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Building Identity Through Art

By Erica Orden

When Argentine artist Mirta Kupferminc escorts her mother, a Holocaust survivor who fled her homeland of Hungary in the wake of World War II, to view exhibits of her work, she sometimes worries that her mother will find the material too disturbing, too reminiscent of her experiences during the war. After all, Kupferminc bases much of her mixed-media work on her parents’ heritage, employing historical details from their lives in her pieces. “Sometimes,” Kupferminc said, “I ask her: Are you sure that you can cope with such strong material in these exhibitions? It’s not hard for you?” Her mother’s answer, Kupferminc recalled, is always the same: “‘Oh, Mirta,’ she says, ‘What’s hard is what I lived, not what you’re doing.’”Read More

An Honest Marriage of Vermont and Judaism

By Benjamin Weiner

A white-pillared converted stone church beside a coppice of pine trees and over a sloping meadow from the grave of poet Robert Frost, might seem like a strange location for a sukkah, but this fall the Bennington Museum hosted two of them to mark the centennial of organized Judaism in the Vermont town.Read More

Where ‘Love’ First Appears

By Rabbi Ilana Grinblat

In this column, Rabbi Ilana Grinblat tells of her young son’s exuberant reactions to life’s smallest of joys — and compares these reactions to the overwhelming emotions experienced by the Isaac and Rebecca in this week’s Torah portion.Read More

Dirty Sayings Never Get Old

By Elissa Strauss

In the early 1970s, Marvin Zuckerman and Gershon Weltman, childhood friends from the co-ops of the Bronx, came across a rare Yiddish manuscript. Though they had never thought of putting out a book together, they quickly recognized that there was something in this document that made them want to take up the task of translating and publishing the work — dirty words.Read More

Two-Way Giving

By Howard Shapiro

In October, they began. This time next year, they will have finished. In between, it’s a big commitment to become a docent. It takes a lot of knowledge and plenty of spare time.Read More

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