Jewish Art Research Articles

Une œuvre d’art spoliée par les Nazis conservée à la Bibliothèque royale de Belgique : la restitution de la Vue du Kattenberghof à Anvers par Gillis Neyts

On 6 November 1978, the Royal Library of Belgium purchased through the Amsterdam affiliated society of Sotheby’s the drawing View of the Kattenberghof in Antwerp with horsemen in the foreground from the hand of the seventeenth-century Brussels artist Gillis Neyts. As this drawing after the Second World War was traded several times by this auction house, there was no reason to suspect that the drawing on 15 March 1939 was stolen by the Sipo-SD (Sicherheitspolizei-Sicherheitsdienst) from Dr. Arthur Feldmann, a Jewish art collector from Brno in the Czech Republic today. Elke Sleurs, Secretary of State, responsible for the art collections of the federal scientific institutions, is now following the advice of the Royal Library of Belgium in order to refund the drawing to its rightful heirs, represented by Mr Uri Peled Feldmann. The present text gives account of the historical context and the reasons for this refund.

Artistic Features of Besamims in Eastern Galicia in the 18th – the first third of the 20th Century

The paper focuses on the art of the Jewish community of Galicia from the 18th century to the first third of the 20th century in the context of the European art processes. The analysis of the artistic features of numerous synagogical and household items of the ritual purpose revealed the main trends of particular styles spread, especially baroque and historicism. Special attention is paid to the sources and the artistic inspiration of Jewish art in Galicia. The main circumstances that influenced the development of Jewish art are determined, namely the isolation of the Jewish community, the traditional ideological and semantic load of the monuments, the abidance by the halakhic rules, scriptures on the creating things for ritual and ceremonial purposes, keeping the old traditions in the choice of form, the nature of ornamentation, strict selection of decorating themes and in particular cases even the reproduction of archaic forms. While maintaining the traditional form, the ideological and semantic load for the majority of works of applied arts of the Jewish community of Galicia in the 18th century – the first third of the 20th century, the choice of a composite structure, grouping and ornamental motifs interpretation is influenced by the stylistic effects of Western art. The numerous preserved monuments indicate the openness of masters to the outside art influences, borrowing and basic elements quoting and leading Western styles tendencies as well as Ukrainian art.

“A Substratum of Unprejudiced Art History”

This essay investigates questions of Jewish art in early twentieth-century Germany, the motivations and contexts for such questions, and the methods used to understand them. Focusing on the 1907 “Exhibition of Jewish Artists” in Berlin and its critical reception as a primary case study, the essay grounds the discourse of Jewish art within its own particularities of production. It concludes with a brief analysis of the first major publication to present a history of Jewish art. The discourse of Jewish art in early twentieth-century Germany grappled with the challenges of determining a distinctly Jewish art using the tools of art history. Notions of Jewish artists and Jewish art, however, also presented challenges to the modernist structures of art history with its claims of secular universality and reason, exposing the contradictory assumptions of national and religious particularities.

Portraits from Vienna

A series of life portraits of the Hasidic rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880–1950) rendered by Jewish female artist Gertrud Zuckerkandl throws new light on the modern rabbinical portrait. Gertrud Zuckerkandl, the daughter-in-law of the art patroness Berta Zuckerkandl and the daughter of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel, rendered four life portraits of the sixth dynastic leader of the Belarusian Chabad dynasty in the fashionable Purkersdorf Sanatorium in Vienna in 1935. These four portraits are first and foremost “pretty,” rendered in a delicate hand and in what would have been seen as a feminine colour palette of pastel pinks, lavenders, and blues. Zuckerkandl's portraits reveal not only a fascinating story of Hasidic cosmopolitanism in the 1930s, but the challenges that female Jewish artists faced at the time in Vienna. While literary accounts of Hasidism dictate strict gender separation and Viennese art critics castigated women artists as incapable of capturing the interior life, these four portraits reveal a far more complex story on both accounts.

