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Robert Kirschbaum: Small Paintings from The Akedah Series Our encounters with the Divine are precious moments of personal religiosity.  We believe that when we pray we are speaking directly to God and at that moment we are in the Divine presence.  And yet we are…
Hagar and Rosh Hashanah “After these things, God tested Abraham…" (Genesis 22:1).  What things? The midrash demands that the wording, “after these things” means something immediately after. We, on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, mentally experience these words immediately after the first day’s reading.…
Response Art Series There is a short list of things that really matter: family, friends, country and faith top most.  For many Jews, our people and Israel occupy an almost sacred place in the order of commitment and passion.  Therefore when either the Jewish people…
Alan Falk’s Lessons Two of Alan Falk’s biblical paintings immediately assault us aesthetically and thematically. Isaac Blessing Jacob (2009) and The Cry of Esau (2010) document the famous stolen blessing of Genesis 27 and its consequences.  The ancient Isaac is clad in a white nightshirt,…
Mourning, Memory & Art David Roberts (1796-1864) was a Scottish painter who in the late 1830’s traveled extensively in the Levant and Egypt documenting “Orientalist” sites in drawings and watercolors. Together with the lithographer Louis Haghe, he marketed his work to a public eager for…
Meer Akselrod: Painting his People Empathy and memory meet in the work of Meer Akselrod (1902-1970), the Jewish Russian artist who defied aesthetic convention and totalitarian dictates to relentlessly pursue his personal artistic vision of painting the Jewish people.  His quiet courage in the face…
Drisha Arts Fellows Explore Shabbat Who would have guessed that a yeshiva would have an Arts Program?  If I had died and gone to heaven, surely the World to Come would look like this.  And yet on the Upper West Side of Manhattan the liberal…
The Art of Tanya Fredman Acts of Loving Kindness. This mitzvah is included next to Torah study in the precepts that have no limit, as well as the precepts that are rewarded in this World and in the World to Come. This is surely one…
Chagall and The Cross The oft-repeated quote by art critic Robert Hughes that Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was the “quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century” perhaps reveals more than the normally mordant writer intended.  Chagall’s role as celebrator of a dream-like vision of the Russian…
The Art of Matrimony Ketubot are the magical crystal ball into the life, concerns and joys of the Jewish community.  Perhaps no other Jewish artifact is so openly expressive of the dreams, desires and fears of the everyday world of Jewish life throughout the ages. …
A Photographic Journey with Yuri Dojc Can the Holocaust be memorialized by an aesthetically beautiful object?  Doesn’t the obscenity of the crime create a fundamental contradiction?  The question still stands 66 years later, even as art is still being made about the Holocaust. Jewish creativity…
Moriah’s Illuminated Torah Avner Moriah, the well-known Israeli artist, has illuminated the Book of Genesis.  No small feat, he has conjured images for all the major narratives as well as alluding to other analogous stories throughout the Torah.  He sees the first book of Torah…

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