Vocal Musicians Make a Joyful Noise

By Lauren Korduner
Published on January 1, 2004

Human voices converge on the same note, echoing a haunting harmony -- arousing complicated emotions.

This has been the buzz surrounding an award-winning Jewish a cappella group, Shir Appeal, a group of college students from Massachusetts, who will bring their hypnotizing harmonies to Orange County's Temple Bat Yahm (TBY) for Shabbat evening service, Jan. 16. The group was named after Tufts University's mascot -- Jumbo the Elephant. The Hebrew phrase shir hapeal means "song of the elephant."

Eliot "E.J." Safirstein

Published on August 23, 2001

Eliot "E.J." Safirstein, an award-winning playwright, died July 31 at the age of 39.

A childhood survivor of cancer, Safirstein wrote the 1988 John Cauble Award-winning short play "Waterworks," which was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. His first television script, a "Family Law" episode titled "Generations," was broadcast on Dec. 11, 2000.

Pilot Project

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on April 6, 2000

During a pivotal moment in Elan Frank's award-winning documentary, "Blue and White in Red Square," a Russian-Israeli looks about his old Moscow neighborhood with an expression of dismay. Eugene had excitedly made the trip home with fellow musicians in the Young Israeli Philharmonic, many of them émigrés returning for the first time to post-Communist Russia. But as the violinist gazed at his decrepit old apartment building, surrounded by garbage and graffiti, his exuberance turned to bitter disappointment. "I feel like a stranger here," he said.