To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I want to address the myth of Israel as a “state for European settlers,” and the lack of awareness regarding Jews from Arab countries. The majority of the Jewish population of Israel are Sephardic Jews. These are Jews from North Africa and Middle Eastern countries that had lived under Arab/Moslem domination. When Israel became a state, these Jews were forced out of the countries they had lived in for centuries (Iraq, Libya, etc....

Apparently the bruisers in the cheap seats hadn’t heard about glasnost when the Soviet Dynamo Riga hockey team skated into the Chicago Stadium early this month to face the Blackhawks. The organ was blaring either “Stars and Stripes Forever” or “Grand Old Flag.” It was hard to tell. The guy standing next to us in a gray sweatshirt with ripped sleeves was getting the words wrong either way. His Old Style-soaked utterances were something to the effect: “Be proud of the red, white, and blue, you goddamn Commies–check the Commie bastard....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then as I thought that since Harold Washington was in the second year of his term then, the mayor couldn’t have been responsible for the bad condition of the sidewalks and streets, because the wear on them couldn’t have taken place during his time in office. Then I became more convinced about it, not only by reading that it was the previous mayor responsible for this neglect, but as I noticed that repair of the streets and sidewalks started taking place throughout Chicago....

An You Ready for Herman van Veen? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eight years ago van Veen appeared on Broadway and two years later he returned to New York for a brief engagement at Carnegie Hall. At the time the critics either loved or hated him. “There was no in-between,” remembers van Veen, who has learned not to let critics overly influence what he does onstage....

Blues musicians aren’t born old. The 60s-era “rediscovery” of aging blues greats gave birth to an enduring image of elderly gentlemen picking guitars on rural front porches or blowing harmonica in forsaken urban gin mills, wizened by years of anonymous hard living. But the wistful melancholy of Skip James or the haunted introspection of Lightnin’ Hopkins becomes even more remarkable when one listens to some of their early recordings and remembers that these songs were created by young men in their prime, abrim with youthful exuberance yet still capable of crafting sophisticated folk poetry....

Friday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gather together, Chicago. This promises to be a one-of-a-kind birthday party. For one thing, the guest of honor will attend in spirit only when Harold Washington’s 66th birthday is celebrated today with an all-out bash at the Charles Hayes Center (also known as the Packing House), 4859 S. Wabash. Harold himself may not be there to dance a jig with Mary Ella, smile that big smile of his, shake hands, kiss babies, and sing “My Kind of Town,” but count on every major progressive politician to try to fill his shoes....

Heard the one about Jones and Laverty? In 1981, at the age of 23, George Jones was charged with home invasion, aggravated battery, armed violence, attempted murder, and the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl. His trial–a death penalty case–was under way when Area Two violent crimes detective Frank Laverty came forward and testified that he had written a memo saying that Jones’s arrest had been a case of mistaken identity, and that the other detectives who had testified knew there was evidence implicating a different man....

One steamy night in early June about 400 residents of Uptown and Edgewater gathered in a local Chinese restaurant to toast the formation of a new neighborhood group. Most observers figure they have a long way to go. “I don’t want to knock their success, that’s not our purpose,” says Ken Bruck, executive director of the Edgewater Community Council, a group that has long feuded with ONE. “There’s room in this area for a lot of groups....

DISASTER SERIES You just can’t help laughing when you first see Joe Goode onstage in the Disaster Series. Goode solicits that response with placid exaggeration–a porkpie hat, big eyes, wide mouth, and drawn-out vowels. The work’s ten sections treat disasters large and small, private and public, shared and borne alone, blurring the distinctions between them and treating them as metaphors for each other. Laughter distances: for all its floods of angst and disappointment, the Disaster Series is never maudlin....

It’s a curious thing, the continuing protest over the redevelopment of Navy Pier–the $150 million plans made by the city and state are well under way, but opposition to them has never really ended. Most preservationists and open-lands activists want it to remain completely open to the public, with the pavilions at its western and eastern ends to be used for public expositions and civic gatherings. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The train was almost empty. It was late in the evening, that tired, uncertain hour of the night that marks the end of one day and the beginning of the next. Pages of the morning newspaper were still crawling slowly down the aisle, ignored and forgotten. At the far end of the car sat a security guard in his blue uniform, head resting heavily on his hands as he tried to stay awake....

