In a New Exhibit, the Jewish Museum Overlooks the Jewishness of Soviet Photographers

The Jewish Museum in New York City is currently mounting an exhibit entitled The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Films. In her review, Frances Brent notes that the exhibit—although in many ways well executed—does not properly draw attention to the outsized role Jews played in early Soviet photography, or the Jewish identities of most of the artists whose work is on display:

[Take, for instance], El Lissitzky, whose experiments with photographs and mastery of photomontage grew out of the Jewish and Russian avant-garde. Lissitzky was a protean talent, and there were many iterations to his career. As a teenager he studied painting in Vitebsk with [Marc] Chagall’s teacher Yehudah Pen. He trained in Germany and later Moscow as an architect before taking part in Jewish ethnographic expeditions. He illustrated both Russian and Yiddish books—most famously Ḥad gadya, [an illustrated version of the traditional Passover song]. Under the influence of [Kazimir] Malevich he became a Suprematist and, after that, a constructivist in Moscow. From 1921 to 1925 he lived in Germany and Switzerland and experimented with printmaking, typography, and book design, adding the new techniques of photo-collage and photomontage to his repertoire.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Arts & Culture, Jewish museums, Marc Chagall, Photography, Soviet Jewry

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society