Chana Orloff

Chana Orloff (1888–1968), a Ukrainian-born artist who emigrated to France in 1910 by way of Palestine, was one of the most important Jewish artists of the School of Paris and a pioneering woman in the early Israeli art world, yet her story has been marginalized in both the narratives of European modernism and the history of Israeli art. I propose that Orloff's biography and artistic production, particularly her sculpted portraits of Jewish friends and colleagues in Paris between the two World Wars, demonstrate how diaspora, gender, and displacement play a critical role in a revised narrative of twentieth-century modern art. I argue that Orloff's work offers a compelling visual counter-discourse to prevailing negative stereotypes of Jewish identity in European visual culture. During a time when many émigré artists wished to distance themselves from their Jewish identity in light of widespread anti-Semitic and xenophobic beliefs that their work contributed to the “decline” of French culture, Orloff proudly did just the opposite.

JEWISH ART IN ANTIQUITY - S. Pearce (ed.) The Image and its Prohibition in Jewish Antiquity. (Journal of Jewish Studies Supplement 2.) Pp. x + 273, b/w & colour ills. Oxford: Journal of Jewish Studies, 2013. Paper, £55, US$90. ISBN: 978-0-9575228-0-0.

JEWISH ART IN ANTIQUITY - S. Pearce (ed.) The Image and its Prohibition in Jewish Antiquity. (Journal of Jewish Studies Supplement 2.) Pp. x + 273, b/w & colour ills. Oxford: Journal of Jewish Studies, 2013. Paper, £55, US$90. ISBN: 978-0-9575228-0-0. - Volume 65 Issue 2

Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen ed. by Vincent Brook, Marat Grinberg (review)

Reviewed by: Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen ed. by Vincent Brook, Marat Grinberg Judah M. Cohen (bio) Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen. By Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg, eds. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014. xxxiii + 275 pp. Woody on Rye, when viewed from outside of the circle of scholars interested in Jewishness and Woody Allen’s movies, seems like an insider conversation content to remain that way. The volume brings together a series of respected scholars to explore ideas and themes in Allen’s movies from c. 1992 onward—films, Brook and Grinberg claim, largely overlooked in scholarship due to the “the major fissure in Allen’s career caused by the Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi Previn scandal” (ix). Unfortunately, the addition of a lens of “Jewishness” appears to hamstring the contributors—and their volume’s contribution—more than it helps. Grinberg, in his own essay, provides a justification: “Woody Allen ought to be viewed as a serious Jewish artist and philosopher, whose Jewish or indeed Judaic thinking shines through even or especially in the absence of apparent Jewish markers, thematics, or identity” (38). Yet while this pairing seems natural on the surface (and may appeal theoretically to Jewish studies), these dual foci too often turn the volume into an exercise in scholarly self-affirmation. Despite Woody Allen’s complex, and often dismissive, relationship to Judaism in his own accounts, his voice is drowned out here by scholarly fiat. Scholarship that explores a celebrity’s or artist’s “Jewishness” has become its own cottage industry, achieving varying degrees of success. Often such studies involve combing a subject’s works for indicators of Judaism, whether obvious or coded; triangulating these observations with other mediated accounts of the artist, such as newspaper interviews or profiles; and anchoring the discussion to more general thematic ideas in the work of prominent scholars. While at times illuminating, these kinds of studies have been critiqued as more interested in arranging [End Page 271] data to achieve a preconceived end than in letting the evidence speak for itself. An entire volume predicated on such a preconceived end, moreover—here, Allen’s Jewishness—has the trap already set. Attractive writing and humorous turns of phrase, as well as a whimsical design that replaces colons in chapter titles with a broken pair of glasses, cannot save many of the essays from suffering as a result. Historians might find particularly annoying the lack of primary materials engaged beyond Allen’s films, leading, among other things, to long plot narrations/readings (especially Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Deconstructing Harry, and Scoop) that can repeat across several essays. Without other historical benchmarks, moreover, the films double as their own insular history, leading to a false impression of hermeticism. I also had difficulty with the frequency by which authors asserted signs of “Jewishness” through acknowledged stereotype: how discussions of a nose, or hypersexuality, or shortness of stature, unproblematically become paradigms of Judaism in order to establish a dialectic with Christianity or to address gender relations. A three essay “Schlemiel Studies” section proves emblematic of this approach, proclaiming the Schlemiel as a distinctive Jewish character and then labeling Allen’s characters as Schlemiels-by-presumption. A three essay section on Allen’s female characters includes a number of interesting ideas about the portrayals of Jewish women but works with such a limited amount of material that by the end arguments seem repetitious. And assertive speculation about Allen’s creative choices, given that none of the authors appeared to make any efforts to contact him, seem to emphasize the artifice of scholarly convention and its questionability here. Among many examples: “what is especially striking about Cassandra’s Dream is that Allen brings God back with a vengeance” (51). I came to wonder, as I arrived at the end of the book, if releasing the authors from the “Jewishness” target might have led to a more diverse—and, frankly, better, collection. In contrast, James Fisher’s essay on Allen’s Broadway plays offers a glimpse of what this volume could have become. A refreshing detour from the film analyses, Fisher’s more...

