Menachem Wecker
By Menachem Wecker
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Culture Painter Jules Olitski Enjoys a Second Life
It’s hard to explain the feeling one experiences when standing in front of, and contemplating the dynamic movement in, Jules Olitski’s paintings. Picture a beautiful yet quickly fleeting vision of creamer diffusing throughout a cup of coffee. If one freezes the frame when the cloudiness is at its height — just before the dairy explosion…
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Culture An Agnostic Equation
When it was revealed in 2007 that Mother Teresa — widely regarded as a bastion of faith — doubted her religious beliefs, the public got a rare glimpse of a tormented, and distinctly human, life of paradox. The publication of Mother Teresa’s written communications exposed “a startling portrait in self-contradiction,” in which her private spiritual…
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Culture His Cross To Bear
It’s tempting to read literal crucifixion imagery into Barnett Newman’s 14-canvas series, “The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani.” The portrait-oriented, black-and-white paintings and their bold stripes initially appear to be fully vertical in their thrusts, like crosses without horizontal shafts. But upon closer inspection, the vertical stripes, or “zips,” as Newman called them, which…
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Culture Battling Horror With the Absurd
Photographs by an artist who put clock springs and matchsticks in his nose to fool Nazis into mistaking him for an Aryan hang in galleries in the basement of the Art Institute of Chicago. Adjacent to them is an exhibit that includes a 1945 self-portrait by another artist, who is posing with the German eagle…
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Culture Tu B’Shvat a Holiday in Transition
Last Tu B’Shvat, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, located on Manhattan’s Battery Place, hosted a musical — “The Hatseller and the Monkeys” — and an arts and crafts event for children. This year, the museum has no nature-themed events on the docket to mark the Jewish new year’s celebration for trees, which begins on the…
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Culture Rembrandt Chose Jewish Models To Depict a More Realistic Jesus
Sometime in the mid-to-late 1640s or early 1650s, a young Jewish man — probably of Spanish-Portuguese descent — seems to have taken what would likely have been a short walk from his home in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter to Jodenbreestraat (“Jewish Broad Street”) 4, where Rembrandt van Rijn lived. Inside the three-story home, which Rembrandt purchased…
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Culture Ode to the Righteous Bulgarian Gentiles
When several trains entered Bulgaria secretly on March 8, 1943, to deport 8,000 Jews to Polish concentration camps, the Bulgarian Parliament, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Bulgarian people opposed the anti-Semitic plot so vehemently that Nazi-sympathetic Alexander Belev, chairman of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, had to back down. Other attempts to deport Jews…
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The Schmooze ‘Photograph 51’ Puts Science Onstage
Elizabeth Rich as Rosalind Franklin in ‘Photograph 51.’ Photo by Stan Barouh. Watching the current production at Washington D.C.’s Theater J of Anna Ziegler’s “Photograph 51,” which tells the tragic tale of Jewish scientist and almost Nobel laureate Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (1900)….
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