In the nineteenth century, fancy dress activities and their material record formed part of the mise-en-scène of the Jewish elite’s self-fashioning. Family photographs and press reports of Jews in costume cast new light on the visualization of wealthy Jews. These Jews actively participated in the fancy dress culture of the elites, a popular form of cultural expression that was deemed a powerful way

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945, an exhibition that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in February, 2020, proposed to remake art history by demonstrating the profound impact Mexican painters had on their counterparts in the United States, inspiring American artists “to use their art to protest economic, social, and racial injustices.” An unexamined part of

The image of Leviathan held a special fascination for artists who decorated wooden synagogues and illustrated manuscripts from the eighteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe. They usually depicted this biblical and Talmudic creature as a giant fish coiled round in a circle. A leviathan of the same shape appears at first in Jewish manuscripts produced in Germany

Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre constituted by the wedding of kabbalistic diagrams—the trees of the metonymic name—and large parchment sheets. Differences of kabbalistic opinion naturally found expression in these “maps of God.” The Sabbatean messianic movement of the 1660s and its prolonged and impactful afterlife produced, among other things

The destiny of an architect, painter, or carver working on the construction and decoration of an Eastern-European synagogue is a popular subject in Jewish folklore and literature. These stories are related to the international tale “The Giant as a Master Builder” (classified as АТ 1099), which Jewish storytellers adapted to their audiences. This paper discusses narratives circulated in traditional

Batsheva Goldman-Ida, art historian and museum curator, introduces the article by Jiří Mordechai Georgo Langer (1894, Prague–1943, Tel Aviv): “On the Function of the Jewish Doorpost Scroll,” presented for the first time in English translation, and originally written for the Freud journal Imago in 1928. Langer, a Hebrew poet and teacher of Jewish studies was a friend of Franz Kafka. Langer joined the

Rabbi Sasson ben Mordechai Shandukh was one of the leaders of the renewed Jewish community in Baghdad in the second half of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Among the literary heritage left by Rabbi Sasson Shandukh, which includes moral literature, liturgical poems, halakhic literature and prominent Kabbalistic literature, are the unique Kabbalistic ilanot (rotuli

After a lifelong career as a central figure in the London art scene, the American-Jewish artist R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007) left England in 1997 for Los Angeles to be “in exile,” as he named it, following a series of tragic events that he believed had caused the sudden death of his beloved wife and muse, artist Sandra Fisher (1947–1994). In Los Angeles, he continued the mission he had assigned himself

Jonathan Leaman (b. 1954, London) is a British painter who is represented in the Tate Collection. This article, the result of 15 years of his correspondence with art historian and museum curator Batsheva Goldman-Ida, focuses on a group of works by the artist from the last two decades. Leaman’s familiarity with major Kabbalah scholarship, combined with his wide knowledge of poetry and philosophy, enable

Rabbi Nahman’s philosophical and literary work has generated great interest among artists in various fields over the course of the last few decades, an interest of such degree and power that it has no equal in the traditional Jewish world. In this article, I will discuss one element of Rabbi Nahman’s spiritual world that may explain to some degree the attraction of his work to painters and other artists

Maps feature prominently in Amy Kurzweil’s graphic novel Flying Couch and Sarah Glidden’s graphic novel How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less. Even though their texts address different topics, the two Jewish graphic novels make use of maps in similar ways. Both authors use maps to explore their own complex relationships with seminal topics in contemporary Jewish life. For Kurzweil, maps become

This article analyzes the late Maurice Sendak’s (1928–2012) entry into the field of children’s picture books in the midtwentieth century and his contribution to the affective shift in children’s literature. It examines Sendak’s complex social position and artistic development in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as lesser-known illustrations by Sendak, including collaborations with Ruth Krauss and with

The present article investigates the visual elements of the illustrated youth quarterly L’Illustration Juive, which was published in Alexandria between 1929 and 1931 in French and Hebrew. The analysis sets out to expose the ideologies and worldviews informing the publication’s editorial board, as well as the conscious or unconscious message that the quarterly tried to communicate to its young readership

This article offers an alternative reading of Martin Buber (1878–1956), one guided by his writings on craft and artistic creation. Rather than view Buber as a philosopher of dialogue, it views him as a philosopher of relationships, including relationships to nonhuman things. His writings on craft and artistic creation are taken to exemplify these nonhuman relationships. After sketching out the general

This article examines images of wild flowers in Israeli visual culture from the period of pre-state Israel until the present day. These images have served as “cultural objects” that have helped construct a national identity. They have appeared in Hebrew publications, stamps, banknotes, and artworks. Arguing that the choice of botanical art is a political statement, this article shows the complex attitudes

