Stories about how we look at Jewish artists and how Jewish artists look at the world.
Forward With the Arts
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Culture How one dance lover is preserving the Jewish history of ballet — one blog entry at a time
Beatrice Waterhouse happened to go to a college that had a notable dance program. She hadn’t taken a ballet class since her early teens, but she figured she’d take a course on the history of dance. It sounded cool — plus, she needed the elective. “It turned out to be a history of basically ethnic…
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News A remarkable photo exhibit captures ‘a joyful moment’ of Black-Jewish unity in Miami Beach
On fabled Miami Beach, land of sunshine and escape, Blacks and Jews share a shameful history of discrimination and exclusion. Into the 1970s, Blacks were prohibited by racist “sundown” laws from swimming or spending the night on the Beach, or to be there without a work ID. Jews could not buy or rent property on…
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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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In Case You Missed It
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Culture I come from a long line of Jewish Bundists. Now, Molly Crabapple is part of our family.
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Opinion American Jews have a Hasan Piker problem. Solving it is going to hurt
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Fast Forward 200+ Bnei Menashe immigrate to Israel from India, the first to make the journey in years
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Yiddish װאָס קען מען זיך אָפּלערנען פֿון מאָלי קראַבעפּלס בוך װעגן „בונד“?What can we learn from Molly Crabapple’s book about the Bund?
דאָס בוך איז גרונטיק געפֿאָרשט, לעבעדיק אָנגעשריבן — אָבער אידעאָלאָגיש באַפֿאַרבט