About 25 years ago, Alan Teller and Jerri Zbiral bought a shoebox of 127 negatives and prints that they found under a couch at an estate sale in Northbrook, Illinois, near their home in Evanston. Their friend Irving Leiden, who had recently died, had owned the box, and his widow didn’t recall any information about…
One day, when fashion icon Donna Karan was 11, she went up in the attic of her home and discovered old family photos hidden away in a trunk. In one, she saw her mom with an unfamiliar man. When her mother, known as Queenie, discovered her there, she became physically abusive. According to Karan’s newly…
Whenever Isaiah Sheffer, the playwright and director who co-founded Symphony Space, worked in his home, he retreated to “The Mineshaft,” a spacious closet located near what was probably a dumb waiter at one point, furnished with a little desk. The makeshift office also accommodated suits, ties and Sheffer’s toolbox. Over the years, boxes of his…
The first set The Actors Company Theatre uses in its production of Motti Lerner’s “Hard Love” is different from those usually seen in Manhattan’s Beckett Theatre. At first glance, it’s an ordinary kitchen, but a closer look reveals some intriguing features. A shelf mounted above a cabinet holds a tzedakah charity box bracketed by two…
Moshe Safdie was sitting in a wood-paneled room in the National Academy of Design’s Beaux-Arts mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, surrounded by his drawings and architectural models. Represented among the works by the septuagenarian architect in the exhibit “Global Citizen: The Art of Moshe Safdie” were materials related to some of his Israeli projects:…
The show currently on display at Dominique Lévy’s gallery on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and devoted to the works of the artist known as Gego, is called “Autobiography of a Line,” after an early art book made by Gego herself. The title suggests something deeply personal, but the show offers something more oblique, more obscurely…
There is a 1960s style sukkah bolted atop a black 2003 Chevrolet pickup with Connecticut plates driving through all five boroughs this week that looks unlike any wooden hut I made in Hebrew School during the holiday of Sukkot. It actually brought to mind the pattern of a vintage faux Pucci turtleneck I own and…
Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene By Diana L. Linden Wayne State University Press, 184 pages, $44.99 Albert Einstein disembarking in America alongside anonymous impoverished refugees. Prescient views in 1939 of concentration camp prisoners in Nazi Germany. These are just two of the indelible images created on a monumental scale…
The Talmud didn’t make Sasha Steinberg a drag queen. But it did help inspire Vym, the “drag culture” glossy he launched in July as Sasha Velour, his alter ego. “What struck me about the Talmud, and so much Jewish philosophy, is that it’s not always one narrative,” Steinberg told the Forward from the Brooklyn apartment…
One hundred years ago, on July 1, 1915, a Jewish decorative art association called Ben Ouri was founded in the heart of London’s East End. It was led by Lazar Berson, a charismatic Russian Jewish émigré artist whose vision was to create a Jewish arts society that would support Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant artists and craftsmen,…
The Umm el-Fahem Gallery, dedicated to exhibiting contemporary Palestinian and Arab art, contains an archive seemingly at odds with its mission. It features the photographs and life histories of some 300 of the town’s oldest inhabitants, most of them already dead. But these stories were sacred to the Gallery’s founder and director, Said Abu Shakra,…
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