Arts & Culture | Museums

Object Lessons

04/10/2013 | Sandee Brawarsky | Jewish Week Book Critic | Museums

At most museums, the bulk of the collection is not on the walls or in display cases, but carefully catalogued and stored, out of sight. At The Jewish Museum, artist Barbara Bloom was extended a dream invitation: to peruse their collection of 25,000 works of ceremonial and fine art, and to configure an altogether new display.

Giving The Familiar A New Look

03/19/2013 | Sandee Brawarsky | Jewish Week Book Critic | Museums

In the entrance hallway of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Ben Rubin’s new video installation projects light onto Broadway and into the lobby and adjacent courtyard. Suspended from the high ceiling, the screen carries a series of 5,378 colored images, each inspired by a page of the Talmud.

The War That Made The Jews Americans

03/12/2013 | Sandee Brawarsky | Jewish Week Book Critic | Museums

In April 1850, Peter Still, a slave, purchased his freedom from Joseph Friedman, a sympathetic Jewish businessman in Tuscumbia, Ala.

In Search Of Proust’s Jewish Themes

02/19/2013 | Diane Cole | Special To The Jewish Week | Museums

In his writing, he exposed the rampant anti-Jewish currents in the Parisian society of his era.

The City, On The Brink Of War

11/20/2012 | Jack Schwartz | Special To The Jewish Week | Museums

In our collective consciousness, New York City during World War II often conjures up imagery of sailors “On the Town,” the “Stage Door Canteen” and Alfred Eisenstadt’s iconic photo of a sailor and a nurse in Times Square celebrating Japan’s surrender with a kiss. Except for an occasional History Channel glimpse of a troop ship leaving the harbor or a nod to the distant past from a gentrifying Brooklyn Navy Yard, the city is remembered, if at all, as a convenient recreational stop before American GIs moved on to more serious work overseas.

Apartheid In (Mostly) Black-And-White

10/03/2012 | Sharon Anstey | Special To The Jewish Week | Museums

In South Africa, apartheid institutionalized racial segregation in every facet of life and the struggle against it took many forms. From the outset, photography was a critical element both in documenting the impact of the system and the resistance to it.

The International Center of Photography has put together an extraordinarily wide-ranging exhibition that spans the Afrikaner nationalist ascension to power in 1948 through Nelson Mandela’s assumption of the presidency in 1993.