Jewish Art Research Articles

Reimagining Judaism

Reimagining Judaism

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

Idolatry and Fixation: Modern Jewish Thought and the Criticism of Cosmetically and Technologically Perfected Female Faces in Contemporary Popular Culture

Abstract This article argues that the ‘halakhically’ (legally) governed representational techniques employed by Jewish art are founded upon a counter-idolatrous theology of appearance: both human and divine. In drawing upon a range of Jewish sources from the ancient to the contemporary period that understand idolatry as an estrangement of the world from God, this article presents a Jewish feminist theological critique of alienation in the late modern popular visual regime, while suggesting that it is nonetheless possible for public culture to behold the divine image in images of the human without such images becoming idolatrous.

Resident Artist: Anonymous No More: Carol Hamoy's Visible Women

American artist Carol Hamoy belongs to the growing number of Jewish feminist artists who are addressing biblical themes in visual art.1 For Hamoy, recovering the histories and lives of women has been the central focus of a long and productive career. Her multimedia installation The Invisible Part of the Children of Israel was a centerpiece of MATRONITA, an exhibition of international Jewish feminist art presented by the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, Israel, last year. Most of the artists in that exhibit engaged with and provoked critical examination of Orthodox practice and belief. Hamoy’s exceptional piece instead evokes the ancient past and its imprint upon our consciousness. Indeed, it reshapes that imprint. The Invisible Part of the Children of Israel is emblematic of Hamoy’s meticulous scholarly research and carefully honed skills as an assemblage sculptor/seamstress. “Anonymous was a woman,” goes the feminist dictum, and this complex work, deceptively simple in presentation, makes that truism explicit. It does so by training a brilliantly nuanced lens on what is missing. Hamoy calls herself “a storyteller and an educator.” In evoking stories of women while simultaneously referencing the womanly arts of sewing and needlework, she has been well served by her family’s background in the New York City garment industry

“The Redeemer to Arise from the House of Dan”: Samson, Apocalypticism, and Messianic Hopes in Late Antique Galilee

Abstract In the last five years, two mosaics depicting Samson’s biblical exploits have been discovered in Lower Eastern Galilee. Both mosaics were found in synagogues that date to the Late Roman/Byzantine period and are located in close proximity to Tiberias. Because of the rarity of Samson in ancient Jewish art and Samson’s lack of historical ties to the region, the significance of these mosaics requires explanation. This article explores this significance by considering the socio-religious context of the region in which the mosaics were discovered. Sources indicate that apocalyptic thought and messianic expectations flourished in Jewish Galilee throughout late antiquity, particularly in the vicinity of Tiberias. In addition, liturgical texts show that some Jews in this period viewed Samson as a biblical type of the future messiah—a redeemer of the past who foreshadowed Israel’s eschatological redemption. This confluence of evidence suggests that the Samson mosaics can be viewed as apocalyptic images reflecting messianic hopes that were popular in late antique Galilee.

