From The House of G-d to Club Dates
Anthony Wexler
Six months ago, a new face appeared on the stage at New York’s Bowery Ballroom.  Raised in a deeply religious home, Robert Randolph had never taken his music outside the church and the gospel community, which had provided his only audience to date.  It was a journey that Church leaders warned him against; armed with a strong faith in the universal power of music, Randolph was determined to play for those who would listen.  There would be no looking back....

Book Review: Lively Speculation Regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls
Avraham Bronstein
An intellectually honest approach to archeological scholarship requires making a clear demarcation between what the findings actually tell us and a scholar’s own attempt to fill in the gaps and present a complete theory of what was taking place. Regrettably, such an approach is for the most part the exception, not the rule, when it comes to books written for the general public, and even more so for a topic like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which continue to maintain an aura of mystery and controversy fifty years after their initial discovery....

Alice In Chains’ Layne Staley Dies at 34
Zion Orent
Led by singer Layne Staley’s deep, mournful, sometimes wailing voice, Alice in Chains stormed the early 1990s Grunge Rock scene.  Alice in Chains would go on to sell millions of CDs, be nominated for numerous Grammy Awards, and reach out to millions of fans across the country who could associate with their music.  With Staley’s death last week, the rock world lost a unique voice from one of its best bands....

Death Ain’t A Holiday
Steven I. Weiss
After a surprise earthquake, a group of American archaeology students escape death – or so they think.  The plot of Death Takes A Holiday has David Lambert (Ari Hoffman) and his gifted archaeology students sharing their anxieties and thoughts with Death (Avi Ehrenreich), disguised as Lambert’s old school chum, Paul Sirki, whom Death ran into on the way over....

When Psychology and Ultra-Orthodoxy Collide
Tzvi Kahn
Avraham, a thirty-five-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew of Yemenite origin, was communicating with demons that had red eyes and legs and feet like a chicken’s.  They appeared to him on a regular basis, threatening to kill him just as they had killed his father when Avraham was eight years old.  Whenever the demons appeared, Avraham would repeatedly strike his head against the wall and run around screaming for help....

The Shame of Thievery
Tzvi Kahn
“I’m not a thief,” insists Marcos (Darín), one half of the criminal pair that is the focus of Nine Queens.  He, with his cohort Juan (Pauls), pursue an elaborate plan to sell a counterfeit set of rare stamps to an affluent and sleazy collector.  Marcos’ refusal to acknowledge the obvious, as well as his cavalier, Mafia-like attitude toward robbery, is perhaps the most disconcerting element of writer and director Fabian Bielinsky’s new film from Argentina, which tells the story of Marcos and Juan’s intricate stamp-selling plot and the motivations of treachery and deceit that permeate their every move....