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Contemporary Jewish Art

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Yad Vashem's Art Obscenity is not the usual province of art. And yet behind almost all Holocaust art lies the obscenity of the crime, the stench of genocide. This simple fact makes it singular in the history of art, a deep contradiction of art's traditional…
Postcards Art lies. An object depicted is not the actual thing, a person or relationship in art is but a fiction, an intellectual conceit that attempts to emotionally tempt us into a narrative insight. As much as art proclaims its purpose to be truth, it…
A Painting by John Dubrow From 1997 to 1998 John Dubrow got to know the World Trade Center fairly well. He made many paintings from a high vantage point on the 91st floor in a temporary studio granted him by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.…
Lights at the Israel Museum From "Let there be Light" of Biblical fame to yesterday's sound and light show, the notion of light as a metaphor or aesthetic tool is worn and tedious at best. Even as pietists, who claim dominion over Divine emanations, battle…
Missing Women of the Book Jews and books... as natural a combo as love and spring, wine and cheese, and for sure God and His people... they are meant to be together. Proud to be known as the People of the Book we parade the…
The Nineteen Diaspora Paintings Why should we bother with art? A waste of time, bitul Torah, perhaps even a lure into apikores.... viewing art, not to mention making it, could be viewed as a can of worms best left unopened. Alas, our tradition is to…
Maus: Flash Back to the Present Survivor Memory into Holocaust Art, Part II The Negative Heart of Maus Last week we examined the first volume of Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman. It is a complex and engrossing work that combines the testimony of a…
Maus: Flash Back to the Present Survivor Memory into Holocaust Art, Part I History's Limits Elie Wiesel encapsulates the problem of Holocaust art by insisting that “Auschwitz defies imagination and perception; it submits only to memory. It can be communicated by testimony, not fiction.” Art as…
View from the Shoah A well-known Midrash tells of the destruction of Jerusalem and how the Divine Presence removed itself from the holy precincts of the Temple. Stage by stage the Divine Presence retreated from the holy land of Israel as the Land was defiled…
Paintings of Shalom of Safed There once lived a pious old man in Safed. His great-grandparents had come from Eastern Europe to Eretz Yisroel sometime in the eighteenth century. He remembered back when the Turks ruled Palestine and then the English came and tried to…
New Paintings “When the Holy One, blessed is He, created the first man, He took him and led him around the trees of the Garden of Eden and said; ”Look at my works! See how beautiful they are–how excellent! For your sake I created them…
Lipchitz's Prayer No time of prayer is more intense than at Rosh Hashanna and Yom Kippur as we literally pray for our lives, our sustenance and ultimately, our salvation. Our fate hangs in the balance poised between the gates of mercy and the awesome judgment…

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