This Sunday evening the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center’s Summer Institute screens a powerful documentary, Four Seasons Lodge: Survival of the Joyous, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 at the door.

In 1979, nearly 100 German and Polish survivors of Nazi death camps created a sprawling retreat in New York’s Catskill Mountains, calling it the Four Seasons Lodge. Members of this unique community gathered for decades to celebrate with good food, all-night dancing, and raucous poker games.

Friday, June 19: Overcast, gray day. High humidity. Downtown Water street Vineyard Haven is bustling with pedestrian traffic in the afternoon. Clouds lighten. Brief sunshine. Clouds thicken late.

A concert of new work by Michelle Mola and Dudley Brooks, two innovative choreographers chosen from an international pool of over 100 applicants, opens this weekend at the Yard on Middle Road in Chilmark.

Mr. Brooks’ work has a sense of the ridiculous; he’s funny. This weekend, Brooks will premiere D was a Dancer, featuring Edward Lear nonsense poems set to music, and A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Dance — the dance world will never be the same!

Palestinian interfaith expert Aziz Abu Sarah, a peace building practitioner of 10 years, will offer a first-hand perspective on the prospects for a negotiated, two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role activists can play in achieving it at 7 p.m. on Friday, June 26, free at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center on Centre street in Vineyard Haven.

Art Every Day

Featherstone Center for the Arts is pleased to announce a new arts program for children. Art Every Day for children entering grades 1-6 will begin Monday, June 29 and will continue each week through the week of August 17. Art Every Day will be offered Monday through Friday from 2 to 5 p.m. for a cost of $30 per class. Art teachers, Nancy Blank and Emme Brown will provide hands-on instruction in a different art medium for each week day.

“Gentlemen, I am tickled pink to be instructing you colored fliers,” announces white Captain O’Hurley (Joe Forbrich) to his black World War II aviation cadets, in a voice dripping more sarcasm than the crankcase of a P-40 Warhawk extrudes oil. In truth, at the time that the first black airmen were trained at Tuskegee Army Airfield in 1941, many believed the cadets lacked the intelligence and skill to fly a single-engine or multi-engine plane.

They were wrong.

M ost people are familiar with the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Stick to what works. Don’t take unnecessary risks.

It’s a bit of advice that Nancy Shaw Cramer has chosen happily to ignore throughout her career.

Making choices and changes, even riskier ones, has been vital to Ms. Shaw Cramer’s success in the Island art world. It was on a bit of a providential whim that the former tapestry weaver decided to move to the Island in the first place, and to transform herself from artist to art proprietor.

By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

Fishing boats are back out in Vineyard Sound, after what has been a long stretch of really bad weather, not just on the land, on the water.

The Menemsha fleet returned to fishing for fluke on Wednesday, after being kept shoreside since last weekend because of the wind.

“I haven’t fished for three days,” said Capt. Craig Coutinho of the Menemsha dragger Viking on Tuesday night. “The fluke fishing was going pretty good, before we got this.”

It is absolutely not true that I am not a dog lover. 

My favorite dogs in the woods, though, are the dogwoods, those flowering beauties whose bark is worse than their bite. And, contrary to canines, you can teach an old dogwood a new trick: that of fantastic flowering each year, and pollen dispersion far and wide.

By LYNNE IRONS