An Alternative Post-War Jewish Art World

An Alternative Post-War Jewish Art World Andrew Wasserman Annie Cohen-Solal . Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Pp. xxv, 540. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN 1400044278. Vanessa Corby . Eva Hesse: Longing, Belonging, and Displacement. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2010. Pp. xvii, 250. Hardcover $29.95. ISBN 9 781845115449. David Kaufmann . Telling Stories: Philip Guston's Later Works. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. 118. Paper $24.95. ISBN 9780520265769. In his April 8, 1965 New York Times article "The Jewish Museum: What is It, Why is it, and What Next?" art critic Sam Hunter identified the uptown Manhattan museum as pulled in two directions: one, it served as a repository of historic ceremonial Judaica, defined by continued ties to the Jewish Theological Seminary; two, it functioned as an exhibition space for contemporary art appearing to "have no immediate bearing on Jewish affairs." This division was first announced in 1957 with the exhibition Artists of the New York School: Second Generation and exacerbated by the show 1970 Software Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. One can still find it in this year's Kehinde Wiley exhibition, World Stage: Israel. Such exhibitions reveal a complex institutional definition of what constitutes Jewish art within greater contemporary art practice. In remarks in a1966 lecture at the museum, later published in Commentary as "Is There Jewish Art?" art critic Harold Rosenberg's declared, "First, they build a Jewish Museum, then they ask, Is there a Jewish art?" He proposed several possible criteria for establishing "Jewish art" as a specific category: art produced by Jews, art concerned with identifiable Jewish subjects, Jewish ceremonial objects, Jewish folk art and ephemera, and "metaphysical Judaica." With each category deemed unsatisfying, Rosenberg determined, "There is no Jewish art" if one attends exclusively to stylistic choices and practical function. Instead, he echoed Hunter's criterion of an "intellectual sympathy" that evolved from a Jewish Enlightenment culture and that accommodates challenging and novel art production. This attempt to align post-war American art with Jewish intellectual tradition simply on the basis of an under-analyzed, culturally specific appreciation for advanced culture is troubling to say the least. Rather than tackle the topic of a "Jewish art" from the standpoint of stylistics and utility (too limited) or [End Page 71] intellectual rigor (too broad), it is perhaps better to query the practitioners at this subject's center. Recent attempts at canon formation have generated lists including standard mid-century figures of Jewish-American heritage, including Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Ben Shahn, and Leonard Baskin. However, as the exhibition records of the Jewish Museum demonstrate, these lists demand amending. Three recent books—Vanessa Corby's Eva Hesse: Longing, Belonging and Displacement, David Kaufmann's Telling Stories: Philip Guston's Later Works, and Annie Cohen-Solal's Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli—offer the possibility of such an alternative lens. Each considers the career of a major figure of post-war American art whose work is informed by a rejection of, embrace of, or ambivalence toward Jewish identity. Additionally, the texts analyze how negotiating a multi-hyphenate identity in personal and professional realms under intense assimilationist pressures affected the reception of both the art and the artist within their historical age as well as today. Although not always successful as individual scholarly exercises, these texts collectively propose substituting a "Jewish art" world defined by aesthetic-based typologies for a Jewish "art world," to borrow Howard Becker's term. Beyond just artists, an art world expands to include the collectors, curators, dealers, critics, and historians who contribute to the creation, presentation and reception of artwork. This world runs alongside and intersects with a greater post-war Jewish American culture. As such, it offers an opportunity to consider this art world's relevance to shifting definitions governing what constitutes contemporary Jewish art. Corby provides an ambitious study of the connections between gender, ethnic, and religious heritage, and personal trauma, that shaped not only Eva Hesse's work, but also scholarship about Hesse over the past four decades. The text merges Ann Wagner's important historically-grounded work on...

Open Windows: Jewish Refugee Artists in Scotland during the Twentieth Century

This case study on the work and influence of four Jewish artists in Glasgow during the early years of the Second World War reviews cultural transfer within the wider context of Jewish history in Scotland. This review suggests that this incidence of cultural transfer was mainly achieved through personal contacts and networks and emphasises the importance of the presence of an established Jewish population. It also shows that parts of Scottish society were prepared to absorb refugee influences, while the Jewish artists under review adopted novel forms of cultural production, incorporating their individual and group experiences as well as the influence of the wider society.

Irreconcilable: Ethics and Aesthetics for Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin

Irreconcilable:Ethics and Aesthetics for Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin Rochelle Tobias (bio) Over the past thirty years Benjamin scholarship has convincingly shown the importance of Judaism for Benjamin's thought from the early writings on language to the later reflections on history, modernity, and urban life. The same strain is evident in Benjamin's critique of metaphysics, as exemplified in the Christian notion of grace. Benjamin dismisses the notion of the redemption of the individual from history and replaces it with the idea of the redemption of the historical past in a mystical now or punctual present.1 What has received surprisingly little attention is the impact of Judaism on Benjamin's reflections on aesthetics in essays like "Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin" and "Goethe's Elective Affinities," in which he grapples with the relation of art to life and the truth, or essence, of semblance (Schein). While Benjamin's thought need not be confined to religious or Judaic concerns, the reluctance of critics to identify Judaic elements in his aesthetic writings has reinforced an existing prejudice. According to this prejudice, Jewish art is based in the prohibition of graven images, [End Page 665] which amounts to saying that Jewish art consists in the dissolution of its images or the negation of its representations. Among the twentieth-century thinkers to adopt this position was Theodor Adorno, who made the biblical injunction against graven images into a defining feature of modern art.2 While Benjamin understood the limits of the aesthetic image, he did so within a broader frame. Art was not to be confused with religion or ethics, lest they both become myth. (I will elaborate on this point later.) In the essay on the Elective Affinities, he distinguishes between art and ethics in a startling way: by invoking the Jewish Day of Atonement (in German, der Versöhnungstag) to oppose the sacrificial logic of Goethe's text. According to this logic, the novel's heroine Ottilie must die to make up for the rift she causes in Eduard and Charlotte's marriage not through any deed, but her mere presence in the household. Benjamin emphasizes that Ottilie is not guilty of any misdeed, any trespass against the marriage since such conduct would automatically disqualify her death as a sacrifice. Rather she can expiate the sins of others only to the extent that she is not tainted by sin, like the Nazarene Jesus whom Benjamin refers to at the end of the essay.3 Benjamin readily admits that the framing of Ottilie's death as a sacrifice belongs to "the deepest intentions" (GS I: 140) of the novel. At the same time, he insists that there is another religious model at work in the Elective Affinities that requires neither sacrifice nor the negation of one's most ardent wishes. This model comes to the fore in the novella "The Marvelous Young Neighbors" embedded in the main text, which Benjamin [End Page 666] reads not only as an inversion of the novel's plot but also, and more importantly, as an inversion of the logic underlying it. The novella, like the novel, concerns two lovers who are drawn toward each other, although they have given their hand in marriage to someone else. (In the novel Charlotte and Eduard are married; in the novella the young girl is engaged to an older acquaintance.) But unlike the characters in the novel who passively endure rather than actively challenge their fate, the protagonists in the novella risk everything, including their life, to realize their love in this world instead of the next. They are willing, in other words, to sacrifice themselves, which makes the "wondrous" or "marvelous" outcome of their act of defiance all the more astonishing. Benjamin describes the marvel as follows: Weil nämlich wahre Versöhnung mit Gott keinem gelingt, der nicht in ihr—soviel an ihm ist—alles vernichtet, um erst vor Gottes versöhntem Antlitz es wieder erstanden zu finden, darum bezeichnet ein todesmutiger Sprung jenen Augenblick, da sie [die Liebenden der Novelle]—ein jeder ganz für sich allein vor Gott—um der Versöhnung willen sich einsetzen. Und in solcher Versöhnungsbereitschaft erst ausgesöhnt...

Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre Rebecca Rovit Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 304 pp. $49.95. Historians and arts scholars have long discussed the rightful place of German-born Jews in German society and the tenuous relationship that they held historically vis-à-vis their non-Jewish-born fellow citizens. The curious paradigm of both belonging to German society and at the same time being apart from it distinguished Jews in Germany for centuries, despite the Enlightenment and subsequent freedoms for Jews within the unified Germany of 1871. During Wilhelmine Germany and in the Weimar Republic, Jews typically gravitated to occupations which reflected this trend. So it is not surprising that a majority of assimilated German Jews entered independent professions related to the arts, especially the theatre. What role did Jewish artists play in shaping modern German theatre during the late nineteenth- and twentieth centuries? What effect did avant-garde theatre trends have on German Jews and their self-identity? Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem's fascinating, edited collection of essays, Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, begins to address such long-neglected questions. With the expert collaboration of twelve scholars, the recent addition to editor Thomas E. Postlewait's prize-winning series, Studies in Theatre History and Culture, offers an unusually varied palette of perspectives on the extent to which German Jews not only contributed to, but co-created modern German theatre. The editors, known for their scholarship in performance history, delimit their study as dating from 1871 to 1933 and encompassing non-traditional forms of theatre, known as "modernist." The book's organization devotes roughly the first half of the book to how theatre constituted Jewish identity in Germany. Many of the authors address the notion of Jewish modernization in terms of a remaking of self, acculturation, and self-transformation when Jewish actors performed their identity. In the book's second chapter, for example, [End Page 198] Steven E. Aschheim posits the theatre as an actual "physical and psychosymbolic site" within which the complexities of Jewish post-Enlightenment identity played out (p. 27). Other scholars like Bernhard Greiner and Peter M. Marx, in Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, reconsider Jewish identity and the theatre through the lens of Jewish philosopher Theodore Lessing and literary critic Arnold Zweig's provocative twentieth-century writings on the Jewish actor's propensity for mimicry and talent for physical expressiveness. The book's thematic focus on Jewish theatre artists within the German theatre resonates in each chapter wherein authors emphasize the shaping force that Jews had on their Gentile theatre colleagues. Among the anthology's strengths, in addition to excellent editing, are the thematic correspondences between the chapters. Many of the assembled essays inform one another from different points of view; and yet the separate essays also provide the reader with an overlay of topics, creating a dialogic discourse between chapters. In this way, Malkin, in her essay about Jewish actors on the German Expressionist Stage (Chapter 9), refers to the modernist director Leopold Jessner's concept of transformation (1922) by which the German Jewish actor "navigated" between being and impersonation, passing between the Jewish and the German identities enfolded within him (p. 168). Anat Feinberg (Chapter 13) offers a biography of Jessner and his influence on modernist German theatre. Feinberg's chapter thus builds on Malkin's analysis of the Jewish actor's capacity for on-stage doubleness as a social strategy to hide his identity as a Jew, while revealing a specific Jewish expressive creativity. Read together, these chapters allow the reader to better assess theatre production by Jews during the 1920s, while understanding something about Jewish identity. So too do several authors provide essays on such theatre innovators and directors as Otto Brahm (born Abrahamsohn) and Max Reinhardt (born Goldmann) and their vital contribution to German theatre. Peter Jelavich (Chapter 3) situates these theatre impresarios and their artistic influence within Imperial Germany, while Lisa Silverman discusses Reinhardt's personal metamorphosis and the impact of Yiddish theatre on his grand...

