Arts

On Sunday, February 18, I attended an opening at the Kraft Center for Jewish Life (also known as the Columbia/Barnard Hillel) for the exhibit Words Within.

Was Rembrandt a Jewish artist because he painted the Jewish wedding?

"Back in Russia most of my works were dark and grey, reflecting the mood of those days and the way they taught us to paint," says artist Eric Lubiynov.

Mattress companies are forever reminding us that we spend one third of our lives in bed.

It sounds like a variation upon a hackneyed joke: Two Jewish writers and an anti-Semitic composer walk into a salon.

The notion of a foreground and a background in a painting is an illusion.

Often times, the most terrifying thing that plagues someone undergoing a traumatic process is uncertainty.

In a 1934 article, titled "New Training for Future Artists and Art Lovers," Mark Rothko drew upon his experience teaching at the Brooklyn Jewish Academy to explore a new model of art instruction.

Is it a book, is it art, or is it both?"

"I had the bad luck to get tangled up in this horror. The crimes did not occur because it was my will," a man in a dark suit with a striped tie says, matter-of-factly.

It is easy to read the narrative of Joseph and his alienation from his family as a tragic tale of missed opportunities in parenting, and brotherly compassion and patience.

Song of Songs is one of the most controversial books in Tanach because of its ambiguity.

One day, the rabbi's cat gets tired of the constant cawing of the rabbi's parrot, so he eats the bird and acquires the ability to speak.

Richard Michelson is an existential, yet guilty, sort of poet.

Man's use of "Time" is an artificial system that has been invented as a template to place over nature for convenience.

"I try to tell momma she won't get stolen. Her hair is not that nice.

Although Sophie Zawistowska asserts that nothing would have been different, had she chosen her six-year-old daughter, Eva, to live and her 10-year-old son, Jan, to die instead,

Ever since artists created berry juice paintings of buffalos on cave walls, seeking to offer the hunters mastery over their prey, artists have used limited, physical materials to create transcendent, idealized art.

"Take a sock at Hitler! Sock your dough in bonds and stamps!" says one comic.

Edmund Engelman's photograph, Entrance of Berggasse in Vienna's 9th District with Number 19 in the Middle, unfolds like a Twilight Zone episode.

Cockroaches are not usually associated with Judaism. They might show up unwanted during Pesach cleaning.

The current show at the Yeshiva University Museum is bizarrely titled.

Book collectors are often pack-rats that are obsessed with the printed word in all of its manifestations.

George Grosz's 1944 painting, "Cain, or Hitler in Hell" shows the Nazi leader with his iconic moustache and uniform sitting sadly, mopping his brow.

For American artists, the attacks on the Twin Towers are a particularly difficult subject matter.

"When you go back and you think about what it is," Jake Ehrenreich told me over the phone, pausing to put down his cell phone whenever he saw a nearby police car, "it's all about tradition."

With their own long history of suffering oppression and hate fresh in their minds, many American Jews played important roles in the civil rights movement.

Much ink and money has been spilt over the topic of "hip Judaism".

Throughout her career, German Jewish artist Eva Hesse (1936-1970) was obsessed with the motif of the circle.

We have documented 1,800 years of Jewish Art production in the preceding five sections of the "Jewish Art Primer".