Redeeming Our Sacred Story: The Death of Jesus and Relations between Jews and Christians by Mary C. Boys (review)

Reviewed by: Redeeming Our Sacred Story: The Death of Jesus and Relations between Jews and Christians by Mary C. Boys Robert A. Krieg Redeeming Our Sacred Story: The Death of Jesus and Relations between Jews and Christians. By Mary C. Boys. (New York: Paulist Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 387. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8091-4817-2.) The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum (November 18, 1965), teaches that “the Old and New Testaments are like a mirror in which the pilgrim Church on earth looks at God” (n. 7). Since Christians’ inadequate approaches to this sacred mirror have generated erroneous theological ideas, Dei Verbum proceeds (nn. 8–20) to explain and endorse the critical interpretation of the Bible within the Church’s life and worship. Redeeming Our Sacred Story builds on Dei Verbum, as it aims at releasing the New Testament’s references to the Jewish people from longstanding, tragic misinterpretations. This enlightening book is the fruit of participation in Jewish-Christian dialogue by Mary C. Boys, Union Theological Seminary’s Skinner and McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology and dean of academic affairs. The book’s part I, “A Trembling Telling,” highlights the issue. On the one hand, Christians have at times wrongly appealed to Jesus’s suffering and death in support of their denigration of themselves and/or of others (for example, women, African Americans, and Jews). On the other hand, they have at other times rightly approached the cross as a “mirror” of their misery and their hope. This mirroring is often evident, for example, in the religious hymns of enslaved Black Christians (pp. 26–31). Part II, “A Troubling Telling—and Its Tragic Consequences,” examines how the passion narratives, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Pauline letters have served as the “raw materials for hostility to Jews” (p. 47). For example, they were distorted in Nazi propaganda against Jews and Judaism, and, for centuries, they were misread [End Page 589] in the Oberammergau Passion Play’s misrepresentation of the Jewish people as “Christ killers” (pp. 104–36). A decisive, ecclesiastical effort to overcome anti-Semitic renderings of the New Testament occurred not only with the Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum but also with its Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate (October 28, 1965). As Boys explains, this effort is continuing today, although not without occasional ambiguity, in the Vatican’s deliberate engagement in Jewish-Christian relations (pp. 130–36). Part III, “A Transformed Telling,” demonstrates how Christians, building on Dei Verbum, can adopt a judicious hermeneutics to assure an accurate reading of the Bible. In particular, it proposes “eight guidelines for interpreting New Testament texts about the passion and death of Jesus” (pp. 221–26). These helpful, concrete criteria are meant to free the true “power of the story” of Jesus Christ. In pursuit of this goal, Boys illumines how the gospels’ authentic power may be experienced in the Church’s devotional practices such as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and meditations on Jesus’s “Seven Last Words.” The epilogue observes that this book is a “synthesis,” uniting “biblical, hermeneutical, and historical studies” for the sake of “a ‘practical’ theology” (p. 258). In this vein, it recommends that Christians will discover more of the New Testament’s wisdom as they learn from Jewish interpretations of the Bible as well as from Jewish art and literature on Jesus’s Crucifixion such as that rendered by Marc Chagall and Chaim Potok (pp. 265–68). Appearing fifty years after the Second Vatican Council, Redeeming Our Sacred Story is a significant, timely contribution to the Council’s renewal of the Church’s life, mission, and theology. Written in clear, energetic language, it is readily accessible to general readers, and it is an invaluable resource for pastors, homilists, catechists, and teachers. Robert A. Krieg University of Notre Dame Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press

The Work of Creation: Image, Idolatry, and Jewish Discourse in Theology and the Arts

The Second Commandment, prohibiting both the worship and manufacture of graven images, is often employed as a mechanism for explaining a perceived absence of Jewish participation in the visual arts, in spite of a well recorded history of Jewish participation in the manufacture of graven images which are typically classed as craft objects. This article aims to introduce to theology the scepticism towards hierarchical distinctions between art and craft which is already familiar in the world of art theory, and by so doing prompt a dislocation of theological reflection on works of art from the point of visual engagement to the point of manufacture. It suggests that attentiveness to Jewish discourses about material production opens up interesting and potentially generative possibilities for work in theology and the arts beyond the consideration of specifically Jewish art.

