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.
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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.