there’s one author in the chick lit section who manages to fill her pink-covered pages with substance, humor (even some Jewish humor), life lessons and a little girl talk.

I think we all have moments when excitement hits us so hard that we’re rendered speechless, and we can’t synthesize any of the thoughts and feelings running through our heads into coherent responses.

 The moment President Obama clinched the election, he made that famous pledge to his two daughters—as well as to billions around the world—to get a puppy for his family’s new home.

“Chicago is like the mother country of improv,” says Eli Galperin, one of the founding members of Altermania, an Israeli improv group hitting town April 14 as part of the Chicago Improv Festival. The annual event, this year dubbed “One World, Many Laughs,” will feature 90 ensembles from 11 different countries.

I remember first hearing Max Quinlan’s beautiful voice when he was just a little boy, singing in Buffalo Grove community theater productions. Growing up, both of our moms were active on the Village Arts Commission, so we often found ourselves on stage or backstage together.

You don’t meet a lot of Jews named Christopher Campbell. Well, actually, Christopher Campbell is no longer Christopher. He’s now Yisrael Campbell, but he journeyed on a long and spiritual road to arrive at his new identity. Back in the 1960s, Campbell was born into a Philadelphia Catholic family, to an Italian mother and Irish father. As Campbell describes it, “I’m the first-born son of a manic-depressive Italian woman and a pathologically silent Irishman. That makes me wildly emotional…in a very quiet way.”

In 2005, Lisa Alcalay Klug wrote two articles about being Jewish. One for the San Francisco Chronicle about how cool it is to be a Jew in the Bay Area, and another for The Forward about eight nights of Chanukah kitsch. “These two stories had something essential in common: a pride in being Jewish, an embrace of kitsch and a reverent irreverence—an irreverence based on a real love of being Jewish. When I thought of a concept to encapsulate that, the word Heebster lit up in my brain like a neon sign,” Lisa says.

In October 2007, Joel Stein was sitting in the parking lot in Old Orchard, waiting. Alone in the car, he started to laugh — the word sadorachmonesism had popped into his head. Using the root word rachmones (pity, sympathy) he created a new noun: sadorachmonesism. Defined as: the act of your mother telling you that you look “a little thick” in your new dress, then handing you her credit card to go buy something “more flattering.”

For the last 11 years, Jeff Ruby has worked his way up the totem pole from fact-checking restaurant hours and addresses and being hazed with assignments to review Rainforest Café and Hard Rock Café – “the amphibian and guitar beat” – to his current position as Senior Editor for the magazine, not only writing about food and dining, but also penning a monthly column called The Closer about, well, whatever he wants.

There was an extended pause in the conversation when I asked my husband, Joe, if he would like to join me at a dance performance last Saturday night. I have dragged my poor jock husband to countless musicals and plays, but never to a dance show. I could see the images swirling through his brain – scantily clad men slithering on the floor in a bizarre interpretive dance – and braced myself for the “no.”

Whoever said you can’t have your cake and eat it too has not been in the shoes of T.J. Shanoff. He is passionate about his work, has never had a day job, owns a home in the city he loves, travels the world and has a flexible schedule. Jealous? So what does he do? Apparently, it’s complicated.

Former Lakeview resident Matthue Roth has always been a writer, spending many of his early teen years running home after school to write science fiction stories. His new novel, Losers might not be about outer space, but the story of a Russian Jew named Jupiter Glazer’s struggle against loser-dom does have elements of a stranger in a strange land.

In Allison Amend’s debut collection of short stories, Things That Pass for Love, (OV Books), released this week, no matter how far removed the character is from the author, there’s a little bit of Allison in everyone she writes about.

The number one movie at the box office last week starred a talking dog. If you’re looking for something a little more…human…starring talking people from around the world, check out The 44th Chicago International Film Festival, playing in the Windy City from Thurs., Oct. 16- Wed., Oct. 29. This year’s festival, presented by Cinema/Chicago, features special appearances by international actors and directors along with a line up of more than 175 films total—116 feature films, 38 short films and 18 documentaries from around the globe.