The 2015 Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art

The Jerusalem Biennale is a platform for professional artists whose current work relates, in one way or another, to the world of Jewish content within the conceptual framework of contemporary Jewish art. It does not attempt to answer the questions of what contemporary Jewish art is, or whether there is such a thing at all. The Biennale endeavors to create spaces where the discussion can take place and develop. Many people view the fields of “Jewish art” and “contemporary art” as mutually exclusive. Jewish art is often associated with Judaica—traditional objects used in religious rituals— while contemporary art is characterized by the use of modern media such as video, sound, installation and performance, and by themes relevant to the present. The main challenge of the Jerusalem Biennale is to promote art that is both Jewish and contemporary. This focus offers a promising alternative to the conventional boundaries of Israeli art and opens the event up to the Jewish world at large.

A Progressive View on Religion and Modern Art

This article examines the Religious Art of Today exhibition, originally held in 1944 at Boston’s Institute of Modern Art and then reformulated for the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio. The exhibition was eclectic in that it included a wide range of artists and a diversity of faiths, and engaged the debate held among museum professionals about the relationship between religion and modern art. The article focuses closely on Catholic, Jewish, and Navajo art included in the exhibition. The IMA’s commitment to the figurative tradition afforded artists the opportunity to explore their identities—as Jews, as Catholics, as Navajos—using recognizable religious subjects. That the works in the exhibition were selected as representative of modern art resulted in a convergence of discourses related to modern art with those of religious/cultural identity.

Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical by Stuart J. Hecht (review)

Reviewed by: Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical by Stuart J. Hecht Judith Sebesta Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical. By Stuart J. Hecht. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. pp. 240. $85 cloth. One might think that the subject of Jews and the American musical has been all but exhausted; after all, during the past decade, Andrea Most in Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (2004) and Henry Bial in Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005) have provided insightful explorations of the topic, as has John Bush Jones in Our Musicals, Ourselves (2004), among others. But Stuart Hecht, in his entertaining and downright brilliant Transposing Broadway, proves that scholars have only just scratched the surface of this significant subject, opening a deep vein of gold that reveals just how important the contributions of Jewish artists have been in developing the American musical. His thesis is that “Jews shaped the musical, aside from its entertainment value, to represent their grappling with the promise of the American Dream and the methods of assimilation that might help one achieve it” (4); Broadway musicals are, he asserts, our “cultural Ellis Island” as they provide access to U.S. culture just as Ellis Island welcomed immigrants to America (5). The book focuses on transposition as change—changing styles of music, form and structure, the characters, and subjects in musicals—to reflect an ever-changing audience and nation (13). I knew I was going to love this volume when, right off the bat in the introduction, Hecht gives consideration to the noteworthy but oft-dismissed work of Jerry Herman, pointing out that although the form and structure of his shows, like Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage Aux Folles, are conventional, their subjects are not. They are models of characters attempting to integrate into mainstream American culture and life. The author’s method is primarily dramaturgical, with the volume organized topically by chapter; within each topic, Hecht engages in a close study of representative shows, analyzing how each works onstage “for both the immediate audience and for the larger community which that audience represents” (13). For example, chapter 2 focuses on how the use of the double couple expressed larger societal issues, with Guys and Dolls the quintessential double couple format and its assimilative associations. Like the introduction, chapter 3, “The Melting Pot Paradigm of Irving Berlin,” focuses on a Jewish writer of some of the most popular songs in musical theatre history, usually given short shrift in that history (including by Most), when his [End Page 157] “legacy has not been as recognized or acknowledged as his degree of popularity and artistry might dictate” (43). As Hecht suggests, Berlin embodied the American Dream. Chapter 4 explores musicals that offer instruction on how to achieve that dream, with an interesting examination of depictions of gambling as a short cut to it, as well as portrayals of labor unions and outsiders. He finishes this section with an assessment of Sondheim shows that both celebrate and question the American Dream. One of Hecht’s most brilliant moments occurs in this chapter when he briefly analyzes “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” from Gypsy as an assimilation advice (87), taking a seemingly fluff, vaudevillian number and turning it into socio political statement. His good work on “Cinderella Musicals” in the next chapter leads to the climax of the book, and it is in the penultimate chapters 6 and 7 that I sensed that the author feels the closest personal connection to the shows examined, namely, Ragtime, Parade, and Fiddler on the Roof. Hecht opens up the latter to new readings by suggesting a through line from it to later musicals like Hair, Rent, In the Heights, and The Color Purple, arguing that, based in part on this legacy, Fiddler was “one of the most important American musicals ever produced” (185). (In fact, he so convinces me that I likely will be adding it to my syllabus next time I teach musical theatre history, when before I have glossed over it in that course.) And if these two chapters were not enough to convince me that I have encountered a model...

