JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
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…
In Chicago, The Spertus Museum has just opened “Jewish Modernists in Chicago,” the seventh chapter in its eight-part series, “Uncovered & Rediscovered: Stories of Jewish Chicago.” This new exhibit focuses on the artistic influence of a group of Jewish artists active in Chicago in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. The entire series is part of…
Among the Nazis’ persecuted minorities were Jewish and non-Jewish artists, musicians and writers branded “degenerate” by the regime. “Radical Departures: The Modernist Experiment,” an exhibition currently showing at the Leo Baeck Institute/Center for Jewish History in New York, gathers together work by these “degenerate” artists, including Georg Stahl, Samson Schames, David Ludwig Bloch and others….
The Yiddish poet Yirmiye (Jeremiah) Hesheles died on October 16, 2010. When he celebrated his 100th birthday a group of dedicated Yiddishists, myself included, celebrated the occasion by paying him a visit at the New York State Veterans Home in St. Albans, Queens. A herd of geese, as if out of an Eastern European legend,…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. The name Mark Epshtein (1899-1949) no longer occupies a prominent place in Yiddish cultural history, but a current exhibit in Kiev brought the artist back to the city where he created his most important work. “The Return of the Master,” which runs until February 20 at the…
