I’ve said this before and think I’ll say it again. Communities that have only 20 something's are not real communities, they are college campuses, or post college campuses, and they are generally not healthy environments.
One way to tell a healthy community is the presence of the elderly (y’all don’t count as elderly...unless you get the senior discount), Small children, homeless people, places of worship etc...

There's an interview with composer Daniel David Feinsmith online at the Teruah - Jewish Music blog (as well as at All About Jewish Theatre).

Here's a video that I just shot. I'm singing one of my favorite of my own songs (the only one for which I can remember all the lyrics and which works unaccompanied), "Lead Me In." You can hear it as a sort of hymn to the Shekhinah. The lyrics are online here.

Enjoy!

My longer post just got erased in the publication process, so here is the short and sweet version.

I'm coming to Cleveland in September to start Tiferet Artist Collective. I believe that Tiferet Artist Collective is to Tiferet Village as Compost is to the garden.
Through our creations, inquiry and networking we will organically create the foundation for a new community to grow.

Here's a real jaw-dropper. Someone who's apparently cited as a significant literary critic dismisses contemporary Jewish literature because "there's really nothing to write about."

Here's Vivan Gornick interviewed in the Boston Review:

As I finished loading my laundry into a dryer at a Berkeley laundromat this afternoon, I heard a woman's voice (with an accent that I couldn't place) shrieking from outside: "Get out from my face! You! Get out from my face! G'neef! G'neef!"

In a new post to her blog Five Feet Above Water, poet (and friend of Tiferet) Carly Sachs points to a good article by Randi Sherman in New York Jewish Week, "A New Take On Text Messages," on some exciting art work being done by Jewish women studying at the Drisha Institute in New York.

An idea just hit me for a work comparing experiences of a variety of more-or-less contemporary exiles, as inspired by the article in the previous post:

In this article, "Letter From an Israeli Soldier," an Israeli soldier writes of her feelings, years after participating in the evacuation and removal of a settlement. Political issues aside, this moving piece shows one of the emotional aspects of a particular Jewish experience, touching on issues of personal and communal responsibility, the sense of guilt, and aspects of exile even for some within Israel.

(Found via a post to the Vos Iz Neias (Yiddish: What's News?) blog.)

A link from one of my favorite blogs, The Jew and the Carrot, points to an article in the Washington Post about growing crops in urban areas. One surprising datum from the article: "George Ball, chairman of W. Atlee Burpee, the country's largest seed company, said he has seen a 30 to 40 percent increase in vegetable seed sales this year."