TRUTH OR DARE DICE RULES “I know I’m not the best singer or the best dancer. I’m interested in pushing other people’s buttons.” Truth or Dare, which comes on as if it were truth and dare, sets out to give us both the “real” offstage Madonna, shot in grainy black and white, and the performing Madonna during her “Blond Ambition” tour, shot in color. But our sense of documentary reality is limited in a number of ways: by offscreen past-tense narration from Madonna identifying and contextualizing what we see, by jazzy crosscutting between color and black and white that prevents us from fully taking in either (occasionally the film breaks its own rules by offering brief offstage segments in color), and by Madonna’s relentless determination to theatricalize her life–or at least those parts that are lived in front of cameras....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The best thing about our block is and always has been the variety represented by the buildings and their occupants. Yuppie lawyers and brokers and executives (the “snooty, well-groomed newcomers,” no doubt), the “aging old guard,” and even the occasional neer-do-well tenant have managed to live here in comparative harmony. We’ll miss Tina’s and Rosie’s watchful eyes and willingness to accept UPS packages in a block nearly deserted on weekdays....

The first feature of Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann (Poetry in Motion, Comic Book Confidential) may be the best documentary on free jazz that we have. Produced with Bill Smith, editor of Coda magazine, the film consists mainly of interviews with and performances by four key musicians: solo pianists Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, trumpet player Bill Dixon (performing with a trio), and tenor saxophone player Archie Shepp (playing with a quartet); Taylor and Shepp also read some of their poetry....

Spike Lee’s high-powered, all-over-the-place movie about interracial romance (Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra), crack addiction (a remarkable turn by Samuel L. Jackson), breaking away from one’s family (a theme that crops up in at least five households, with Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Anthony Quinn, and Frank Vincent among the parents), and corporate advancement for blacks (Snipes again), chiefly set in two New York neighborhoods (Harlem and Bensonhurst). The disparate themes never quite come together, but with strong and inventive direction, juicy dialogue, and many fine performances–John Turturro, as Sciorra’s ex-boyfriend, is especially impressive, Lonette McKee is good as Snipes’s aggrieved wife, and Lee is also around briefly as Snipes’s best friend–you won’t be bored for a minute....

LUNCH Berkoff’s Lunch–first produced in London in 1981, a year after West–is also poetic, though this time Berkoff draws on T.S. Eliot, not Shakespeare. Like Eliot, Berkoff is fascinated by the spiritual and sexual sterility of modern life. And like Eliot, Berkoff is determined to reveal the latent poetry in contemporary speech. In fact, much of his dialogue sounds like Eliot, as when a character remarks, “The wind blows like spiderwebs across our face....

Lead Story Kevin E. Tibbs, 21, was arrested in Brunswick, Maryland, in February for attempting to steal a parking meter. When police stopped Tibbs he was trying to conceal it in his trousers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Randall Eugene Davis, who has only one leg, was arrested in Clarinda, Iowa, in March; he was suspected of stealing a truck that contained animals, among them a three-legged Labrador retriever....

Lead Story Turkey’s best-known circumcisionist, Kemal Ozkan, switched parties in last fall’s political campaign. He had been a member of the Motherland Party, which used Ozkan to attract crowds at rallies by offering voters free circumcisions for their children, but switched to the True Path Party, where he believes his skills will be better appreciated. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September in San Diego, Navy enlisted man Vernon Isip, 39, was charged with the felony of “dueling” following the death of a man with whom Isip was competing for a woman’s affections....

Don Rose was upset. Esposito, who had been the chef at the restaurant at 508 N. Clark for about a year, was known to his employees as Giovanni and spoke little English, though he told FBI agents he was John Michael Phelan (of Irish descent) and a native of Milwaukee, though he could barely pronounce “Milwaukee.” A federal magistrate at an identity hearing March 13 ruled he was in fact the fugitive Esposito, who fled Italy in 1984 to avoid a three-year prison sentence following an extortion conviction....

PULITZER PIPES: NEW MUSIC FOR THE ORGAN The church where I went as a kid didn’t have a very impressive organ or organist, so that was not the source of my initial attraction to the instrument. My friends and I were impressed with the fact that it was the instrument Lon Chaney played during the unmasking scene in The Phantom of the Opera. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s something about the organ–you either love it passionately or you hate it....