Museums

Magnes Merger Has Its Costs

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:34:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Partnership with UC-Berkeley seen mostly as a boon but questions linger about prized collection’s independence.

The new home of the Magnes Collection for Jewish Art and Life, a Bay Area institution renowned for its archives of material relating to Jews in the American West, displays all the museum’s ambition.

Art Berkeley Judaica Magnes Collection for Jewish Art and Life Museums

Portraits Of Israelis As Young Men

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:08:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Israel through the eyes of a different kind of Old Master.

The case is sometimes made that when it comes to telling truths about Israel — be they good, bad or ugly — it’s probably best to have a Jew do it. But Kehinde Wiley, a gay black artist from South Central Los Angeles, may be offering the definitive rebuke to that notion.

Ethiopian Jews Kehinde Wiley

Illuminating The Chanukah Context

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:29:36 +0000

Museums

Diane Cole

Special To The Jewish Week

Cervera Bible on display at Met shows the brighter side of Sephardic Jewish history.

The Jewish holiday of Chanukah lasts eight days, but New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is celebrating over the course of eight weeks, in the form of its recently opened exhibition “Lisbon’s Hebrew Bible: Medieval Jewish Art in Context,” on display through Jan. 16. And the contexts are plural, not singular.

Light Haunted By Darkness

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:45:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Maurice Sendak handpicked menorahs from The Jewish Museum’s collection for a new show, and they reflect his life and work.

If you happened to have been at The Jewish Museum’s new holiday exhibit, “An Artist Remembers: Hanukkah Lamps Selected by Maurice Sendak,” last week, you would have noticed one menorah was missing.

Thirty-three lamps are on display, all of them hand-picked by Sendak, the revered children’s book author, most famously of “Where the Wilds Things Are.” But there was an empty space under the small placard that read: “Hanukkah Lamp, Landsberg am Lech, Germany, 1945.”

Where had it gone? Why was it missing?

Illuminating The Chanukah Context

Dani Shetrit — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:33:58 +0000

Museums

Diane Cole

Special To The Jewish Week

Cervera Bible on display at Met shows the brighter side of Sephardic Jewish history.

A Revolutionary Torah

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:25:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Shearith Israel scroll, with burn marks still on it, is centerpiece of New-York Historical Society’s reopening exhibit.

In August 1776, George Washington and his troops retreated to Manhattan Island. The British had just routed his rebel army in Long Island, and Washington tried desperately to hold onto what little perch of New York he could. But by November, the British expelled his army from Manhattan, which the British occupied throughout the Revolutionary war.

historic torah Shearith Israel Torah

Photographers Taking It To The Streets

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:31:00 +0000

Museums

Caroline Lagnado

Special To The Jewish Week

Jewish Museum’s ‘Radical Camera’ show highlights the pioneering work of the N.Y. Photo League.

The juxtaposition in the photograph, like the contrast between the makeshift encampment at Zuccotti Park and the soaring tower of Goldman Sachs’ headquarters, is glaring. On a gritty street on the Lower East Side, the two sides of a tenement building tell a tale of haves and have-nots, the 1 percent and the 99. In Erika Stone’s striking black-and-white photo, a family’s gray underthings hang limply on a clothesline, framed by the tenement’s fading brick, while on the adjoining wall a well-coiffed and full-lipped blonde in an advertisement gazes sexily upward, a boxy ring on her finger and a sleek watch on her wrist.

new york photography Photography

The Dead Sea Scrolls, With Access For All

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:23:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Israel Museum-Google digitization project a boon for public but perhaps not for scholars.

When Google and the Israel Museum announced three weeks ago that they were digitizing images of the Dead Sea Scrolls — perhaps the most important biblical discovery of the last century — the praise was nearly ubiquitous.

Strip Tease

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:51:00 +0000

Museums

Rebecca Schischa

Special To The Jewish Week

YU Museum’s ‘Graphic Details’ exhibit spotlights feminist and edgy Jewish comics.

Yeshiva University Museum has upped its cool — and its feminist — factor with a new exhibition showcasing comic art by Jewish women artists.

“Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women,” which opened last week, presents work by 18 artists from the U.S., Canada, England and Israel from the 1970s to the present.

comics Yeshiva University Museum

Prescription For Genocide

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:45:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

The ‘Deadly Medicine’ exhibit shows how politics and broader cultural currents perverted medicine.

To the extent that people know about Josef Mengele, the German doctor dubbed the “Angel of Death” for his grisly experiments on inmates at Auschwitz, he is usually taken to be an aberration. Surely, many assume, there was a silent majority of German doctors, who, if not bold enough to speak out against the ghastly turn medicine had taken under the Nazi regime, were against the race-based science the Nazis preached.

Drawing A Bead On Ezra Jack Keats

Lisa Shimabukuro — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:02:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

The children’s book author-illustrator broke ground with an African-American character in ‘The Snowy Day,’ but his Jewish identity isn’t black and white.

The publication of “The Snowy Day” in 1962 was a seminal moment in publishing history. Never before had a mainstream publisher put out a children’s book that focused on an African-American character, and never before had anyone thought that such a book could win a Caldecott Medal, one of the industry’s most prestigious prizes.

Memories Of Home, In 3D

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:27:35 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Maya Zack recreates a 1930s Berlin living room, complete with portents of doom.

Maya Zack wanted to get every detail right.

She pestered a German Jewish refugee, Manfred Nomburg, about every last detail of the Berlin home where he grew up: the wallpaper, the dining room china, the living room chairs. He had not seen his home in 70 years, when he escaped to Pre-state Israel.

But when Zack, 35, a prize-winning Israeli artist, turned all those details into a life-sized, computer-generated 3D work of art — titled “Living Room,” which goes on view at The Jewish Museum on Sunday — Nomburg did not recognize a thing.

Memories Of Home, In 3D

Lisa Shimabukuro — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:44:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Maya Zack recreates a 1930s Berlin living room, complete with portents of doom.

Maya Zack wanted to get every detail right.

Zion, By Any Other Name

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 21:27:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Before the Jews had a direction home, YIVO show chronicles, there was Suriname, Angola and Uganda.

A century ago, the idea of Jews resettling in ancient Israel was an interesting, if quaint, idea. For many European Jews, some of whom became prominent Zionists, real-life Palestine was utterly unrealistic. Thousands of Jews were being massacred in pogroms and the priority of many Jewish leaders was simple: secure a territory for Jews to settle in first — worry about where it was later.

Jerusalem Home For American Artists

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 23:44:00 +0000

Museums

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

American Academy inaugural fellowships go to wide range of creators.

American artists from Herman Melville to Mark Twain to Saul Bellow have traveled to Jerusalem looking for inspiration. But until this week, when the first-ever American Academy in Jerusalem was officially announced, there has never been a formal program encouraging artists to do so.

American Acadmy in Jerusalem artists inspiration from Jerusalem