Explores the works of five major American Jewish artists: Jack Levine, George Segal, Audrey Flack, Larry Rivers, and R. B. Kitaj. Focuses on the use of imagery influenced by the Bible.

Is there a Jewish art? Is there a single "Jewish experience"? Matthew Baigell, the acknowledged American expert on Jewish art, offers the first book ever on the history of Jewish American art from the early settlements to the present.

This volume focuses on Jewish American identity within the context of Pop art in New York City during the sixties to reveal the multivalent identities and selves often ignored in Pop scholarship. Melissa L. Mednicov establishes her study within the context of prominent Jewish artists, dealers, institutions, and collectors in New York City in the Pop sixties. Mednicov incorporates the historiography of Jewish identity in Pop art—the ways by which identity is named or silenced—to better understand how Pop art made, or marked, different modes of identity in the sixties. By looking at a nexus of the art world in this period and the ways in which Jewish identity was registered or negated, Mednicov is able to further consider questions about the ways mass culture influenced Pop art and its participants—and, to a larger extent, formed further modes of identity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Jewish studies, and American studies.

Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists presents over 80 19th- and 20-century Jewish American artists, ranging from the critically neglected Theresa Bernstein, Ruth Gikow, and Jennings Tofel, to the well-known Eva Hesse, Roy Lichtenstein, and Larry Rivers. The subject matter of some of these artists may surprise readers. Adolph Gottlieb designed and supervised the fabrication of a 35-foot wide, four-story high stained glass facade for a synagogue; Louise Nevelson sculpted a Holocaust memorial; and Philip Pearlstein painted a version of Moses with the Tablets of the Law early in his career. Covering painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers, as well as artists who engage in newer forms of visual expression such as video, conceptual, and performance art, the book is in part intended to stimulate further scholarship on these artists. When appropriate, entries reveal the influence of the Jewish American encounter on the artists' work along with other factors such as gender and the immigrant experience. In many cases, the artists' own words are employed to flesh out perspectives on their art as well as on their Jewish identity. To that end, the volume contains excerpts from recent interviews conducted by the author with some of the artists, including Judy Chicago, Audrey Flack, Jack Levine, and Sol LeWitt. Illustrations accompanying each artist's entry, some in color, aid this invaluable look at Jewish American art.

Contemporary Jewish art is a growing field that includes traditional as well as new creative practices, yet criticism of it is almost exclusively reliant on the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images. Arguing that this disregards the corpus of Jewish thought and a century of criticism and interpretation, Ben Schachter advocates instead a new approach focused on action and process. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the Second Commandment, Schachter addresses abstraction, conceptual art, performance art, and other styles that do not rely on imagery for meaning. He examines Jewish art through the concept of melachot—work-like “creative activities” as defined by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. Showing the similarity between art and melachot in the active processes of contemporary Jewish artists such as Ruth Weisberg, Allan Wexler, Archie Rand, and Nechama Golan, he explores the relationship between these artists’ methods and Judaism’s demanding attention to procedure. A compellingly written challenge to traditionalism, Image, Action, and Idea in Contemporary Jewish Art makes a well-argued case for artistic production, interpretation, and criticism that revels in the dual foundation of Judaism and art history.

Covering nearly two centuries, this is a comprehensive account of the art made by Jews across Europe, America and Israel. The book discusses many issues including the shifting Jewish identity, the effects of the diaspora, anti-Semitism and the distinctive character of images made within a Christian.

JPS is proud to reissue Cohen and Mendes-Flohr’s classic work, perhaps the most important, comprehensive anthology available on 20th century Jewish thought. This outstanding volume presents 140 concise yet authoritative essays by renowned Jewish figures Eugene Borowitz, Emil Fackenheim, Blu Greenberg, Susannah Heschel, Jacob Neusner, Gershom Scholem, Adin Steinsaltz, and many others. They define and reflect upon such central ideas as charity, chosen people, death, family, love, myth, suffering, Torah, tradition and more. With entries from Aesthetics to Zionism, this book provides striking insights into both the Jewish experience and the Judeo-Christian tradition.

A study of Ben Shahn’s New Deal murals (1933–43) in the context of American Jewish history, labor history, and public discourse. Lithuanian-born artist Ben Shahn learned fresco painting as an assistant to Diego Rivera in the 1930s and created his own visually powerful, technically sophisticated, and stylistically innovative artworks as part of the New Deal Arts Project’s national mural program. InBen Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene author Diana L. Linden demonstrates that Shahn mined his Jewish heritage and left-leaning politics for his style and subject matter, offering insight into his murals’ creation and their sometimes complicated reception by officials, the public, and the press. In four chapters, Linden presents case studies of select Shahn murals that were created from 1933 to 1943 and are located in public buildings in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri. She studies Shahn’s famous untitled fresco for the Jersey Homesteads—a utopian socialist cooperative community populated with former Jewish garment workers and funded under the New Deal—Shahn’s mural for the Bronx Central Post Office, a fresco Shahn proposed to the post office in St. Louis, and a related one-panel easel painting titled The First Amendment located in a Queens, New York, post office. By investigating the role of Jewish identity in Shahn’s works, Linden considers the artist’s responses to important issues of the era, such as President Roosevelt’s opposition to open immigration to the United States, New York’s bustling garment industry and its labor unions, ideological concerns about freedom and liberty that had signifcant meaning to Jews, and the encroachment of censorship into American art. Linden shows that throughout his public murals, Shahn literally painted Jews into the American scene with his subjects, themes, and compositions. Readers interested in Jewish American history, art history, and Depression-era American culture will enjoy this insightful volume.

This survey of intertestamental Judaism illuminates the customs and controversies that provide essential background for understanding the New Testament. Scott opens a door into the Jewish world and literature leading up to the development of Christianity. He also offers an accessible overview of the data through helpful charts, maps, and diagrams incorporated throughout the text to engage his readers.

On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto staged a now legendary revolt against their Nazi oppressors. Since that day, the deprivation and despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture looks at how this place and its story have been remembered in fine art, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics. Samantha Baskind explores seventy years’ worth of artistic representations of the ghetto and revolt to understand why they became and remain touchstones in the American mind. Her study includes iconic works such as Leon Uris’s best-selling novel Mila 18, Roman Polanski’s Academy Award–winning film The Pianist, and Rod Serling’s teleplay In the Presence of Mine Enemies, as well as accounts in the American Jewish Yearbook and the New York Times, the art of Samuel Bak and Arthur Szyk, and the poetry of Yala Korwin and Charles Reznikoff. In probing these works, Baskind pursues key questions of Jewish identity: What links artistic representations of the ghetto to the Jewish diaspora? How is art politicized or depoliticized? Why have Americans made such a strong cultural claim on the uprising? Vibrantly illustrated and vividly told, The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture shows the importance of the ghetto as a site of memory and creative struggle and reveals how this seminal event and locale served as a staging ground for the forging of Jewish American identity.