Guest Columnist: Batnadiv Weinberg

Home | Advertising Opportunities | About | Contact | Site Map | Subscribe

Web Exclusives Dining Guide In This Week's Edition News Front Page Editorial/Letters Editorials Letters To The Editor Torah Weekly Luach Questions & Answers Daf Yomi Leadership Challenges Torah Thought for Teens View From Zion Torah Features Halachic Questions/Rabbi Jack Simcha Cohen Covenant & Conversation Parshah Panorama OP-ED Media Monitor Columns Chodesh Tov/Rabbi Hanoch Teller Glimpses Into American Jewish History Rebbetzin's Viewpoint/Rebbetzin Jungreis Focus on Israel/Dov Gilor My Machberes Baseball Insider Jerusalem Vantage Point/Caroline B. Glick Moshe Feiglin Fundamentally Freund/Michael Freund Archives The Practical Activist/Yossi Cukier Features Interviews and Profiles Lessons In Emunah Truth From Israel Inquiring Photographer Electronics Today The Book Shelf Movie and Play Reviews Extras Archives The Way We Were: From The Archives Magazine Parenting Our Children Chronicles of Crises Judith Guedalia Devora Waysman Special Features Feminine Soul Teens and Twenties Talk Jewish Arts Marriage and Relationships Impact Of Women On Jewish History/Prof. L. Jackson On Our Own/Cheryl Kupfer Archives Louis Rene Beres Web Exclusives Kashrus Center Responsa Of Modern Judaism Family Issues Food Latest in Kosher Food Restaurant Review Kosher Food News Recipes Jewish Community Rockland County/Northern New Jersey Upcoming Events How You Can Help Travel Features On The Jewish World South Florida Personal Perspectives Queens and Long Island Archives West Coast Happenings Contests/Games Judoko Chess in the Press Tishrei Contest Chanukah Contest Purim Contest Shavuos Contest Summer Contest Tu B'Shevat Contest Crossword Puzzle Word Star Media Kits Building Blocks Media Kit Bayit Ne'eman - a Home Magazine Health & Living Media Kit Shopper Media Kit Supplements Shopper Health & Living Mind, Body & Soul Building Blocks Current Cover Page Related Sites Minyan Locator Service Directory
	Select an Archives Section: JP Archives: Jewish Arts 321 Archived Articles Found in Jewish Arts Next 20 Articles > 1) Posted Sep 01 2010 Process, Loss and History By Guest Columnist: Batnadiv Weinberg New York has gone through a William Kentridge craze this year. There have been scattered exhibitions in galleries throughout the cities, in addition to lectures and live performances. From the blockbuster Five Themes show at the MoMA, the Metropolitan Opera's production of Kentridge's directed-and-designed multimedia version of Shostakovich's The Nose, the South African artist has been a dominant voice on the New York art scene. For those who missed the incredible MoMA retrospective-or for those who simply wish for another Kentridge fix-a final salvo can be caught at the Jewish Museum's exhibition of part of Kentridge's Nine Drawings for Projection series. Read Article 2) Posted Aug 25 2010 Anything But Your Grandmother's Candle Sticks: Contemporary Judaica By Menachem Wecker A tallit with pastel-colored circular candies on the atarah (literally crown, the top, embellished portion of the garment); a hand held golden bulldozer used to collect chametz on Passover; a mezuzah that shows the three letter name of God (shin, daled, yud, the Sustainer) on a computer keyboard above an "Enter" button, where the text of the mezuzah appears (in the typography of a Torah scroll) on the monitor. Read Article 3) Posted Aug 18 2010 Generations By Richard McBee Two Jewish holidays particularly command us to be connected with our vast history. Most notably the Passover demands that we feel as if we too went out of Egypt with the Jewish masses. Less obvious is Tisha b'Av. But if the destruction of our two Temples and the subsequent Jewish communal disasters are to be properly commemorated, we must somehow transform our feelings into a personal loss. Each oppression, each murder, each disgrace must feel like it happened to our family just yesterday. Read Article 4) Posted Aug 11 2010 How Jewish Is Rembrandt's 'Jewish' Bride? By Menachem Wecker As I sit to write this article less than a week before my wedding, my mind keeps returning to a particular work, which one must grapple with if one intends to take the history of Jewish art seriously. Read Article 5) Posted Aug 04 2010 *A Mohel's Siddur* by Aryeh ben Judah Leib By Richard McBee Imagine you are a mohel and, thank God, business is booming. It's a good living and you even have time to sit and learn in between the jobs that seem to crop up at least once a week. In addition, you do a bit of doctoring and tutoring a few children in heder. You think, "Perhaps I should have a siddur to replace my father's worn-out printed volume that he got from his father and then from his father oh so many years ago. Here