Last month’s column, as you may recall, made much of Judaica collectors who prefer to sell rather than donate their holdings. No sooner had I made that claim than a number of readers as well as colleagues duly informed me that I was barking up the wrong tree. Dolefully, they pointed out that even if…
Would you know what it means if I say that we are living in a post-Internet age? A whole lot has been said regarding the designation, but consensus, alas, remains out of grasp. Nonetheless the notion stakes its claim on, even demands, our attention: Whatever, wherever, the post-Internet may be, welcome to it. “Surround Audience,”…
New York City is losing its Museum of Biblical Art. The Board of Trustees of MOBIA announced that it will close for good on June 30 this year. Its current exhibition, Sculpture in the Age of Donatello, will remain open to the public through June 14. This comes about a year after the American Bible…
In October of 1986, as a delegation of Jews active in community affairs toured a closed Auschwitz-Birkenau, investigative journalist Ann Weiss fell behind the others. “A need for solitude compelled me to linger behind, Weiss said of confronting 30,000 shoes that once belonged to prisoners. “Alone, I studied their broken forms, and thought of their…
This year, Israel’s contribution to the World’s Fair is, more or less, breakfast cereal. The theme of the fair, which opens in Milan in May and runs for six months, is “Feeding the planet, energy for life.” Israel will be represented by a 39-by-230-foot living billboard of wheat, rice and corn. It is meant to…
The largest art gift in the history of the Art Institute of Chicago has been donated to the museum by Stefan Edlis, a Vienna-born Jewish industrialist and art collector, and his wife Gael Neeson. The over 40 works from Edlis’ collection of Pop and contemporary art that will go to the museum include nine silkscreens…
Why should Justin Bieber have all the fun? Instead of the teenage pop sensation chanting “Baby, Baby, Baby,” why not the words “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel,” sung to the same tune? One professional Jewish a cappella group is doing just that. Six13 is part of a growing number of Hebraic harmonizers springing up across America in…
Beijing (formerly Peking) opera is not like anything else. Certainly it?s not like Western opera, except to the extent that both art forms have singers act out stories. To an untrained Western ear, the women?s voices in Chinese opera can resemble nothing so much as the mewing of cats, as cats and female singers of…
We all believe in magic. Despite 300 years of industrial and social revolution, as well as unparalleled explanation of the natural world through the scientific method, we still throw salt over our shoulders, put up hamsas in our homes, wear lucky shirts to job interviews and run through tested game-day rituals, whether we are playing…
“Schmatta: Rags To Riches To Rags,” a documentary about the rise and decline of New York’s garment district — and the efforts to preserve what remains of a sector that played a vital role in the American Jewish experience during the past century — premieres October 19 on HBO. Its director, Marc Levin, recently sat…
The June 19 wedding of Sarah Hoenig, 21, and Eric Kinzbrunner, 22, began with all the pageantry one would expect of an Orthodox ceremony. In a pre-wedding bedeken, the bride’s veil was lowered. The marriage contract, or ketubah, was signed at the groom’s table, or tisch, and the blessings were chanted and the glass broken…
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