AUGUST 27 • 2020 | 48

ing private tuition and classes 
at Farber Hebrew Day School, 
Frankel Jewish Academy, the 
Birmingham Bloomfield Art 
Center and various community 
centers. She gave up teaching 
four years ago to concentrate on 
her own art.
In 2017, Sider and Rabbi 
Joseph Krakoff published a 
book, Never Enough Time, to help 
people grieving the loss of a 
loved one, and a companion col-
oring book for children. 
Sider spends many hours 
working in her first-floor home 
studio.
“I must create,
” she said. “It is 
the essence of my being. I am 
continually thinking about how 
I can translate my experience 
into art.
” 
An entire closet at the 
entrance to her studio is filled 
with large sheets of glass in doz-
ens of colors. Some are thick and 
opaque, resembling marble; oth-
ers are extremely thin and nearly 
transparent. 
Sider gets her glass, all of it 
hand-made, from vendors all 
over the world. She particularly 
likes Italian smalti, a type of 
glass produced in just two places 
in Italy. 
“Italian smalti is created with 
a focus on brilliance, purity of 
color, quality and consistency,
” 
she said. “The recipes for over 
3,000 colors have been handed 
down for centuries, often kept 
within family groups. The pro-
duction of the glass itself is con-

sidered an art form.
”
She starts the process with 
drawings, which she uses as a 
guide to create an acrylic paint-
ing. Sometimes she uses her own 
hands as models, taking numer-
ous selfies with her cellphone to 
get the right angle. She creates 
the mosaic by placing glass piec-
es atop the painting. 
Sider uses no grout in her 
portraits, so each piece of glass 
has to be cut precisely to match 
the pieces next to it. 
Scrupulous about detail, Sider 
points to the embroidered edge 
of a shirt in one of her portraits 
where there is a break in the 
“stitching.
” Yemenite Jews often 
intentionally included a tiny 
flaw in their work, whether a 
building or a garment, to show 
that nothing man-made could 
be perfect.
The mosaics have a fluid look, 
as the glass pieces reflect light 
differently at different times of 
the day. 
Sider hopes a museum will 
be interested in exhibiting the “I 
Am Yemenite” collection when it 
is complete.
Sider and her husband, Bill, 
an attorney, are members of 
Kehillat Etz Chaim in Oak Park. 
In addition to Joshua, they 
have 22-year-old twins, Ben 
and Eli, who live at home, and 
a Bernese-poodle mix named 
Juneau. When she’
s not in her 
studio, Sider spends time in her 
garden, which has been certified 
as a butterfly habitat. 

Michelle Sider at 
work in her studio.

continued from page 47

SPACE STUFF; MAYA AS 
KAMALA; AND PENN’
S 
PHILANTHROPY
Away is an original Netflix series 
that premieres Sept. 4. Hilary 
Swank stars as an American 
astronaut who must leave her 
husband and teen daughter 
behind to command an inter-
national space crew embarking 
upon a treacherous, three-year 
mission. There are six more char-
acters in the credits, and I pre-
sume they are crew members. 
Two are Jewish: Josh Charles, 
48, and Mark Ivanir, 51. 
Charles, the co-star of the 
hit TV drama The Good Wife, 
is the son of a Jewish father 
and a non-Jewish mother. He’
s 
described himself as Jewish. 
In 2013, he wed Sophie Flack, 
now 38. Flack, whose mother 
is Jewish, is a retired New York 
City ballet dancer and a novelist. 
The couple have two children. 
Avenir’
s family left Ukraine and 
settled in Israel when he was 4. 
He’
s worked steadily in mostly 
smallish film parts since 1988.
It looks like Maya Rudolph, 
48, will appear at least a couple 
of times on SNL when the series 
resumes sometime this fall (no 
date set yet). Rudolph played 
Sen. Kamala Harris in three SNL 
debate skits last season. (She 
was recently nominated for a 
guest appearance Emmy for 
these skits). 
Last week, she told the 
Hollywood Reporter that SNL cre-
ator/producer Lorne Michaels,
75, all but said she’
d be back: 
“He sent me a GIF of myself, as 
Kamala, in sunglasses, sipping a 
cocktail and saying, ‘
Oh no.’
”
Maya added that she doesn’
t 
think of herself as an impres-
sionist, but she has long noticed 
that when she quotes anyone, it 

somehow just comes out in their 
voice. She attributes this to being 
a good listener. 
After the first skit, Harris sent 
out this tweet: “That girl being 
played by Maya Rudolph on 
SNL? That girl was me.” 
Rudolph told the Reporter: “It 
[the tweet] was really clever and 
great, so I wrote her back. But I 
haven’
t had the chance to meet 
her. I would love to.”
I have no doubt that Sean 
Penn, 60, will win the humani-
tarian award at a future Oscars 
ceremony. Almost quietly, he’
s 
emerged as a master organizer 
of disaster relief. It began in 
2005, with help for Hurricane 
Katrina victims. Some then said it 
was a publicity stunt. But then, in 
2010, he founded and oversaw 
an organization (CORE) that did 
tremendous work to help Haitian 
earthquake victims.
In 2012, CORE and Penn did 
the same for Pakistanis, following 
an earthquake there. Last March, 
CORE began free COVID-19 
testing in California. Testing sites 
have expanded exponentially 
across the country (including 
Native American reservations). 
CORE works with local orga-
nizations, and its reputation is 
so high that major foundations 
are now funding it. (I have to add 
that in 2013 Penn used connec-
tions to facilitate the escape of 
a Jewish businessman who was 
being held in a Bolivian jail on 
dubious charges. Penn then took 
him to his LA home and helped 
nurse him to health.) 

NATE BLOOM
COLUMNIST

CASA ROSADA VIA WIKIPEDIA

Sean Penn

Arts&Life

celebrity jews