I am in Trebitsch who can help me find something...nice. Oh, I know, Aryeh ben Judah Leib. He is getting really famous for making hand written books with beautiful decorations over in Vienna where he has set up shop. He makes his seforim for important people, even those Yidden who serve at the royal Court - just like they used to do maybe two hundred years ago before we had Hebrew printing. Why not, I'm doing well, doing God's work. It's a hiddur mitzvah." Read Article 6) Posted Jul 28 2010 Is Curious George Jewish? Monkeys and Jewish Art By Menachem Wecker Monkeys and apes are generally symbols of base passion, particularly lust, in Western art. Giovanni Battista Foggini's 17th century bronze sculpture "The Fall of Man" shows not only the serpent dangling from the Tree of Knowledge tempting Adam and Eve, but also a monkey seated behind the tree eating an apple. Foggini may have gotten the idea from Jan Brueghel the Elder, whose 1612 painting "Garden of Eden" features a monkey prominently, or from a c. 1410 "The Garden of Eden" by an unknown artist in Frankfurt. A century earlier, Martin Luther had famously referred to Satan as "God's ape," building upon the then-popular view of monkeys as unintelligent animals that simply mimicked primitive human behavior. Read Article 7) Posted Jul 21 2010 Considering Dura: Part III By Richard McBee** The significance of the 3rd century Dura Europos synagogue murals paradoxically lies less in their historical importance as the earliest example of Jewish narrative art than in their role as a paradigm of what is possible for contemporary Jewish artists. After all, we have absolutely no other examples of Jewish narrative art on this scale and one might argue Dura is simply an aberration, a curiosity from Late Antiquity, never repeated. But of course that is its power, revealing the untapped possibilities of Jewish narrative based on Torah, Midrash and individual creativity, spanning a gap of 1700 years and, with imagination, finding parallels and inspiration between their world and ours. Read Article 8) Posted Jul 14 2010 Jewish Community vs. Spinoza: David Ives' New Jerusalem By Menachem Wecker "If all mankind minus one were of one opinion," wrote the political philosopher John Stuart Mill in his 1859 treatise On Liberty, "mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." Read Article 9) Posted Jul 07 2010 Considering Dura: Part II By Richard McBee Dura Europos looms large in the history of Jewish Art not only because of its place as the earliest example of Jewish Art but also because its achievements are seemingly at odds with the conceptual and halachic problems it presents. The complexity and variety of Torah subjects depicted are more ambitious and extensive than any Jewish Art until the advent of the illuminated Haggadahs in Spain one thousand years later. The notion of a synagogue interior fully decorated with images does not reappear until the famous painted shuls of Poland, Lithuania and Russia in the 17th century. All that said the images we see are, at times, problematic. Read Article 10) Posted Jun 30 2010 Can a Tenement Fire Be a Microcosm for the Holocaust? Ben Shahn's Hickman Drawings By Menachem Wecker Ben Shahn's "Allegory" (1948), which is part of the collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, shows a lion with a fiery mane standing in an abstract red, blue, green and purple landscape. A bright red-orange structure in the bottom left corner might be a burning building. Underneath the lion is a heap of people, probably dead but perhaps sleeping. The sky is also a mixture of fire and smoke and the painting resembles depictions of hell in medieval manuscripts, where eternal punishment is often personified as a menacing and demonic beast. Whatever the allegory Shahn is depicting, one can be sure it is not intended to be a happy setting. Read Article 11) Posted Jun 23 2010 Dura Considered: Part I By Richard McBee The dilemma of the Jewish artist is that he or she is often dismissed out of hand as a cultural and halachic impossibility. And yet a very real history exists to reveal a great many antecedents. Jews have made Jewish art for at least two thousand years: 20th & 19th century paintings, five hundred years of making ritual objects and illustrated prayer books, haggados, megillos and ketubos not to mention the extensive production of illuminated manuscripts between 1300 and 1500. And in the Land of Israel at least 18 decorative mosaic synagogue floors spanning the 4th through 6th centuries of the Common Era have been uncover so far. Where did it all begin? The answer is simple: Dura Europos. Read Article 12) Posted Jun 16 2010 Yiddish Theater Is Alive and Well (at Least in Chicago), But What Does It Have to Say About Religion? By