Did you know frogs are scholars of Torah, the Leviathan was God’s favorite pet and gazelles were the carrier pigeons of ancient Judea? From the time Adam named the animals, the Jewish imagination has been preoccupied with creatures of the sea and creeping things of the land, referring to them in proverbs and deploying them…
Driving south along Old York Road in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, a giant milky-glass tetrahedral dome, cross-hatched with cast-aluminum, seems to rise from the surrounding woods. A bold pastiche of prehistoric, modern and biblical, it simultaneously evokes Mayan ruins, a Japanese pagoda and Mount Sinai, while creating a wholly new form. Beth Sholom, dedicated on Sept….
The Polish artist Erna Rosenstein (1913-2004) often called herself a fairy or a witch. In letters to a friend, she would sign off as “Fairy Rosenstein.” Rosenstein had a long-running interest in fairy tales and wrote and illustrated her own, like the charmingly surreal, surreally charming “Tiny Tale of Snail and All His Friends.” And…
We know the usual occupations in Sholom Aleichem’s fiction: dairyman, butcher, tailor. But did you hear the one about pickpockets (or “nimble fingers”), robbers (“snatchers”) and horse thieves? If not, don’t worry — most haven’t. As far as we know, Sholom Aleichem, the beloved Yiddish author best-remembered for his Tevye stories, only wrote about such…
Editor’s Note: This article was published originally on February 21, 2016. We are revisiting it on the occasion of Al Jaffee’s 100th birthday. On a snowy February afternoon, Al Jaffee, my childhood hero, invited me into his well-lit studio in Midtown Manhattan. The walls were covered with his drawings, images from Mad Magazine and a…
During the pandemic, Jessica Tamar Deutsch has been considering exile as she relearns how to paint. Specifically, she’s been thinking about the title character in “The Lost Princess,” a story by Rabbi Nachman, the mystic founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement, about a young woman who disappears from her home after displeasing her kingly father….
You don’t have to be a connoisseur of culture to recognize the truth behind author Toni Morrison’s maxim that it is at dire times like these when artists must go to work. “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear…That is how civilizations heal,” Morrison…
Can an art show be fascinating without containing a single truly fascinating artwork? The Dora Kallmus exhibit at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan is full of competent, uneccentric photographs of eccentric geniuses from the early 20th century: Gustav Klimt, Colette, Josephine Baker, Picasso. Just as the show seems to be running out of famous faces,…
Of all the icons to emerge from the left-wing politics of the last century, it is among the most talked about and the least looked at, the most mystical and the most frightening. It is probably the unlikeliest and also, by a country mile, the weirdest. Its caretakers make up the most exclusive club in…
*This is the fourth in a series of stories about the work of Käthe Kollwitz and how it influenced artists, activists and collectors like Dr. Richard Simms, part of whose collection is being exhibited by the Getty Center in Los Angeles. You may find the previous articles here, here and here. In 1903, working with…
This is the third in a four-part series of stories about the work of Käthe Kollwitz and how it influenced artists, activists and collectors like Dr. Richard Simms, part of whose collection is being exhibited by the Getty Center in Los Angeles. You may find the previous articles here and here. In 1971, as America…
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