>> ... Next Generation ...
Festivus!
Annual Christmas night party breaks
young adults from "Chinese and a movie."
0
n Christmas night, while
many still had their
holiday traditions of
eating Chinese food and
going to the movies, ComePlayDetroit
and CommunityNEXT, a department of
NEXTGen Detroit at the Jewish Federation
of Metropolitan Detroit, continued their
very own tradition: Festivus!
The third annual Festivus Party took
place at Fifth Avenue in Royal Oak,
where more than 400 young adults came
out for an evening of catching up with old
friends and making new ones.
In December 2010, Michigan changed
its laws, permitting alcohol to be served
on Christmas Day. Justin Jacobs, founder
of ComePlayDetroit, realized that so many
young Jewish adults do the same thing
year after year — Chinese food and the
movies — mainly out of boredom and
lack of other social opportunities.
Jacobs reached out to a friend of his,
Aaron Belen, an owner of the bar, and
requested that they open on Christmas.
Jacobs guaranteed at least 150-200
people would come out to the party.
CommunityNEXT was brought in as an
event partner, and the promotions began
for the first-ever Festivus Party in Detroit.
Six hundred people showed up in 2010,
and the party just keeps going. ❑
A New Way
To Explore
Jewish Culture
Yiddish Book Center launches program
for Jewish 20-somethings.
T
Matt Ran, Rachel Lachover and
Justin Jacobs
A view of the overall festivities
•
he Yiddish Book Center just
launched a new program
called Tent, which offers
20-somethings a chance to
explore their area of interest through
the lens of Jewish culture.
Tent is an immersive, intense series
of weeklong workshops for young
Jewish adults focusing on comedy (Los
Angeles in March), creative writing
(Amherst, Mass., in June) and theater
(New York City in August).
Each of these subjects — comedy,
creative writing, and theater — have
rich Jewish histories and Tent's goal
is to provide an opportunity for
participants to connect with those
histories.
The workshops are designed to help
participants understand their place
as Jews in a multicultural society, to
answer their questions about who they
are and where they come from, and to
help them explore the vast, complex
and immediately relevant cultural side
of their identity.
"Modern culture can inspire us
to think imaginatively about what
Jewishness means. And vice versa.
Many of the young Jews I know feel
more connected to Jewish culture
than to religion or politics. Tent will
be about exploring how these cultural
enthusiasms —for comedy, cooking,
law and so many other fields — can
become a bigger part of the national
discussion of what it means to be
Jewish," says Josh Lambert, Tent's
program director.
Each of the workshops offered in
2013 is free to accepted participants;
the only cost is travel. In the following
years, Tent will grow to include 30
programs by 2016.
The comedy workshop, March 17-24
in LA, will explore stand-up, improv
and sketch forms with comedians from
the country's leading comedy troupes.
Participants will meet with performers
and writers working in film and
television, see Sarah Silverman's show
at Largo, talk shop with Jill Soloway,
writer and producer of Weeds and Six
Feet Under and more.
Josh Lambert, Tent program
director
The creative writing workshop,
June 2-9 in Amherst, will be geared
toward aspiring and practicing writers.
Participants will have their fiction
workshopped by their peers and
critically acclaimed visiting writers,
meet a New York-based literary agent
and the NEA's literature director Ira
Silverberg, and more.
The theater workshop, Aug. 4-11
in New York City, offers the chance to
meet actors, playwrights, and directors,
participate in a Q&A with playwright
Tony Kushner, and attend several
current theatrical productions, Off-
Broadway and elsewhere.
Applications and information are
available at tentsite.org . Applications for
the comedy workshop are due Jan. 7,
2013, and can be submitted online.
❑
Mike Chosid, Rabbi Yisrael Pinson, Aaron Belen and Sara Bloomberg
ill
January 3 • 2013
21