Menachem Wecker
By Menachem Wecker
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Art History of Dutch Jews Role in Slavery Is Bluntly Depicted
‘The word ‘slave’ is used in this exhibition,” notes a wall text at “Jews in the Caribbean: Four Centuries of History in Suriname and Curacao” at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum. “The museum is aware of the controversial nature of this term. ‘Slaves,’ as used here, refers to African men, women, and children taken captive and…
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The Schmooze The Jewish Photograph That Changed Everything
When the international photographic agency Magnum Photos asked its members to select one of their works which they felt “changed everything,” the hope, according to Magnum’s website, was for the photographers to “reflect on their careers and identify a single picture that represents a turning point in their lives as image makers.” Among the 51…
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Life The Haggadah Illuminations of Barbara Wolff
A recent donation of artwork by Jewish artist Barbara Wolff to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York is doubly rare. With few exceptions, the Morgan’s collection stops at the year 1600, and its Hebrew illumination holdings are scarce. “A gift of this sort is highly unusual to the department of medieval and Renaissance…
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Culture How Man Ray Drew on Math, Shakespeare — and Shoah
From 1934 to 1935, at Paris’s Institut Henri Poincaré, surrealist artist Man Ray photographed dusty mathematical models, which he said he found baffling. But the Philadelphia native, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, had to abandon the photos when he fled the Nazis for Hollywood. In 1946, he returned to Paris and retrieved the photos; two years later,…
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The Schmooze A Spice Box Fit for a Pope
Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Arts Part of the Havdalah ritual, which bids adieu to the departing Sabbath, recognizes the divine separator between sacred and profane, light and darkness, Israel and the nations, and the seventh day and weekdays. The second to last distinction is deemphasized in a unique Jewish circa-1800 spice box currently on view…
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Culture A Museum as Big as Texas
Perhaps surprisingly, the newly launched National Center for Jewish Art doesn’t reside on the East Coast, in California, or in Chicago. Instead, it is housed at Dallas’s Museum of Biblical Art, which lives up to its state’s reputation for enormity. Even excluding Gib Singleton’s soon-to-be-installed, huge outdoor “Via Dolorosa” installation, the museum boasts 30,000 square…
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Culture An Eccentric Archeologist Who Drew a Line in the Sand
A German Jewish Iranologist, who lost his University of Berlin post in 1935 after officially declaring that his grandparents were Jewish, is one of several focuses of an exhibit about Asian travel at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. “The Traveler’s Eye: Scenes of Asia” is on view through May 31. Ernst Herzfeld…
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Life Retracing Ancient Jewish Threads
Gail Rothschild The Three Fates famously spin, measure, and cut cosmic threads, which makes one of literature’s greatest scenes even more poignant in its reversal of that natural order. Penelope ingeniously outwits suitors hoping to usurp her husband Odysseus’s role when he doesn’t return from the Trojan War. Suspecting that her husband still lives, Penelope…
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