The present article studies the thematic ways in which Jewish childhood was represented in Russian Jewish art and visual media from the 1850s to the 1930s. During this period, Russian Jewry was undergoing important transformations. It saw the establishment of a traditional model of religious life, a subsequent process of modernization and acculturation, and finally the education of the “New Jew” as

Helène Aylon (b. 1931) is among the first generation of feminist artists who identified and challenged traditional patriarchal and misogynist readings of ancient religious texts. This article analyzes the discourse and examines the reception of Aylon’s work The Liberation of G-d (1990–1996) within the Jewish art world and the American Conservative Jewish community, and her contribution to these two

Everyone plays and that, of course, includes children. In an ideal world, there would be literary traditions, archaeological remains and artistic renditions, which would enable the reconstruction of toys. Unfortunately, the situation does not exist for ancient Jewish society. For the most part, there are depictions in rabbinic literature and it is those toy traditions which I examine. The study begins

This article discusses the clothing of Jewish children and adolescents in Western and Central Europe in the early modern period. Looking at egodocuments, sumptuary laws, visual representations, moral books, halakhic literature and apprenticeship contracts, it gives a first overview of children’s dress and involvement in the textile industry. The article explore the forces that shaped children’s garments—parental

“The Children’s Theatre by the Kindergarten Teachers Center,” that was founded in 1928, was the first Hebrew repertory theatre exclusively addressing the audience of children attending kindergarten and the first grades of elementary school. This article explores how The Children’s Theater conveyed a set of performative practices that consolidated a habitus of Eretz-Israeli childhood. The theater articulated

This article pairs Bibliothek, a memorial in Berlin against the Nazi book-burning of May 10, 1933, with the library in Wim Wenders’ film Der Himmel über Berlin (1987) as sites to reflect on loss with the disappearance of material books from the library and the conversion of libraries into information centers in the era of the internet and digital reproduction. It explores loss by taking up arguments

This article studies the photographic methods that the Poland-based Landkentnish (Yiddish for “knowing the land”) movement employed in the interwar period to promote Jewish culture and Poland as a home for the Jewish people. The movement wished to increase the exposure of Polish Jews to Poland’s diverse landscapes in order to strengthen their connection to the Polish land. It also aspired to create

The architect Alfred Alschuler, a prolific designer of commercial and industrial buildings in the Chicago area, also built several synagogues before his most significant creation, Temple Isaiah, now the home of the Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv Isaiah Israel congregation. Completed in 1924, it marked a departure from Alschuler’s earlier classical synagogues and was Inspired, he wrote, by a synagogue at Hammat

This article addresses the theoretical dimensions of the consolidation of identity and formal expression in the historiography of the painter Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943), including the central place of his Jewish identity in it. It contends that the anormative historical archive related to Soutine and the centrality of the expressive object in the criticism on him have obscured his historiographical

This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the intersection of the imaginative discourse of post-witness representation and the production of Jewish memorial space. By representing missing places and people, Alembik puts her drawings into an exchange with an Appalachian musical form to explore family trauma. These crime scenes are spaces that breathe life

Recurrences of ancient ship carvings and drawings in Jewish burial caves are curious phenomena, which rarely capture the attention of scholars. Few narrative Jewish texts, which might otherwise illuminate this pattern, explicitly describe any link between ships and death. The ubiquity of nautical images in graffiti and monumental art throughout the ancient Mediterranean, moreover, obscures their particular

The discovery of pawned objects in treasure troves attributed to Jews enables investigation of the use and understanding of these objects by Jews, especially regarding those of a more secular nature, i.e. objects that have little relationship to Jewish or Christian liturgy and that lack explicit Jewish or Christian religious iconography or inscriptions. One of these pawned objects is a girdle, which

Vera Frenkel’s video and installation work focuses on the complexities of intercultural relations and identities, always raising issues of uncertainty, fantasy, and cultural expectations. Born in Bratislava in 1938, carried by her mother out of Europe on the eve of war, Frenkel came to Canada as a teenager, studied sociology at McGill University, and turned to art to explore the passages and perplexities

This essay discusses genuine medieval Jewish marriage rings, mostly dated to the fourteenth century, and then examines the rise in the collecting of Jewish marriage rings in the nineteenth century. As a result of the paucity of genuine medieval examples, forgers created rings that drew on characteristics of the early examples and on the decorative forms and techniques of other types of jewelry. Unscrupulous

by Yitzhak Yitzhak, “All Roads Lead to Rome.”3 This ditty was sung to soldiers of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army when they participated in the liberation of Rome in 1944—a kind of proto-Israeli USO show. According to this song, “a couple of sabras from Canaan, Ruth and Amnon from the Jezreel Valley, went on a trip that had never been done before” to Rome. There these sabra soldiers in love

