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,…
Museums don’t typically take public, unequivocal stands on the question of the literal truth of the bible. But a National Geographic announcement of its exhibit “Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology” (on display through Jan. 3, 2016) refers to both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail as “famous, fictional relics.” But…
What would Adolf Hitler say today if he walked by Munich’s recently opened Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism? I posed this question to the German novelist Timur Vermes when we visited the city’s newest and most overdue museum together. Vermes was the perfect person to ask, as he is the author of…
Toronto-born Miriam Schapiro, who died on Saturday, June 20, at the age of 91, proved that an ardent feminist can also be a joyous artist. Born in 1923 to Russian Jewish parents, Fannie Cohen and Theodore Schapiro, she had a rich and varied imagination, as described in Thalia Gouma-Peterson’s “Miriam Schapiro” from Harry N. Abrams…
Growing up in Vienna means that your primary school education included memorizing the first stanza of the Blue Danube Waltz (“Die Donau so blau, so blau, so blau…”), knowing when the Ottomans unsuccessfully laid siege to Vienna (1529 and 1683), and learning about the city’s best-known boulevard, the Ringstrasse. While I might not recall all…
The first time I saw the way Jules Feiffer drew a line, I was captivated. I was at the School of Visual Arts’ library, reading his Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice strips, and his figures always seemed caught in midmovement, about to jump off the page with electric energy. Prose and drawings seemed effortlessly paired, and…
‘The word ‘slave’ is used in this exhibition,” notes a wall text at “Jews in the Caribbean: Four Centuries of History in Suriname and Curacao” at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum. “The museum is aware of the controversial nature of this term. ‘Slaves,’ as used here, refers to African men, women, and children taken captive and…
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