The Critic as Patron and Mediator: Max Brod, Modern Art, and Jewish Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Prague

Abstract Early in his career the critic Max Brod (1884–1968) distinguished himself as a patron of modern art and a mediator among competing ethnic and religious groups. Beginning in 1907, Brod became one of the foremost supporters of Jewish artists in Prague, and an advocate for their alliance with non-Jewish contemporaries, both German and Czech. He promoted them in his critical writing and editorial work, collected their art, and introduced them to other sponsors of modernism. Through his patronage work, he shaped how the identities of these artists were presented to the public, positioned their art in contexts that endorsed acculturation and integration, and minimized perceptions of artistic and national difference. Yet Brod's outlook on Jewish artistic identity changed over time. During the First World War, as Brod became active in the Zionist movement, he began to consider that Jewish identity might productively be marked and expressed in modern art, although he remained reluctant to designate specific artistic forms and subjects as distinctly Jewish.

Eine verwandtschaftliche Verbindung (A Connection of Kinship)? Jewish-Turkish Alliances in Contemporary Jewish Writing in German

“Every time I racked my brains about how to overcome the distance between Esra and myself, I would ask myself why we were so close”, muses Adam, the Jew of Armenian and Czech heritage who is the narrator-protagonist of Esra, Maxim Biller’s second novel.1 This sentence captures particularly well the feelings of proximity, nearness and irreconcilable difference experienced by the literary inventions of contemporary Jewish authors as they attempt to relate to Germany’s largest minority: the Turks. Esther Dischereit suggests, moreover, that Germany’s Jewish and Turkish populations share common ground, and that a closer relationship with Germany’s Turkish minority might prove less painful than diasporic Jewish identities, which give rise to “conflicts, marginalization and hurt”.2 Relationships between Jewish and non-hyphenated Germans and Austrians seem fraught with difficulties: philo- and antisemitism, misplaced curiosity, and thoughtlessness, as Tanya Ury, a Jewish artist resident in Cologne, writes: A German artist proposed that I participate in a collaborative project in which I was to research her Nazi family and she, my Jewish family. Taken aback at the enormous insensitivity of her request … , I calmly told her that she might be avoiding the issue by offloading her responsibility onto me.3

Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (review)

Reviewed by: Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Klára Moricz Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. By K. M. Knittel. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. [xiii, 201 p. ISBN 9780754663720. $ 99.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. On 29 March 1935 Arnold Schoenberg gave a speech in Los Angeles about his experience of growing up as an "Austrian-Jewish artist." Among the challenges faced by Jewish artists he singled out the lack of self-confidence, caused by Jews' acceptance of Wagner's philosophy: "[y]ou were not a true Wagnerian if you did not believe in Deutschtum, in Teutonism; and you could not be a true Wagnerian without being a follower of his anti-Semitic essay, Das Judentum in der Music, 'Judaism in Music'" (cited from Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 503). In her book, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, K. M. Knittel sets out to show the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Viennese music criticism of Mahler's time. She is not the first to notice the anti-Semitic clichés frequently used by critics to condemn Mahler's work. Her project is not to point out the most blatantly anti-Semitic attacks on Mahler, but to show that even seemingly objective critics were culturally conditioned to judge Mahler not primarily as a musician but as a Jew. She consciously excludes from her discussion the most virulently anti-Semitic papers, focusing her attention on Vienna's leading critics: Julius Korngold, Robert Hirschfeld, Max Kalbeck, Hans Liebstöckl, Max Graf, and Theodor Helm. She is little concerned with these critics' backgrounds, ideologies, or aesthetic convictions (we learn only on page 131 that Hirschfeld himself was Jewish), only with their use of language, more precisely with parallels she finds between their writings and that of Wagner in his infamous Judaism in Music. She aims to demonstrate that the same language still permeates scholarship on Mahler today and suggests that we can free ourselves of its anti-Semitic implications only by acknowledging its presence and its origin. In the six chapters of her book Knittel attempts to systematically deconstruct the language of Mahler's critics, devoting separate chapters to Alfred Roller's and Alma Mahler's descriptions of Mahler's body ("Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler"), to Wagner's poisonous essay and its resonances with old and new anti-Semitic tropes ("Das Judentum in der Musik"), to Viennese reviews of Mahler's symphonies ("Die Wiener Kritiker") and of Richard Strauss's symphonic poems ("Das Problem Richard Strauss"), concluding with the evaluation of Mahler scholarship in the present ("Eine musikalische Physiognomik"). Knittel reads descriptions of Mahler's body against Oskar Panizza's viciously anti-Semitic short story, "Der operirte Jud" (1893), in which a Jewish character, Itzig Faitel Stern, tries to erase his Jewishness by undergoing surgery. As expected, the counterfeit fails and at the end of the story Stern's real features become visible to the horror of his gentile bride. (One wonders why Knittel, while meticulously avoiding openly anti-Semitic attacks on Mahler, [End Page 359] chose such a blatantly anti-Semitic text as a model against which she measures the much more subtle anti-Semitic language of Mahler's critics.) Knittel argues that in the introduction to his picture book Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: E. P. Tal, 1922), Roller, a visual artist with keen eyes, acknowledges Jewish stereotypes by actively going against them as he depicts Mahler's naked body as perfect and beautiful. In Roller's avoidance of describing Mahler's genitals (and hence addressing "the obvious issue of circumcision," p. 32) Knittel sees inadvertent emphasis on "its association with castration." One wonders what Roller could have written about the topic to escape suspicion. Much more convincing is Knittel's discussion of Alma Schindler's ambiguous relationship to Mahler's Jewish background. As her diaries attest, Schindler had to overcome her strong anti-Semitism in order to marry Vienna's most celebrated musician. Her attraction to fame and glamour trumped her bias...

