Primrose Road

"The FBI hunts down the most vicious criminals online," reads a half-page ad for the new thriller Untraceable, "but the most dangerous one is hunting them."

I'll bet that in the world of American crime thrillers, the FBI hunts down criminals via Google searches.

According to film and television, any and all information is available to us with a web browser and a couple of clever keystrokes. Computers never fail, except when they explode. On police/courtroom procedural dramas, often all it takes to catch a criminal is a simple search of a database of fingerprints, which never fails. And somehow, TV's fictional rendering of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit (Law and Order: SVU) is outfitted with gigantic hi-def flat screens that display information relevant to the case (a function served by simple marker-boards on the other two Law and Order series). Lawyers and court employees involved in jury selection have to worry about the CSI Effect because of the widespread belief that when it comes to criminal investigation, computers can do just about anything.

No wonder today's college students think that Google and Wikipedia are all-powerful.

There's a documentary titled Yiddish Theater: A Love Story coming to New York and LA this November. Dan Katzir, the documentary's director, posted news of the screenings to the Yugntruf mailing list last week, noting that the film tries to get across a "message about the importance of keeping Yiddish theater alive to a larger community."

"Enter the funny, larger-than-life world of Yiddish Theater today through this documentary film about the amazing woman who has kept the oldest running Yiddish Theater in America alive. Zypora Spaisman is a Holocaust survivor who conquers all hearts in her passion for art, life and Yiddish.

This heartwarming story of one unique woman's struggle portrays the fight of both an old art form to stay relevant and an old actress to find meaning and a stage in a society that worships youth.

Shot in real time in one of the coldest winters in NEW YORK over the eight days of Hanukkah, Zypora's theater has one week to raise funding to keep their show going. Many miracles occur during this week. But will they be enough to save this critically acclaimed Yiddish show?"

Passion, miracles, melodrama, larger-than-lifedness: sounds like Yiddish theater all right! I'm not much for "miracles," but I'm definitely looking forward to seeing this.