Review: Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture by Joseph Siry; Eric Mendelsohn’s Park Synagogue: Architecture and Community by Walter C. Leedy Jr. and Sara Jane Pearman

Joseph Siry Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 736 pp., 10 color and 295 b/w illus. $70 (cloth), ISBN 9780226761404 Walter C. Leedy Jr. and Sara Jane Pearman Eric Mendelsohn’s Park Synagogue: Architecture and Community Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2012, 192 pp., 59 b/w illus. $45 (cloth), ISBN 9781606350850 Beginning in the late 1940s, a number of Jewish intellectuals and organizations began to focus attention on Jewish art and architecture, raising the questions: How could the synagogue building better express contemporary American Judaism? What was the role, if any, of historical architectural tradition? Prominent commentators like art historian Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein and architect Percival Goodman noted that, although an ancient building type, the synagogue has never developed a characteristic form or style. The reasons for such an absence of uniformity are many, including the Jews’ peripatetic existence, laws prohibiting land ownership, the synagogue’s egalitarian nature and its multivalent role, and the desire to assimilate. The lack of architectural traditions led designers to borrow and adapt from what they saw around them, including mosques in the Middle East and Christian churches in the West. Greek-, Byzantine-, and Moorish-styled synagogues predominated in Europe, and immigrants brought these traditions with them to the United States. Both Wischnitzer-Bernstein and Goodman proposed modernist architecture as a fruitful new direction, emphasizing its functionalism and freedom from historical associations. Two of America’s most famous synagogues, both constructed in the 1950s and both explorations in the modernist style, are the subjects of recent books of varying depth. As its title indicates, Joseph Siry’s Beth Sholom Synagogue , from the Sacred Landmarks series published by the University of Chicago Press, is about more than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (1954–59). The story of that commission and design is the culmination of six initial chapters that provide context for Wright’s ideas about modern synagogue design. Siry begins his book by examining the relationship between Judaism and Chicago’s liberal Unitarians (led by Wright’s uncle the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones), focusing on the ways in which Wright’s view of Judaism was colored by the Unitarian engagement with …

Jewish artists and the Bible in twentieth-century America

Jewish artists and the Bible in twentieth-century America

On Violence, Joy, and Justice: The Poetry of C.k. Williams

On Violence, Joy, and Justice: The Poetry of C.k. Williams

‘Alas, alas. House, oh house!’: The collapse of the Cologne City Archive

Abstract When the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne (known as Cologne’s City Archive) collapsed in 2009, a municipal institution became visible in quite unintended ways. The incident and its consequences tell us about the structure, constitution and regulation of the archive as such but also about the significance of the archive for the memory culture that shapes Germany today. This article turns to the collapse to show how the archive is implicated in the politics of the city and of memory. In the midst of other local scandals, the disaster has become an emblem of political and moral breakdown in Cologne, but it has also confronted citizens with the loss of something fundamental – given, but perhaps not acknowledged – to their identity. This article outlines the response to the incident more broadly, before focusing on works by the British Jewish artist Tanya Ury (Fury, 2009, archive burn out, 2014) and the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek (Ein Sturz/A Fall, 2010), which use the former archive as a site of resistance, challenging the prescriptive, patriarchal logic of the archive and its implications for the culture and politics of memory.