Looking Jewish: The State of Research on Modern Jewish Art

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.Lionel Trilling, notebook entry, 1928I know of no writer in English who has added a micromillimeter to his status by realizing his Jewishness, although I know of some who have curtailed their promise by trying to heighten their Jewish consciousness.Lionel Trilling, Contemporary Jewish Record, 1944DEFINITIONS AND HISTORIOGRAPHYSCHOLARSHIP ON MODERN JEWISH ART has developed critical mass only in the past two decades, after an uneven pioneer phase most often confined to museum exhibition catalogues and closely researched articles in the once indispensable Journal of Jewish Art (1974- 88). * From Israel (yet written in English), Jewish Art's successor, Ars Judaica (2005-), is now complemented by the first American-edited journal dedicated to Jewish art, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture (2007-). Several anthologies have recently emerged, such as Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd's Complex. Identities (2001) and Barbara KirshenblattGimblett and Jonathan Karp's The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (2008).2 Much serious work still appears either as museum publications or articles, mostly in journals of Jewish art or Jewish studies.3 Yet Jewish art history continues to suffer from a lack of respectability outside Israel; indeed, the prevailing perception within the discipline of art history does not yet recognize Jewish art as a subfield, such as African American art, let alone Christian or Islamic art. Art history more typically is delineated by nationality, another of the definitions of Jewish difference, and a starting point for some current self-conscious Jewish art scholarship. This essay will discuss such recent contributions to the field of Jewish art, alongside three older landmark books- enduring models for interdisciplinary, historically grounded scholarship in modern Jewish art - by Richard Cohen, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, and Avram Kampf.4General historiographical problems concerning the assessment of Jewish art formed the subject of a 1999 anthology, edited by Catherine Soussloff.5 The first segment considers biases of the field of art history against the very notion of Jewish art, in part due to the widespread misimpression that the Second Commandment prohibited Jews from making pictorial imagery. lisa Saltzman, who also later devoted important books to the subject, tackles the issue of art after the Shoah, particularly for a gentile German like Anselm Kiefer.6 Soussloff's book also engages with how a historian or critic's identity shapes his (in all cases) approach to Jewish art/ Specifically, Margaret Olin examines nineteenth-century art history surveys and their exclusions of Jewish monuments from a dominant progressive narrative, conceived in national and racial terms. Remaining essays on early Jewish art historians and critics, from Aby Warburg to Clement Greenberg, evaluate emerging twentieth-century Jewish visions of the discipline of art history, whether Renaissance or modern.8The old canard about Jewish image-phobia remains widespread. Two recent books, however, have gone far to redress the commonplace that Second Commandment prohibitions inhibited, even prevented, Jewish visual culture. Kaiman Bland, also a contributor to Soussloff's volume, deconstructs the misperception. His 2000 book chronicles a history of ideas starting with German nineteenth-century stereotypes. Even Kant and Hegel regarded Jews as a verbal people who preferred abstraction and monotheism to the materiality and potential idolatry of art objects - hearing and the word dominated over sight and the image.9 But not only racist outsiders, including Richard Wagner, tarred Jews with this limitation. Prominent insiders, such as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, conceded this (potentially self-fulfilling) historical truth as well. While the very existence of any tradition of Jewish art remained steeped in modern debates over the meanings of both art and Jewish identity, Bland also shows that a premodern consensus actually affirmed Jewish art amid lively discussion (as well as debate) by medieval and early modern rabbis. …

