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Photographs of Vardi Kahana Three Sisters, 1992 by Vardi Kahana, courtesy Andrea Meislin Gallery The Holocaust was “Ground Zero of the Greenwald-Kahana family.”  In the midst of the murderous fury of 1944 three sisters were tattooed with consecutive numbers in Auschwitz.  They were lucky; they survived…
Feinsmith Quartet at Merkin Concert Hall Daniel David Feinsmith To encounter God is an elemental quest of mankind.  And yet for Jews it is paradoxically impossible and immediate.  In any physical sense we know that “…no human can see My face and live” (Exodus 33:20) even…
Paintings and Objects by Lynn Russell Lynn Russell’s current exhibition at the Chassidic Art Institute challenges us with a piety that resists all easy answers.  First there are the Baruch HaShem pieces, highly unusual collaged texts combining letters, images and objects that somehow lead us…
Woodcarving from the Synagogue to the Carousel Much like the Jewish people themselves the legacy of Jewish Art has miraculously survived seemingly endless assaults of the past two centuries.  In Eastern Europe the forces of assimilation, cultural denial and holocaust have worked tirelessly to abandon,…
Davidson, Singer and the Jews Sometime in 1967 Bruce Davidson, the photographer, met Isaac Bashevis Singer, the writer, and they went down to the Lower East Side to the Garden Cafeteria to chat, have coffee and rice pudding. It began a creative friendship that lasted…
Bible Scenes “And the Lord prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”  Rabbi Tarphon said: That fish was specially appointed from the six days of creation to swallow up Jonah… He entered its mouth just as a man enters the great synagogue, and he…
Zabari’s Figures Moshe Zabari has accomplished a remarkable feat… he has put the Matriarchs literally on top of the Torah.  What a triumph for religious feminism, what a triumph for Jewish Art! His recent series of sterling silver Torah Finials (Rimonim) feature Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel…
Ritual and Repetition The bedrock of all religion is repetition. Tradition as a religious concept is nothing less than the repetition of rituals, dress, thought and behavior of preceding generations. For Jews the amount of repetition that is found in one’s life naturally expresses the…
Sarah’s Miscalculation Rembrandt’s etching, Abraham Entertaining the Angels is a pristine jewel of Biblical narrative.  The artist depicts the exact moment the story reveals its true meaning.  The guests have been comfortably seated and served refreshments by Abraham himself, shown humbly waiting on them in…
Frydlender’s Constructions What is Frydlender up to? Barry Frydlender, the prominent Israeli photographer, is currently privileged with simultaneous exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His New York exhibition consists of a mere 10 works that examine various…
Caravaggio and Evil Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio (1571-1610) was well acquainted with evil.  His short violent life careened wildly between prestigious painting commissions from the most powerful men in Rome and drunken street brawls with the lowest of the low.
Ita Aber at Yeshiva University Museum Could there be such a thing as Women’s Art?  From my liberal modernist perspective such a notion is foreign, threatening and, indeed, heretical.  I have long clung to the belief that art is a universal value, a vast spectrum…

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