A Serious Man
Something serious is going on here…
The movie opens with Rashi’s comment on Deuteronomy 18:13: You shall be wholehearted with the Lord your God. Rashi explains that we must “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.”
The Prayer of the Orchard Street Shul
In America it happens all the time. Immigrant Jews arrive, build a community, more Jews come, and then prosper and move on to a better neighborhood and finally the suburbs. In the old neighborhood non-Jewish immigrants take their…
Singer’s Artists
The illustrator stands in an oft-denigrated position, scorned by modernists and traditional purists alike. For both schools of thought the sublime of art cannot be rendered literal. On the other hand, illustrators are curiously accepted if not celebrated by those in a postmodern…
Synagogues in Spain
A few weeks ago we stayed at a hotel in Seville, Spain called Las Casas de la Juderia, literally the houses of the Jewish Quarter. It was beautiful, right next to an old church called Santa Maria la Blanca that was in…
Leipzig Machzor: A Vision from the Past
Seven hundred years ago in a synagogue in southwest Germany near the Rhine River, the chazzan opened a new machzor on Rosh Hashanah as he began Kol Nidrei. The congregation glanced up and gasped as they saw the…
Kupferminc’s Wanderings
Mirta Kupferminc is an artist who has made her artistic mission a search for meaning in a world profoundly unstable, problematic and filled with the terrors of memory not entirely her own. As the child of Holocaust survivors, uprooted from Europe and planted…
Reinventing Ritual at The Jewish Museum
Why would one want to reinvent a Jewish ritual when it had been working perfectly well for hundreds if not thousands of years? Ah ha, perhaps all is not as well as traditionalists would like to think. There is…
Rosh Hashanah Love Letters: Illuminations of David Moss
How should we approach Hashem at this time of teshuvah? Surely with fear because we understand that our lives hang in the balance. But another element needs to be incorporated. Love. Yes, love must define our relationship…
Derfner Judaica Museum and The Art Collection
The inaugural exhibition, Tradition and Remembrance: Treasures of the Derfner Judaica Museum, at the Hebrew Home in Riverdale is a stunning presentation of close to 250 objects that sweeps through Jewish art history from the eighteenth century to…
Esther’s Swoon Revealed
Earlier this summer I went up to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see the blockbuster exhibition, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice. While rarely have I seen as many masterpieces collected together in a traveling show, one painting stood…
A Play by Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer
When we peer back through the millennia whom do we see? Two women standing at the very beginning of our history, Sarah and Hagar. Sarah conspired to overcome her barrenness and provide Abraham with an heir through her maidservant Hagar.…
Brighton Beach Bible
“We are in effect changing the rules as to what is aesthetically acceptable…. It is exciting precisely because we are changing the discourse [about Jewish visual expression and contemporary art].” Joel Silverstein made this startling proclamation in these pages three months ago…