Enough Already!: It's Deborah Kass's Turn to Take the Stage

Contemporary painter Deborah Kass appropriates the forms of post-war masters such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Frank Stella in her work, but her subject choices are often conscious manifestations of her nostalgic identifications with middlebrow Jewish artists and Broadway musicals. Her radical take on nostalgia draws from lyrics, idiomatic sayings, and iconic Jewish figures to promote a progressive rather than conservative agenda. Kass's performative interventions insert her feminist-Jewish-lesbian self squarely at the center of visual culture's frame and on the stage of art's history.

Synagogue Art and the Rabbis in Late Antiquity

This article considers the relationship of synagogue art from the third century C. E. onward to the rabbinic literature of the first millennium C. E. A number of central and prominent artistic remains in synagogues appear to reflect a significant distinction from how the sages would have related to such representations. Disparity between rabbinic texts and early Jewish art can be found in images connected with emperor worship and representations of the seven-branched Temple menorah, the story of the binding of Isaac, and human nudity. Many prominent depictions and symbols appearing in synagogues stand in stark contrast to rabbinic views and preferences. The Rabbis' relationship to the synagogue reflected their overall recognition and acceptance of the institution, although not without a fair amount of ambivalence. They never assumed (nor were they accorded) leadership positions in the synagogue, and when they commented on what transpired therein they might have been heeded or simply ignored. The bet midrash, and not the synagogue, was the focus for rabbinic activity; rabbis were as peripheral to the synagogue as it was to them.

Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj (review)

Imagining Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj, by Aaron Rosen. London: Legenda, 2009. 128 pp. $89.50. The question is art? has preoccupied scholars over the decades, although such discussions have recently waned even if there is still a lack of consensus (including no consensus on whether a consensus is necessary). As early as the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901, Martin Buber mounted a special exhibition of art, which explicitly aimed identify and define elements in visual art. Critics argue whether art should be limited exclusively any art made by a Jew, independent of content, or else whether both the artist and the artwork must be identifiably Jewish, expressly engaging the experience, religious or worldly. In other words, a nineteenth-century portrait of a Gentile sitter by German artist Moritz Daniel Oppenheim would be considered a Jewish work of art, just as much as objects with obvious content, such as a Holocaust memorial by American sculptor Louise Nevelson, a landscape scene of early twentieth-century Palestine by Israeli painter Reuven Rubin, or an eleventh-century German Chanukiah. This issue is obviously most relevant for painting and sculpture from the modern period, namely after the Haskalah, whereas ancient and medieval artwork, or even ceremonial objects, are easily accepted as art. Intrigued by what art may or may not be, well outlined in an introduction that thoughtfully elucidates his methods, Aaron Rosen takes a different tack this question. Rosen builds on Margaret Olin's rejection of the notion that art must be defined, and her argument that instead art can speak'Jewish' (p. 1) at various times, depending on how it is tead and who views it. Accordingly, in his slim volume, Rosen adopts a non-definitional approach (p. 5) art, manifested by fleshing out the non-Jewish artistic influences on the work of the three artists noted in his title: Marc Chagall, Philip Guston, and R. B. Kitaj. That is say, rather than offering an overarching theory of art comprised of characteristics - style, subject, function, or authorship, for example - Rosen looks at works individually, discerning Jewi sh qualities. Although a trained theologian, Rosen shows sensitivity visual form, not treating art as illustrations of a moment or cultural experience, as non -art historians often do. In his chapter on Marc Chagall, Rosen considers several of the artist's biblical works, but especially his crucifixions, and in reference artistic precedents, notably German painter Matthias Gruenwald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1510-15). Using the model of family, Rosen argues that Chagall's art creates a lineage as well as a dialogue with the past and offers a way understand how a artist connects with a decidedly Christian history of art. The second chapter explores Philip Guston's late work, when he returned figuration after decades of painting as an Abstract Expressionist. Rosen concentrates on two images, and ones that on the surface would not appear be Jewish - Deluge II (1975) and Green Rug (1976) - examining them in conjunction, respectively, with two fifteenth-century paintings that are decidedly not Jewish: Paolo Uccello's The Great Flood (c. 1447) and Piero della Francesca's The Flagellation (c. 1455). Playing on Guston's comment that he hoped to make a Golem (p. 51), Rosen understands the artist as wanting mold the clay of older art, so speak, into something newer and of his own. …