Facing the modern: the portrait in Vienna, 1900

During the great flourishing of modern art in fin-de-siecle Vienna, artists of that city focused on images of individuals. Their portraits depict artists, patrons, families, friends, intellectual allies, and society celebrities from the upwardly mobile middle classes. Viewed as a whole, the images allow us to reconstruct the subjects' shifting identities as the Austro-Hungarian Empire underwent dramatic political changes, from the 1867 Ausgleich (Compromise) to the end of World War I. This is viewed as a time when the avant-garde overthrew the academy, yet Facing the Modern tells a more complex story of the time through thought-provoking texts by numerous leading art historians. Their writings examine paintings by innovative artists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele alongside earlier works, blurring the conventionally-held distinctions between 19th-century and early-20th-century art, and revealing surprising continuities in the production and consumption of portraits. This compelling book features works not only by famous names but also by lesser-known female and Jewish artists, giving a more complete picture of the time.

Anti-Semitism and Catholic Aesthetics: Jacques Maritain’s Role in the Religious Conversion of Emmanuel H. Chapman

Emmanuel Harrison Chapman, an Orthodox Jew from Chicago, was immersed in Chicago’s “Yiddish left” during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927, he left his studies in philosophy at the University of Chicago and traveled to Paris, where he intended to become a novelist. Instead, Chapman took up a post as an art critic for The Chicago Evening Post . It was through art criticism that he engaged his own sense of “Jewishness” and entertained the question about the existence of “Jewish art.” During this same period, he met the renowned French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and took up with his circle in Meudon. Between 1928 and 1930, Chapman became a private student of Maritain. Maritain’s project of integrating aesthetics with the neo-Thomist position began to fascinate Chapman. At the same time, Chapman was becoming equally captivated by Maritain’s efforts to radically re-work the Catholic position on antiSemitism. For both men, anti-Semitism would become a defining force in their intellectual and activist lives. Soon Chapman began to search for ways to resolve his interior attraction to Catholic aesthetics and his growing appreciation for Maritain’s work to reverse Catholic anti-Semitism. In late 1930, Chapman converted to Catholicism. This article argues that interwar France provided a unique context for the unlikely forces of aesthetics and anti-Semitism to combine and prompt a religious conversion to Catholicism. Chapman’s conversion of an American Jew contributed to his later work in North America fighting Catholic anti-Semitism, one of the first Atlantic links to Maritain’s philosophy of social activism.

A century of Israeli art

Framing artistic developments in the context of successive periods, author Yigal Zalmona describes the many ways in which Israel’s art has been influenced by its social and political history. This look at the wider picture goes hand-in-hand with detailed, enlightening analyses of seminal artworks from every period. Zalmona surveys the early days of the Bezalel School, founded in 1906 in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement; Land-of-Israel art during an era of nation-building; the pre-eminence of international modernism and Lyrical Abstraction after 1948; social-activist and conceptual art in the 1970s; and the recent embrace of photography and video. Throughout its evolution, Israeli art has reflected a complex cultural discourse revolving around questions of identity - Western versus Eastern, local versus universal, national and ethnic, collective and personal. Drawing on the author’s decades of accumulated knowledge and activity in the field of Israeli art - as historian, critic, teacher, and curator - and aimed at a broad audience, this book will be fascinating reading for art-lovers and for all those with an interest in Israel’s cultural history, offering a compelling example of the interaction between visual art and a dynamic, multifaceted society. Contents Director's Foreword; Preface; 1 Zionist Aesthetics: Jewish Artists in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe; 2 The Bezalel School: Early Arts and Crafts in the Land of Israel; 3 Modernists and the Fascination with the East; 4 A Decade of Conflict: Localism and Universalism; 5 Nimrod - A Case Study in Art, History and Identity; 6 Art in the Service of Nation-Building; 7 New Horizons; 8 The Birth of Now; 9 The Seventies: Exploring the Boundaries of Art; 10 The Eighties: Back to Painting; 11 The Return of the Real? 12 The Beatuy of Weakness; Artists' Index.

“WE ARE THE UNHAPPY FEW”: RETURN AND DISILLUSIONMENT AMONG GERMAN-JEWISH INTELLECTUALS

After the Holocaust a few Jewish artists and intellectuals returned to Germany. The actor Fritz Kortner, the writer Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and the historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps represent three different areas of cultural activity among the returnees. Despite their different experiences they all felt by the 1960s that the hopes they had placed in a new German society were disappointed.