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…
When the State of Israel first came into being 67 years ago, it harbored certain aspirations: It hoped to be not only a national homeland for the Jews and a light unto the nations, but also the fashion mecca of the Middle East. Most of us are familiar with the first two beau ideals; the…
It all started with my grandfather, Sidney Goldstein, and his Korean War memoir. I found it several years ago while helping clean out my grandparents’ garage. I was 26 when I read it for the first time, and he was 27 when he wrote the letters his memoir was based on. I knew he’d written…
“Chagall-Malevich” is an exhilarating paean to the uplifting power of art. Part docu-drama, part fantasy, the film is largely based on the life of Marc Chagall, widely considered the greatest Jewish artist of the 20th Century. Born Moishe Shagal into a Hasidic community in the Pale of the Settlement, Chagall found and pursued his passion…