Synagogue Art and the Rabbis in Late Antiquity

This article considers the relationship of synagogue art from the third century C. E. onward to the rabbinic literature of the first millennium C. E. A number of central and prominent artistic remains in synagogues appear to reflect a significant distinction from how the sages would have related to such representations. Disparity between rabbinic texts and early Jewish art can be found in images connected with emperor worship and representations of the seven-branched Temple menorah, the story of the binding of Isaac, and human nudity. Many prominent depictions and symbols appearing in synagogues stand in stark contrast to rabbinic views and preferences. The Rabbis’ relationship to the synagogue reflected their overall recognition and acceptance of the institution, although not without a fair amount of ambivalence. They never assumed (nor were they accorded) leadership positions in the synagogue, and when they commented on what transpired therein they might have been heeded or simply ignored. The bet midrash, and not the synagogue, was the focus for rabbinic activity; rabbis were as peripheral to the synagogue as it was to them.

Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist (review)

Reviewed by: Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist Tiel Lundy Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, DVD, directed by Andrew D. Cooke: Montilla Pictures, original release 2007, DVD/Bluray 2010. Comic book superheroes have a penchant for sartorial show. Both Spiderman and Superman sport the garish combination of bright red and blue long underwear. Batman’s costume, though more muted in hue, is no less flashy for its many accessories—fire-retardant cape, utility belt, and Bat-a-rang. Far more understated is the Spirit (a.k.a. Denny Colt), the 1940s creation of artist Will Eisner (1917–2005). Attired in the standard businessman’s suit and tie, the Spirit’s only superhero garb consists of a mask, gloves, and modish fedora. (Indeed, to call the Spirit a “superhero” is a misnomer itself, the term not yet a part of the comic book lexicon.) That the Spirit wears even the minimal requirements of a costume reflects Eisner’s reluctant concession to the industry’s demand for “costume characters.” The Spirit, then, seems a fitting extension of its creator who, though achieving heroic status in the comic book community, remained an unassuming, if self-assured, innovator for his sixty-year career. It is hard to overstate Eisner’s importance to graphic narrative—or, what he dubbed “sequential art”—and practitioners of the form speak of him in nothing less than worshipful terms. A highly self-conscious and theoretical artist, Eisner had, at all times, a clear sense of purpose. Comics, he said, were “an art and literary form,” possessing their own “grammar” of complex elements and patterns (Will Eisner, foreword to Comics and Sequential Art [Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985], pp. 5, 8). Film director Andrew D. Cooke and his brother, writer and producer Jon B. Cooke, plainly admire Eisner, and their 2007 documentary Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist pays homage to Eisner’s life and aesthetics. Celebrating the dynamic, even vertiginous quality of Eisner’s images, the filmmakers wisely get out of the way and let Eisner’s noir-fantasy art be the focus. Set in the shadowy “Central City,” The Spirit’s diegesis expresses an essentially pessimistic vision: populated by hapless thugs and criminal masterminds (both male and female), Central City is a libidinous world steeped in violence and tragedy. While The Spirit is undoubtedly informed by a 1940s noir aesthetic, Eisner was the first to acknowledge his debt to an earlier generation of comic book artists like George Herriman (Krazy Kat) and Milton Caniff (Terry and The Pirates), the latter of whom impressed Eisner, as he reveals in Cooke’s documentary, with his “ability to stage the stories” and express a “high degree of drama” through the use of shadows. Fellow artist and Eisner contemporary Joe Kubert calls Caniff, Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) the “three saints” of comic art in the 1930s and 40s. Open appreciation [End Page 193] for one’s artistic predecessors has long been a part of the culture of comics, and the film portrays the industry as one large extended family. Of the many artists working in comics in the early days, the vast majority were Jewish. Jules Feiffer, Bob Kane (born Kahn), Joe Kubert, Gil Kane (né Eli Katz), Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg), Al Feldstein, and Harvey Kurtzman: almost all of them were the children of Jewish immigrants. But if young Jewish boys reading the comics were looking for clearly identifiable Jewish role models, they were disappointed. Friend and artist Jules Feiffer points out in Cooke’s film that Jewish artists were creating characters with the names of Bruce Wayne, Denny Colt, and Clark Kent. There were no “Izzimos or Yosis in the world of comics,” Feiffer says. “They were just drawn by Izzimo and Yosi, but they all assimilated themselves on the comics page.” Although The Spirit did not engage directly the themes of Jewish identity and faith that Eisner’s 1978 graphic novel A Contract With God would, it did, nonetheless, demonstrate its author’s early concerns about the most pressing issue for Jews in the mid-twentieth century—Nazi Germany—openly mocking Hitler well before the U.S. had even...

