Richard I. Cohen, “The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life – An Overview,” in Richard I. Cohen, ed., Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History [=Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 26] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1-24 (original) (raw)
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'Jewish art: a modern history' by Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver
Jewish Culture and History, 2015
Jewish Art: A Modern History offers a scholarly, yet broadly accessible and richly descriptive engagement with Jewish artistic expression in modern times. Firmly grounded in the disciplines of art and cultural history, this long-awaited critical overview of nineteenth and twentieth century Jewish art showcases the 'multifarious Jewish experiences across both geographies and time' (8). Much like the history of the Jewish people, Baskind and Silver argue that Jewish art is a product of interactions with other cultures and histories, and is therefore 'variously modified within diverse nationalities' (10). This volume does not disappoint in its treatment of the much-debated question of what is Jewish art, as it chooses to move away from theoretical dead-ends. Instead, it foregrounds a vast array of artworks that depict the richness, diversity and complexity of Jewish experiences, sensibilities and perceptions. Hence, there is not one understanding of Jewish art, but many. The authors reveal, through detailed case studies of artworks from Western Europe, America and Israel, a variety of styles, forms and shapes, all defining of Jewish artmaking. The six richly illustrated chapters draw very vivid portrayals of well-known and lesser known artists and emphasise the importance of the distinctive political, cultural and social conditions that influenced the artists' creative practice. Especially prominent is the idea that Jewish creativity has flourished within the liminal space of encounter(s) with the others. Art by Jews is continually shaped by difference, or what W.E.B. Du Bois described as 'double consciousness', namely a 'sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others'. 1 From this point of view, Jewish artists have many things in common with African American and feminist artists as they too are 'insiders who are also outsiders'. 2 The creative act comes from the ability to change perspectives, by engaging with the dominant culture as well as radically breaking away with it through the assertion of difference. The book achieves its goal to make the reader see the 'larger whole of Jewish artmaking' and to establish important distinctions and aesthetic practices that place Jewish art within a broader art historical context (12). In this way, it sets the groundwork for a broader analytical framework that can be pursued and extended by future research. By way of introduction, the authors make the case that the prohibition of graven images enforced by the second commandment had, in fact, little bearing upon Jewish creativity which flourished throughout the ages into a rich pictorial tradition. The following chapters illustrate this pictorial tradition in its varied stylistic and thematic manifestations in Germany, France and Britain, Russia (to a certain extent), America and Israel. The two contradictory forces that shaped Jewish identities in Diaspora, namely, a sense of continuity maintained through religious practice, and the need for change, adaptation and emancipation emerge in the works of many Jewish artists. German Jewish painter Moritz Daniel Oppenheim depicts both emancipated German Jews and Jewish communal life with its rites of passage and Sabbath celebrations. Artists from Britain engage with these tensions differently. Solomon Alexander Hart, for example, wished not to be identified as a 'Jewish artist'. Solomon J. Solomon, on the other hand, felt more comfortable with his dual identity. A highly engaging study case of Solomon's painting High Tea in the Sukkah (1906) portrays processes of adaptation to modern British life. In Eastern Europe, Maurycy Gottlieb's painting Jesus preaching at Capernaum (1878-1879) is invoked as an attempt to construct bridges between Jewish
Jewish dimensions in modern visual culture: antisemitism, assimilation, affirmation
2009
G avriel D. Rosenfeld 12Pos twar Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust When Daniel Libeskind was named in early 2003 as the master planner in charge of redeveloping the former World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, most observers saw it as a personal triumph that testifi ed to his newfound status as one of the world's most respected architects. At the same time, his victory highlighted a phenomenon that was strangely overlooked, but is arguably much broader in signifi cance; namely, the recent rise to prominence of Jews in the western architectural profession. 1 Until recently, Jewish achievements in the fi eld of architecture paled in comparison with those attained by Jews in other cultural fi elds, such as literature, fi lm, music, and even painting. Although scattered fi gures like Eric Mendelsohn and Richard Neutra gained recognition as masters of modern architecture in the fi rst half of the century, it has really only been since 1945, and especially since the late 1970s, that Jewish architects have attained notable visibility and prominence as a group. Any survey of contemporary architecture today would be incomplete without mentioning-beyond Libeskind-such Jewish architects as Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, James Ingo Freed, Eric Owen Moss, Moshe Saf die, Robert A. M. Stern, Stanley Tigerman, and Zvi Hecker, among others. 2 It is not merely the Jewish background of these architects that is significant, however. Many of them have been consciously motivated by Jewish concerns and have incorporated Jewish themes in their work, thus making it arguably more "Jewish" in orientation and expression than the work of earlier generations of Jewish architects. To be sure, measuring "Jewishness" in architecture-let alone defi ning what "Jewish architecture" itself might mean-is fraught with problems. 3 Scholars for more than a century have struggled to identify the Jewish qualities of buildings, but they have met with very little success. As a result, the general consensus today is that Copyrighted Material
Through legends, the Jewish collective memory awards a significant place to the builders of synagogues, as it does to the painters of synagogue murals and the carvers of Torah arks. These narratives played an important role in the Jewish community's perception of and its self-identification in the townscape. Tales about masters, both Jewish and Christian, full of oddities, didactics, and miracles, believably circulated in Jewish traditional society, although they were not recorded until the early twentieth century. Sometimes a tale echoes an inscription left by a master on his work, but most often it is an independent form of collective memory. The legends live according to the rules of their genre, often making use of universal subjects, so that their understanding is difficult without the context of non-Jewish folklore. The Israeli School of Folklore Studies is deeply involved in the study of the international tale types and their adaptation to Jewish religious texts and daily life, to the Jewish addressers and addressees in their historical mutations and geographical variety. Such adaptation leads to the production of new narratives, called oicotypes in accordance with the theory and terminology transferred by Carl von Sydow from biology to ethnography. The present paper is dedicated to the adaptation of the Tale of a Giant as a Master Builder (AT 1099), which is popular in Jewish folklore and belles-lettres. The paper deals with the main components of this tale as rendered in a traditional society, its transformations in the writings of European acculturated interpreters, Jewish national romanticists, and those who abandoned this latter trend to embrace the artistic avant-garde.