JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
If you’ve ever lived in New York City — or set foot in it, or talked to someone about it, or watched one of the approximately three billion films about it — you know it has a complicated relationship with its past. On the one hand, there’s a sort of maniacal drive to the future…
Correction, April 5, 11:44 a.m.: [An earlier version of this story stated that Bezalel Academy of Art and Design was part of Hebrew University. In fact, it is a separate entity located on the Hebrew University campus.] In my family, there used to be an ongoing dispute between me and my kids about the Kinder…
A Jewish cemetery in England won a prestigious international prize for design this week, the Jewish Chronicle reported. The New Bushey Cemeterey, in a northwestern suburb of London, claimed the prize for best religious architecture at the World Architecture Festival. The firm behind the cemetery, Waugh Thistleton, was noted for its use of natural materials….
Fashionable evening bags are one thing. But Judith Leiber’s handbags marry exquisitely detailed craftsmanship with a joyously bold, at moments, anarchistic, vision. Close to 100 bejeweled silver and gold-plated high-end “after five” handbags — including Leiber’s iconic evening purses (minaudieres) sculpted to evoke various vegetables and small animals — are on display in the stunning…
Graphic designer Saul Bass is one of those towering figures in American film whose name is far less well-known than his work. His work appears in the films of directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick. If you’ve seen “Catch Me If You Can” (2002), “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (2005), “Mad…
Earlier today, the LA Review of Books published an interview with Jewish book cover designer, Peter Mendelsund. Even if you don’t recognize the name, if you’re a reader you’ve almost certainly seen his work. Among other projects, Mendelsund has redesigned covers from the back catalogs of such notable authors as Franz Kafka, Simone De Beauvoir,…
Organizers have announced a design competition for a memorial in Warsaw to Poles who saved Jews during World War II. Polish-born Holocaust survivor and philanthropist Sigmund Rolat, of the Remembrance and Future Foundation, announced the competition at a news conference in Warsaw on Monday. Rolat said the designs would be judged by an international jury…
Funny how styles come and go. One generation’s eyesore of a couch is another’s prized possession. You need only visit “Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism,” a brand-new exhibition at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum to see how fickle we can be. Filled with stuff formerly consigned to an attic but which now reads as…