Menachem Wecker Trying to summarize the plot of "Jacob and Jack," currently in its world premier at Victory Gardens in Chicago, is a bit like, well, trying to understand a Yiddish play if you don't speak Yiddish. The viewer quickly gets the sense that something really interesting is happening in the play's myriad flashbacks - which are simultaneously redundant and singular - but even after skimming the Jacob and Jack script, I'm still having trouble keeping the narrative and chronology straight. Read Article 13) Posted Jun 09 2010 Bloom's Bittersweet Vision: Paintings by Lloyd Bloom By Richard McBee Upon entering Lloyd Bloom's exhibition at the Chassidic Art Institute one is confronted by the sweet beautiful image of a lamb skipping through the air in a puffy cloud landscape. Right next to it is an image of a goat kid cuddled up in the lap of a young shepherd. Further down the wall we see paintings depicting a young man leining from the Torah, then women lighting Shabbos candles and finally a father and son at the seder table, all candidates to be the most emblematic scene of Jewish life imaginable. Read Article 14) Posted Jun 02 2010 Moses' Spies in Art By Menachem Wecker Growing up, I used to enjoy reading S. Weissman's Little Midrash Says (published 1986) and carefully studying Siegmund Forst's illustrations of the weekly Torah portion. At the time, I had no idea how many of Forst's drawings were derived from earlier traditions of biblical illustration (many of them Christian), but I was particularly struck by the moral readability of the narratives. It was always a cinch to figure out who was a good character and who was evil; you could read it on their faces. The heroes were always smiling widely and the villains looked ugly and angry at the world. Read Article 15) Posted May 26 2010 Howard Lerner's Universe By Richard McBee Walking into Howard Lerner's studio is like falling headfirst into a Tanach made of sculpture. Right near the door is a 10-foot high Tower of Babel. Partially hidden behind this behemoth is a thoroughly idiosyncratic Vision of Ezekiel. Further along into the somewhat cluttered, but not chaotic, studio is a vista of massive sculptures; The Ark of the Covenant looms ahead while Elijah's Ascension is on the left, just past a 10 foot depiction of Enoch. To be totally honest, it's all a bit frightening. Read Article 16) Posted May 17 2010 Toby Cohen's Hovering Hassidim By Menachem Wecker One of my favorite characters in all of literature is the senile patriarch José Arcadio Buendía, of Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, who, before getting tied to a tree for his own protection, decides he would like to capture God in a daguerreotype. José's ultimately unsuccessful design solution is to jump out from around a corner hoping to catch the deity unawares. Read Article 17) Posted May 12 2010 Iconic Images From Israel By Richard McBee Iconic images are rare, especially in the mundane world of photojournalism. But when they happen their intense simplicity compresses a host of ideas and emotions in a single picture, making complexity seem transparent. Israeli photojournalist Rina Castelnuovo excels at this skill. Her first solo exhibition, currently at the Andrea Meislin Gallery, is a breathtaking tour-de-force of photographic insight focusing on the complex reality of Israeli life. Read Article 18) Posted May 05 2010 Interfaith Medieval Artistic Collaborations Shed Light on Spanish Jewish-Christian Relations By Menachem Wecker In 1393, two years after the worst pogroms in Spanish history, the Jewish artist Abraham de Salinas accepted a commission to paint a New Testament-themed retablo, a work placed behind a church altar, for the cathedral of San Salvador. Another Jewish artist, the silversmith Bonafós Abenxueu (sometimes referred to as Bonafés Abenxueu), created the frame for the retablo. Read Article 19) Posted Apr 28 2010 Modern Art/Sacred Space By Richard McBee Read Article 20) Posted Apr 21 2010 Is There A Jewish Tradition About The Shape Of The Tablets Of The Ten Commandments? By Menachem Wecker Nearly six and a half centuries before McDonald's first introduced its iconic logo designed by Jim Schindler, artists had already invented the double-humped shape. The Flemish painter Michiel van der Borch's 1332 manuscript illustration "Moses receives the Tables of the Law" shows a haloed prophet, his hair twisted into horns, carrying his staff and wearing a red robe as he reaches out to receive the Ten Commandments from God. Hundreds of medieval manuscript illuminations, as well as dozens of paintings by Chagall, feature the same rounded layout. Read Article 321 Archived Articles Found in Jewish Arts Next 20 Articles >
Copyright JewishPress.com 2008 \| Contact Us \| About Us