Jews in America: A Cartoon History , and: Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form (review)

Jews in Americas A Cartoon History, by David Gantz. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2006. 168 pp. $28.00. Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form, edited by Paul Buhle. New York: The New Press, 2008. 198 pp. $29.95. David Gantz, in Jews in America, and Paul Buhle, in Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form, present narratives of important Jewish contributions to American culture, both in macro-historical sense and in microcosmic world of American comics. Gantz presents a history of Jewish life in United States in graphic novel form, while Buhle uncovers extensive Jewish American contribution to comic arts (and all of its mass cultural influences) through examples of over ninety Jewishauthored comic strips. In both narratives Jewish are established to be as integral and authentic to America as apple pie. Further, both Gantz and Buhle implicitly argue that Jewish American influence in creation of United States and its popular culture proves its earned place in history, underscoring anxious fears of displacement that are remnants of suffering and repeated exiles of Jewish histories. In Buhle'sjetvi and American Comics, each chapter of textual analysis is followed by a series of Jewish American comics, permitting reader to witness narrated evolution of this particular comic art. While Buhle weaves together into his story an overview of Jewish American comic history, it is a particular type of comprehensive lens. The book mostly focuses on male comic artists, including a few, like Robert Crumb, who wrote on Jewish themes despite having been born Gentile. Buhle, however, is not unaware of this discrepancy. He carefully notes gender inequalities in comic publications and works to take into account women comic artists who have been included in what can be called Jewish American comics canon. Buhle's introduction emphasizes importance of comic strips in creation and reproduction of Jewish American life, in a way that even supersedes die significance of Hollywood. He concedes that nowhere but and mainly behind-the-camera was Jewish role so influential in a major form of popular art (p. 9). Yet, Buhle also contends, 'just as Los Angeles would never be as Jewish as New York, movies could never be as Jewish as comic books, which, irrespective of actual images that were almost entirely Gentile, were produced by Jews masses (p. 9). He continues to establish that tracing Jewish American comics since their inception (as he does here) is a much more fruitful and illuminating endeavor in understanding Jewish Americanization process than tracing Hollywood's Jewish-influenced history. He argues that Jews in America have been on an extended journey to find themselves last hundred years and that comics created and produced by Jewish artists grapple with ambivalences of identity in new world. In this struggle identity, Buhle finds that comic artistry worked differently Jewish who had achieved prosperity and assimilation than those who struggled economically and culturally. He argues that for educated, assimilated Jewish Americans in beginning of twentieth century, the comic strip provided a guilty pleasure at best, an embarrassment at worst, offering further evidence (along with Hollywood, meaning films) of cultural philistinism, vulgarity sans dirty words (p. 19). However, those within cultural ghetto of Yiddish world, things looked very different (p. 20). More-assimilated Jews at this time wrote comics popular papers without notable radical, artistic intentions, while their unassimilated, newcomer counterparts were beginning to embark on this journey of self-definition in cloistered world of Jewish-only readers. As assimilation took hold and Yiddish comic strips became outmoded, Jewish presence in comic strips, as in grew while Jewish content became more covert. …

Christ in the Works of Two Jewish Artists: When Art is Interreligious Dialogue

Painter Marc Chagall and sculptor Jacob Epstein, both of whom were from orthodox Jewish backgrounds, each created a number of works of Christ. Although in Epstein's case, and only later in his career, some of these works were commissioned, both Chagall's and Epstein's works of Christ were self-driven. Chagall described himself as having been "haunted" by the face of Christ in his early years and his several crucifixion paintings were of a Jesus who was not the Christ of Christian dogma, but a "Jewish Jesus" who summed up the suffering of the Jewish people. Epstein similarly created a Christ that was beyond the conventions of the time, through his predilection for using primitive forms in his work. During his life-time, many of Epstein's Christs were met with resistance, but the more visionary critics understood the importance of his work in freeing the image of Christ from the matrix of convention and opening new possibilities of theological perception and understanding. The work of both Chagall and Epstein, who were contemporaries, is examined in relation to Jewish modernism, a movement ongoing in their formative years and before, in which Jewish intellectuals, writers and artists were engaged in efforts to work-out the relationship of Judaism to Jesus and the surrounding Christian world. The atrocities of the Holocaust effectively ended this dialogue. The potential contributions of the thought and creative works of this pre-World War II interreligious interchange to contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue are discussed.