In a Chicago gym locker room, a little girl, maybe three years old, climbs aboard a giant scale. To her, the newly discovered apparatus is a toy with no other purpose than fun. She jumps up and down gleefully and calls for her mother to come witness her game. Her mother exclaims, “That’s great, honey,” and lifts her daughter off the scale and steps onto it herself. Immediately, the mother’s demeanor changes, she frowns, and drops her head down. Then, she gets off the scale and her daughter climbs back on it, this time imitating her mother’s actions, dour face and all.

If I were a princess I would hide away in this castle with my magical creatures. Castle stands as a soliloquy transcendental of the grandeur of adolescent imagination. The building of a fortress is for the purpose of protection and community.

As a little girl, Elizabeth Gelman’s daughter would describe everyone by the color of clothes they were wearing. She would say, “That purple lady over there is talking to that green man.” Like the little girl, children often learn how to classify through this sort of exercise. But somewhere along the way in society, as children grow into adults, differentiating between people sometimes morphs into stereotyping.

Joanna Rudnick doesn’t wake up every morning thinking, “today’s the day I will get cancer.” But the documentary filmmaker does live with the knowledge that she’s more likely to develop cancer than other women her age, in part because of her heritage.

I began painting Judaic themes after my experience in the 2004 South East Asia Tsunami during which I was holidaying in Thailand. The Tsunami opened my eyes to a whole new world of humanity--it was incredible to witness firsthand everyone coming together to help each other. After surviving the Tsunami, my connection with God grew stronger, enabling me to express my passion for Judaism by creating traditional, Judaic art. I am hopeful that my paintings and artwork will inspire others by creating a positive light of energy in their homes.

I’m an avoider. My solution to the circumcision question (to cut or not to cut) is: I’ll only have girls. I am sure that this impractical resolution will result in a family of boys. I would never even have been thinking about this question had it not been for Chicagoan Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon’s film, Cut. And he would never have been thinking about this issue if not for the time, at 15-years-old, he served as the Sandek, the person who holds the baby during the ritual, for his cousin’s bris in Jerusalem. He was appalled when the Mohel leaned over the baby and came up with blood on his beard.

My three days in the Bay Area deviated slightly from the Hemispheres magazine recommended itinerary. No dim sum in Chinatown, no inline skating through the Golden Gate Park. I headed west last month for one reason: to connect with my big brother.

It’s 9:30 p.m. on a sticky July evening and I’m standing outside Lillstreet Art Studio in Ravenswood. I’ve parked the Prius I’m borrowing from a friend and I’ve used my iPhone to call local artist (and old friend) Rebecca Zemans and let her know I have arrived.

“I believe that theatre is an art unlike any other because it asks for a type of bravery that is scarce in this world,” says Dan Dvorkin, one of the founders of Two Lights Theatre Company. Named for Five for Fighting’s “Two Lights,” a song that speaks of this type of courage and bravery, Dan and his co-founder, Becky Leifman, are themselves the Two Lights, or two bright ideas, behind the new company.

If your brain is turning to mush from too much US Weekly and your eyes are tired from too much online reading, it might be time to hit the beach, or even the couch, with a book! If you’re in the mood for something Jewish, look no further than The Jewish Book Network, an organization of the Jewish Book Council, it sends Jewish authors across the country to promote their work.

Over the past year, while walking or running under the Bryn Mawr underpass at Lake Shore Drive, I’ve admired the sparkling colors and tiles, wondering who was responsible for this gorgeous mural. Then, a few months ago, my friend Orit mentioned that she was hiring teens to create another mural for the Bryn Mawr underpass.

… indicates a continuation, a sign that there’s more to say, more to come. And for Adam Blair and his band Dot Dot Dot, that couldn’t be more true. From the band’s inception, things moved fast. The Chicago-based power pop-rock band played to 1,300 people at its third show. Within five months Dot Dot Dot landed a spot on Fox’s reality TV competition, The Next Great American Band and released a CD.

