Arts

Just look at the expression on Yonah's face. It combines fear and incomprehension at his terrible punishment of floating in the belly of the great fish. So too Noah peering out of the ark, perched on the edge of understanding that there might be a future for mankind. Both works point to the genius of Leonard Everett Fisher as an artist and interpreter of biblical narrative.

There is perhaps a paradox afoot in conventional American Jewish views on Holocaust memory.

The Rylands Haggadah, created in Catalonia Spain sometime around 1330, is a towering masterpiece of Jewish Art. In addition to pages of piyutim surrounded by ornate decorative and figurative micrography, richly decorated Haggadah text and blessings, there is a 13 page miniature cycle depicting the Exodus story from Moses at the Burning Bush to the Crossing of the Red Sea.

In an interview for an article published in these pages (Aug. 25, 2004), Jewish Bombay-born painter Siona Benjamin discussed her technique of hiding troubling imagery in the seemingly inviting floral and decorative borders of Indian and Persian miniature-influenced paintings. "Under the beauty of miniatures you can hide danger," she told me of her "Finding Home" series. "The beauty of miniatures draws you in-veiling and revealing."

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

Jewish Art is a grass-roots movement whose time has come. It has evolved precisely because there are those who are moved by their Jewish heritage and wish to share this experience with the art world, the general public and the Jewish community. There has never been such an exciting time.

God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, Sarah's only child. Our forefather gets up early and obeys, not telling Sarah, his wife of 47 years. According to Rashi (Genesis 23:2) when she finds out that Abraham had taken Isaac as a sacrifice and then had not killed him, the shock is too much for her and she dies. This has always disturbed me. Upon reflection other things about their relationship seemed problematic.

You know how it is when a song gets stuck into your head and you keep humming it? This song just got into my head and I had to find it.

Modernity has created a culture of dispensability. Everything comes in a convenient size and a disposable plastic bottle.

Until one examines the Book of Ruth - which is read on the holiday of Shavuot - artistically and mines the text for visual fodder that would lend itself to dynamic subjects to paint, one is unlikely to realize how passive the book actually is. The overwhelming majority of action verbs have to do with speech, and there is virtually no violence or conflict. Save a spitting in a shoe here or uncovering an ankle there, the book is much more about states of mind and identity than it is about action.

Even a poor, unfortunate Jew stranded on an otherwise deserted island, the joke goes, builds two synagogues - one that he attends semi-regularly and the other he wouldn't set foot in if you tried to make him.

Holocaust art has dominated the news lately for all the wrong reasons.

An unshaven man stumbles onstage, clad in a raincoat covering his pajamas. He is barefoot and shuffles among the dried leaves that litter the stage area, a long rectangular set with the audience on either side. It is a most intimate performance area, uncomfortably so.

It’s virtually impossible to ignore the financial aspects of TEFAF Maastricht, the annual arts and antiques fair in the historic city about two hours south of Amsterdam. More than 250 dealers from nearly 20 countries sell their wares—which span from Greek and Roman antiquities to contemporary sculptures—in the halls of the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre, whose corridors are adorned by nearly 65,000 tulips.

If an Israeli settler and a Palestinian shopkeeper sat through Israeli playwright Ilan Hatsor's Masked, both might feel betrayed and misrepresented.

Two masters of modern photography are on view at the International Center of Photography; Chim (Szymin) aka David Seymour and Roman Vishniac. They are both Jewish and just happen to bring astute but radically different visions to Jewish photographic subjects. These brilliant, exhaustive exhibitions help us examine the fundamentals of what it means to create a Jewish Art in photography.

The first question a viewer ought to pose regarding any work of art that includes text is: if we strip you of your text, are you significantly changed?

Just look at the expression on Yonah's face. It combines fear and incomprehension at his terrible punishment of floating in the belly of the great fish. So too Noah peering out of the ark, perched on the edge of understanding that there might be a future for mankind. Both works point to the genius of Leonard Everett Fisher as an artist and interpreter of biblical narrative.

“We Will Not Be Silent” tells the story of Sophie Scholl, a German college student who placed anti-Nazi leaflets at her college and was hanged for her "crime."

Oftentimes, one will find it far more useful to engage a piece of art in terms of what issues it raises and what questions it asks, rather than what ideological statements it offers or answers it proposes.

For years there was a controversy in Israel about the date of Yom HaShoah. The suggestion was for it to be on the day that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising started.

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.

"There is just something about that little girl that I can't get out of my mind. How does she face those fire-breathing beasts?"

Now, I have seen Avraham Fried perform live nearly a dozen times. But I never saw him like this.

We live apart, we Jews − partially, by God's command and partially, because of age-old enmity from non-Jews.

Never in the course of history had a nation escaped from within another nation, especially in a country as tyrannical as Egypt. That is…Never until 1.5 million Jews escaped the Soviet Union. 

Miriam Beerman's paintings have appeared in more than 100 exhibits, including a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum, a first for a woman artist.

Yisgadal v'yisgadash sh'mai rabba b'alma dee v'ra chir'usay. For many Jews there comes a time when we will say these words every day, many times a day, for 11 months as part of the process of mourning a parent. We bravely declare, "May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified in the world that He created as He willed." Over and over we repeat this plea, this affirmation of the greatness of God who took away our loved one. Our loss becomes the occasion for us to proclaim the glory of God's name found in His creation, the very world around us.

A blue-skinned woman with at least one wing carries a caged dove in her right hand and has just released a golden bird from her other hand. Her hair is covered by a shawl that rests over a curved dagger (like the Yemenite jambiya) with a sheath decorated with the stars and stripes of the American flag. A corner of the shawl becomes a pair of tzitzit whose strings are wrapped around a lion's arms and midsection, perhaps restraining it. The woman, who represents a self-portrait of the artist Siona Benjamin, stands on a white ball, which unravels to reveal not string but floral patterns that border the painting. Beneath her yellow skirt, the woman wears striped pants that evoke either the uniform of a prisoner or a concentration camp inmate.

Cartoonists often draw the short straws at posh cocktail parties.