Stories about how we look at Jewish artists and how Jewish artists look at the world.
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Culture Despite war and political unrest, at the Mediterranean Biennale, the art must go on
The fourth Mediterranean Biennale presents works by 60 international artists in public spaces across Haifa and Sakhnin Valley. The exhibition joins art world superstars, rising stars and emerging voices from countries that are rarely seen in Israeli museums and galleries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and Bahrain. In response to the pandemic, curators Avital Bar Shay…
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Culture For the grandfather of micro-drawing, it’s truly a small world after all
The pandemic seems to have changed the world so that it now looks a lot more like the one artist Jacob El Hanani has always lived in. The 74-year-old Moroccan-born, Israeli-raised, New York-steeped “grandfather of micro-drawing,” has been tending to his intricate and painstakingly drawn canvases for over 45 years, in the same Soho loft…
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Culture Don’t reduce Louise Bourgeois’s art to an Oedipus complex
Louise Bourgeois did not trust words; this is what numerous articles and essays about the artist will tell you. That fact is also mentioned at “Louise Bourgeois: Freud’s Daughter,” a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum, which shows more than 50 of the French-born artist’s works alongside pages and pages of musings and notes she…
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Culture How a Holocaust survivor thrived in an art world that didn’t want her
Against all odds, Mila Gokhman has made a life full of flowers. “The main things in my life are flowers and trees,” the artist, 87, said in an interview. She was speaking from Los Angeles, where she lives today. But we were talking about an artistic journey that took place in another country entirely. Born…
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Culture Babi Yar is a site of Jewish death. With a new synagogue, this architect vows to ‘bring back Jewish life’
On the haunted ground of Babi Yar, the walls of a synagogue are opening and closing like the pages of a pop-up book. Over the course of two nights in 1941, SS officers and their local Ukrainian allies murdered almost 34,000 Jews at this ancient ravine, perpetrating one of the largest and most infamous massacres…
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Culture Michelle Zauner’s new memoir will tell you how grief tastes
If you don’t think great human drama can play out in a supermarket, just read the first pages of Michelle Zauner’s new memoir, “Crying in H Mart.” The largest Asian supermarket chain in the United States, H Mart takes its first initial from the Korean phrase han ah reum, which means “one arm full of…
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Culture This traditionally trained scribe is bending the rules — literally
Kalman Delmoor is a classically trained Hebrew scribe, or sofer, who sits in the Yochanan Ben Zakai historic synagogue, one of the Four Sephardi Synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem. But he doesn’t spend his days writing tefillin or mezuzot. Instead, he turns passages from Torah or liturgy into artwork — some colorful, some…
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Culture Meet the real-life artist behind the paintings in ‘Shtisel’
Akiva Shtisel, the protagonist of the eponymous series, is a genius artist, and his gorgeous paintings lie at the heart of the show about Haredi life. In the most recent season, his paintings of his deceased wife hold much of the emotional weight of the show, symbolizing Akiva’s grief and his struggle to develop a…
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