I draw inspiration from lost roots, genealogy, old urban and farm architecture, residential history, sociological photography, the Midwest at night, resistance fighters, people that get me in the gut, ghosts, and music that settles somewhere between my sternum and abdomen.

Local comedian Mike Tureff originally turned to comedy in high school with an ulterior motive—to get girls. “I don’t think it’s so much that I realized I was funny as that I realized I wasn’t good looking enough to get girls without being funny,” he says.

Long before Adam Sandler and Sasha Baron Cohen became famous for their impersonations and manic comedic styles, there was Danny Kaye, a Jew from Brooklyn who made it big in Hollywood.

Ravinia is about to be blessed with reggae’s most unlikely rising star: an Orthodox Jewish beatboxer who skipped out on his senior year of high school to follow the hippie jam band Phish. Born Mathew Miller, Matisyahu (the Hebrew version of "Matthew,” and the name he adopted on becoming observant), certainly doesn’t fit the stereotypical reggae profile.

A hipster is not simply a skinny musician in tight pants and Chuck Taylors with a PBR in one hand and a cigarette in the other. A young Jewish professional is not always a well-dressed, curly-haired, no-nonsense woman. And an artist is not always a tormented waif with a crazy haircut and a half sleeve tattoo. I don’t fully fit into any of these subcultures, but they are all a part of me.

On January 2, 1948, Golda Meir stood, unexpected, before Chicago’s Council of Jewish Federations to appeal for the financial support necessary to arm the Jewish forces fighting for an Israeli state. Today, actress Janet Ulrich Brooks stands on the stage of Pegasus Players’ production of Golda’s Balcony, reenacting this pivotal moment in Israel’s history. “I have no speech,” she says, giving voice to Meir’s historic words. “I’ll tell you what’s in my heart.”

When Annie Coleman takes the stage in her cowboy boots and bright red lipstick instructing people to form squares for ”Dip the Oyster,” some couples fall right into place, secure in their knowledge that a square is composed of four pairs and that your position at the dance's start is "home." Many of these confident types are rockin' cowboy hats.

Inspiration struck Chicago novelist Amy Guth while she was touring the country to promote her first novel, Three Fallen Women. Encouraged by the camaraderie she found at various small-press literary and book festivals and readings nationwide, she wanted to create a similar experience for writers in Chicago. “My experience with literary festivals has been so positive,” she says. “Writing is such a solitary thing to do. It’s easy to forget that there are other people out there working and hoping for the same things.”  The Pilcrow Lit fest was born.

On a typical weekend, almost-famous Chicago Jewish comedian Jena Friedman races by bike from gig to gig, performing standup all over the city. Recently, she opened three shows for Chicago native and manic comic genius Robin Williams.

Joey Garfield says he thinks in pictures. And lucky for us, he makes a living sharing those images with the world through his documentary films. After directing a documentary on graffiti art, Garfield realized he could make films about more stuff he liked. Like beatboxing.

Emil Sher’s adaptation of Karen Levine’s book records the real life experiences of a Czechoslovakian family’s life under Nazi occupation, a history that might have been lost were it not for the efforts of Japanese school children sixty years later, and half a world away.

Growing up in Kfar Saba, Israel, Idan Raichel was attracted to music at a young age. After serving in the Israeli army, he worked as a counselor at a boarding school for immigrants and troubled youth. The school was home to many young Ethiopian Jews who introduced Raichel to Ethiopian folk and pop music.

Joe Goodkin, founder of Chicago-based Quell records, is your regular renaissance guy. In addition to holding down jobs as a paralegal and guitar teacher, he plays in bands, runs a record label and travels to local high schools performing his original folk opera based on Homer’s Odyssey.

Ari Sandel’s 2007 Academy Award-winning “West Bank Story” is a musical comedy about Israelis and Palestinians that takes place between two competing falafel stands in the West Bank. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005 and has since screened at over 115 festivals worldwide and earned 26 awards, is a humorous, hopeful take on a very serious and controversial subject, and Arab, Jewish and international audiences have overwhelmingly embraced the film and its message.