Prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
What is it about big? Why are we impressed by size when we all know that the quality of any given thing is easily just as, if not more, important? The simplest answer is that while man can…
Archie Rand - Jewish Enough
This is it. This is the one exhibition that you must see if contemporary Jewish Art matters at all. Archie Rand has been bravely creating radical Jewish art for at the last twenty years, challenging both the contemporary art establishment…
Harbinger of the Future
Had Gadya, the playful, threatening and ultimately reassuring song that ends many Seder evenings among Ashkenazi Jews, has a long history in the Haggada. It emerged from German folk songs to be first printed in the Prague Haggada of 1595. The…
Sotheby's Judaica
Jewish Art has always been burdened by Jewish history. Unlike most other cultural traditions, the vicissitudes of fate have been particularly harsh and have frustrated any attempt to establish a long-standing cultural tradition for the Jewish people in their far-flung habitations. Frequently just…
Paintings by Shoshannah Brombacher
Exile is punishment; exile is a constant reminder of our fallen status; exile fills us with longings for a permanent home we cannot possess. Paradoxically exile is also where we are most comfortable and where we are most creative with our…
Return to Sinai
I was transfixed the first time I saw Moses und Aron, the 1933 opera by Arnold Schoenberg. That was in 1990 at the New York City Opera and the performance at the Metropolitan Opera this December was no less exciting. The difficult,…
A Call to Art from the Torah World
"We have inherited an amputated visual culture, viscously cut off from our artistic forefathers we have every right to lay claim to," exclaimed Archie Rand, artist and professor at Columbia University. In a passionate and articulate account…
The Art of Aging
Hyman Bloom's haunting painting Old Woman in Red presents us with a central paradigm of aging: its universality. Our past and inevitable future are frequently seen in depictions of the very old. In image after image the exhibition The Art of…
At The Brooklyn Museum
The Holocaust was the largest mass murder in human history. It casts an indelible shadow over everything that follows, twisting morality and normative values in unfathomable ways. The vast complicity of Western Civilization in the pre-meditated murder of six million Jews…
Israeli Picture Book
Marc Chagall, Autour du Coq Rouge, 1982, oil on canvas, 36 x 26 inches, courtesy of Sotheby's Tel Aviv
Autour du Coq Rouge (Around the Red Rooster), painted in 1982 by a ninety-five year old Marc Chagall (1887-1985), the most famous Jewish artist…
Farbrengen: a Gathering of Images
A farbrengen is a gathering of Hassidism in the presence of their holy Rebbe tolearn Torah and hear his words of wisdom. This exhibition is such a gathering. The hitherto unseen photographs by the photographer Jerry Dantzic present the collective…
The Sarajevo Haggadah: The Choice of Images
All Jewish Art depends upon the choice of subject as the primary vehicle to elicit meaning. Style, composition, form and innovation operate in the context of the theme drawn from Jewish texts, commentaries, midrashim and history. For the…