Menachem Wecker, a freelance journalist based in Washington DC, covers art, culture, religion, and education for a variety of publications.
Michelangelo had a thousand years of Catholic art to build on when creating the Sistine Chapel. Jews haven’t had such a tradition, until a secular Jew from Brooklyn stepped up.
A new hasidic art gallery grows in Brooklyn and is already bucking stereotypes. Can it survive, and what does it suggest about contemporary Orthodox life?
Once a month in Manhattan, a small group of committed collectors gather to share their latest finds, identify fakes, pass on knowledge, and share in the arts of material remembering.
The National Gallery of Art has postponed a blockbuster show featuring a renowned American Jewish artist because his work needs further “interpreting.”
Born in the Soviet Union, the painter took on everything and everybody from Dizzy Gillespie to New York street life to the Holocaust. When will he get his full due?
The author of “Shibboleths and Sun Salutations: Should Religious Jews Practice Yoga?” joins us to defend his ideas.
And future generations might shake their heads in disbelief at our own flagrant and heedless indulgence in real, literal idol worship.
Why some Orthodox Jews are nervous about yoga, and why they’re right to be.
The story of the three yods and other religious and aesthetic innovations.
Art historians have almost completely ignored the many connections between the great Old Master and the Jews of Venice. Is there more to be said?
The author of “The Wreck of the Jewish Museum” joins us in the studio to expand on his ideas.
It’s one thing to hold a jazz night in order to draw people into a synagogue building. It’s quite another to show them why the synagogue exists and how it serves its purpose in existing.
From its priceless collection of artworks, a foremost cultural institution has harvested mainly inferior examples for display, while submerging Jewish identity in a sea of “universal values.”
The question has plagued artists ever since the Holocaust. At least one contemporary artist manages to pass the test.
Like Rembrandt’s, Steen’s art reflects a tremendous effort to humanize Jewish figures.
In his paintings of Jacob and his twelve sons, the 17th-century Spanish master humanizes his subjects, rendering them approachable and individual rather than remote and ethereal.