Midway through the Jewish Museum Berlin’s exhibit “Welcome to Jerusalem,” a sprawling tour through the Holy City, one finds a particularly unsettling image. No, it isn’t an especially gruesome crucifixion, a battle scene of the Crusades or a photograph of carnage after a terrorist attack. The offending picture shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gripping…
In the 1980’s the American Jewish artist and writer Avram Finkelstein was a co-creator of the iconic AIDS crisis protest poster which features a pink triangle with the words “Silence=Death.” How this influential graphic image was designed is recalled in Finkelstein’s new memoir, “After Silence: A History of AIDS Through Its Images” (University of California…
13-year-old Zoya Cherkassky couldn’t look away from the window of her apartment in Kiev. The winter of 1990 was snowy and cold, yet even so, people were waiting in a bread line that stretched out the door of the shop across the street. “It was weird, because there were lines during that period, but not…
Amedeo Modigliani, the Sephardic Italian painter and sculptor whose work is widely thought to have helped establish Modernism, is a favorite target of art forgers. Such a favorite, in fact, that a shocking third of the artworks shown in a recent exhibit focused on Modigliani in Genoa, Italy may have been fakes. As The New…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In honor of the 125th birthday of Russian-Jewish artist Solomon Yudovin, a modest yet captivating exhibit at Russia’s St. Petersburg Jewish Community Center highlights some of his best work, including historical photographs, drawings and book illustrations. Of particular interest: A number of his watercolors from the 1930s,…
Is there anything more goyish than the Rockettes, the “precision-dance” troupe best known for its starring role in the annual “Christmas Spectacular” at Radio City Music Hall? Well, yes. As it turns out, the entire creative team behind the annual Radio City holiday event, which began in 1932, were Jewish men brought together by Samuel…
Sara Bloomfield joined the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in its early stages, years before the project turned into one of the nation’s most visited landmarks on the National Mall in Washington. Now, after serving as director of the museum for 18 years, Bloomfield, 67, is tasked with leading the institution during a time when…
Entering the Museum of the Bible was a little like getting on a plane to Israel — it was a mess trying to get through security. There was a kind of honeycombed bomb-sniffing device, tall as a man, that a French correspondent said reminded her of something from “Star Trek.” A newspaper reporter from Alabama…
In the Palestinian village of Burqah, 86% of men are employed, but 60% work unstable, part time jobs. 75% of families have five or more members, and half of such families live beneath the poverty line of $530 per month. 55% of residents expressed concerns about the Israeli military entering the village. Statistics like this…
A Mona Lisa grin became one of Leonard Cohen’s signature facial expressions. For a poet of self-mocking intimacy, it made a perfect mask. As I walked through “A Crack in Everything,” the new exhibit about Cohen’s life and work at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, I imagined Cohen appraising the show with that half-smile….
Elinoy Kisslove is used to receiving odd answers when she asks younger participants in her Tel Aviv graffiti tours what they see in the blurry, black-and-white mural at 26 Florentin Street. “The universe,” someone said to her once. “A womb,” suggested another. Those who live near the mural – mostly 20-somethings attracted to the gentrifying…
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
יעקבֿ פֿינקלמאַן באַשרײַבט אויך זײַן לאַנגיאָריקן פֿאַך — ווי ער האָט צוגעשטעלט וויסן אין טעלעקאָמוניקאַציע איבער דער וועלט
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