On my iPad, I’ve been drawing a visual response to this week’s Torah portion and the Midrash about it. I do this every week and, over the last few years, I’ve made five sets of these drawings. The first set started on a whim. I had learned some odd stories about the first parsha Beresheit….
Siona Benjamin was raised Jewish in India’s Hindu and Muslim society where she attended Catholic and Zoroastrian schools. A two-time Fulbright scholar, author and book illustrator, she now lives in America where she creates art that explores her identity and transcultural issues. Benjamin’s work is inspired by styles of Indian and Persian miniature painting, Christian…
Twenty-two years ago, photographer Claude Cassirer received a call he never expected. His family’s long-lost Nazi-looted painting by the French-Jewish painter Camille Pissarro had been found. It was hanging in a Spanish museum. The painting, “Rue Saint-Honoré, Apres Midi, Effet de Pluie” depicts the grand avenues of modern Paris glistening during an afternoon rain. It…
Even as Karen Kassap cocooned with her family while the world shut down last March, the world insisted on intruding — the pandemic, racial strife, politics. And so, with no particular project in mind, the multimedia collage artist began snipping, gluing, and painting her way through her feelings. Slowly, a canvas depicting two ruby-red monsters…
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…
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