Arts & Culture
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.
You won’t find much of it at the Jewish Museum, but a vibrant Jewish art culture does exist—and needs support.
Assuming no education, offering little knowledge, and affecting not to care about either, New York’s Jewish Museum promises to inspire new forms of an “ever-changing” Jewish identity.
The museum’s latest core exhibition reveals a distance from Judaism indistinguishable from disregard, embarrassment, and disdain.
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.”
Not packaged, not square, not oven-baked: that’s what it wasn’t. But what it was and where the name for it comes from is still something of a mystery.
A few months ago, I was approached with a request to become involved in a then-secret mission: to examine one of the very few high-medieval Haggadahs still in private hands.
When he learned just how much power the likes of Richard Dawkins had amassed, the writer Scott Shay decided to fight back.
A posthumous collection edited by his son Daniel clarifies the great columnist’s legacy to American, and to Jewish, discourse.
The anxiety of criticism.
Post-Holocaust towns populated by biblical ghosts.
Contention was so much a part of modern Yiddish culture that, in any study of that culture, it was all but taken for granted.
Take, for instance, the word tararam, meaning—what else?—“fuss” or “hullabaloo.”