This article analyzes how Anya Ulinich’s graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (2014) engages in and expands upon Jewish writing practices. I argue that through her use of the graphic novel as a medium, Ulinich both draws on and subverts masculine writing practices and images of women that have dominated Jewish literature and culture. Through her cross-discursive, intertextual, multi-directional

This article investigates the notion of memorization in rabbinic and Roman spatial practices. The Greco-Roman mnemonic technique, in which space was a structuring device for the memorized ideas, words or images, has been extensively studied. Scholars have also demonstrated how such a technique was applied in rabbinic systems of memorization and the arrangement of oral traditions. Nevertheless, very

This essay looks at Michael Sgan-Cohen’s reception in the Israeli art field over a period of 25 years. It suggests that whereas Sgan-Cohen’s signature style of referencing and reworking Jewish sources did not change much over that time, the Israeli art field did shift in its reception of his work, from an unfavorable stance in 1978, to a somewhat more accepting one in 1994, to recognition of Sgan-Cohen

This essay explores the Pietas by Jacob Steinhardt, an Eastern-European Jewish artist, in connection with his involvement in the Pathetiker movement. The paper proceeds to examine them against the backdrop of German and Austrian Expressionist movements, as well as other treatments of the theme by Jewish artists. Through stylistic and iconographic analysis of Steinhardt’s Pietas, Czekanowska-Gutman

“Museum Musings” relates to the exhibition Alchemy of Words: Abraham Abulafia, Dada Lettrism (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 16 June–19 November 2016), discussing the connections made, discoveries, and considerations on what lay behind the unique constellation of the show.

This article examines the evidence for the use of portrait sculpture on sarcophagi belonging to members of the Jewish community of Rome. The use of the “learned figure” motif, commonly employed in Roman sarcophagus portraiture and by Jewish patrons, is highlighted, and possible creative appropriations of the trope in Jewish contexts are raised. It is further argued that, among Jewish sarcophagus patrons

The Arch of Titus, constructed circa 81 CE under the emperor Domitian, commemorates the victory of the general, then emperor Titus in the Jewish War of 66–74 CE. Located on Rome’s Via Sacra, the Arch has been a “place of memory” for Romans, Christians and Jews since antiquity. This essay explores the history of a Jewish counter-memory of a bas relief within the arch that depicts the triumphal procession

This case study combines the disciplines of art history, community history, and ethnographic fieldwork to identify a group of museum objects within their cultural context. It shows how ethnography can be used to supplement the tool box available to the art historian in a positive way. Thus, private collections are used to identify the group of Hanukkah lamps of sheet metal in museums. Images of the

This publication is a tribute to the memory of the outstanding folklorist and ethnographer Dov Noy, who passed away in 2013. In the scholarly discourse that classifies folklore by modes and media of transmission, synagogue art—as distinct from folk narrative and behavioral lore—is commonly categorized as “visual folklore.” This paper examines the approach of classifying murals and sculptural decoration

This essay argues that iconoclasm serves as the visual tool of choice for Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz in their Memorial Against Fascism (1986) and for Horst Hoheisel in his Negative Form (1987). The West German historians’ debate of the late 1980s established an image prohibition by framing the representation of the Holocaust as an unimaginable and sacred event. The Counter-Monuments rely on

I share observations from two ethnographic studies conducted during the last eight years in Jewish heritage museums, where collective Jewish identity is displayed and performed, visualized and textualized. I show the visual pervasiveness of texts (historical and contemporary) at these museums, and that these texts indeed amount to the most popular category of artifacts presented as display. In other

“The Star of David and the Stars Outside: The Poetics and Semiotics of Jewish Folklore and of Zionism” written in memory of Dov Noy by his disciple and successor, proposes the perspectives of folklore studies and semiotics as the basis for a critical reading of Gershom Scholem’s essay “Magen David”. The author of the present article reviews the various subsequent versions of Scholem’s essay that was

The Jewish Brumberg sisters, known as the “grandmothers of Soviet animation,” established their own directors’ group at the newly-formed Soyuzmultfilm through which they sheltered and nurtured an underemployed artistic milieu. A case study of the personal, professional, and creative biographies of Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg reveals how they used their directors’ group as a safe haven for Moscow’s

This article surveys the circumstances in which kibbutzim built museums between the 1930s and the 1960s. It focuses on the two largest kibbutz movements and their divergent attitudes to the founding of museums, to art, and to the role of artists in society. In particular, this paper examines the case history of the first art museum to be built in a kibbutz—at Ein Harod, the birthplace of the largest