Tom Freudenheim is an art historian and retired museum director who served as assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and deputy director of the Berlin Jewish Museum. He is also a member of the Forward Association.
Tom Freudenheim
By Tom Freudenheim
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Books In Berlin, the Nazis burned Freud and Fitzgerald. Now Florida’s banning Eric Carle and Margaret Atwood
I went to Berlin to commemorate the 1933 book burnings. But all I could think about was the books banned at home today
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Culture In Berlin, A Remembrance of Synagogues Past
How do you take a walk down memory lane if you don’t have any memories of your own? That’s what I was asking myself on September 11 of this year, when the United States was commemorating the 15th anniversary of a great domestic tragedy and I was in Berlin, participating in yet another attempt to…
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The Schmooze Censorship at The Jewish Museum?
As someone who has spent a lifetime working in museums, I’ve long been sensitive to the decisions made in the process of selecting or omitting works for display. According to a recent article on Tablet Magazine, and another in The New York Times, The Jewish Museum in New York made the decision to remove “Stelen…
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Culture Heist of Ages
After the Auction Written and published by Linda Frank 170 pages, $14.95. There are 1 million new books every year — literally — but it’s impossible to know what to read. In this brave new world, not only can’t you tell a book by its cover, but you also can’t tell it by its publisher…
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News Warhol’s Chosen People
Will the irony of New York’s Jewish Museum’s fascinating new exhibition, “Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered,” on view through August, be lost on most visitors? Probably. I had commented to a friend that Andy Warhol’s 1980 project, a series of 10 portraits (from photographs) of famous (dead) Jews, looks today like the same rip-off it…
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Culture Sowing the Seeds of Christianity
You don’t need to be a born-again Christian to understand the critical role played by the Holy Land in the development of Christianity. That’s probably what the folks at Cleveland’s new Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, which opened last October, are counting on by showing Cradle of Christianity, a major exhibition from the Israel Museum…
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News Lightness & Dark
“Don’t believe everything you read,” was my first reaction to the news that the American Jewish Historical Society plans to sell six of its valuable, Colonial-era portraits of the Franks family. If only my hopefulness were justified. The society’s sale is another nail in an ever-expanding coffin being built to inter the remains of dying…
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