The book asks all the right questions about society, culture, religion and art.

In the first comprehensive study of Jewish identity and its meaning for the history of art, eleven influential scholars illuminate the formative role of Jews as subjects of art historical discourse. At the same time, these essays introduce to art history an understanding of the place of cultural identity in the production of scholarship. Contributors explore the meaning of Jewishness to writers and artists alike through such topics as exile, iconoclasm, and anti-Semitism. Included are essays on Anselm Kiefer and Theodor Adorno; the effects of the Enlightenment; the rise of the nation-state; Nazi policies on art history; the criticism of Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, and Aby Warburg; the art of Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin, and Morris Gottlieb; and Jewish patronage of German Expressionist art. Offering a new approach to the history of art in which the cultural identities of the makers and interpreters play a constitutive role, this collection begins an important and overdue dialogue that will have a significant impact on the fields of art history, Jewish studies, and cultural studies.

Focusing on 19th-and 20th-century European, American and Israeli artists, the contributors explore the ways in which Jewish artists have responded to their Jewishness and to the societies in which they lived (or live), and how these factors have influenced their art, their choice of subject matter, and presentation of their work.

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.

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.

This book traces the emergence and development of an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and the United States. The Zionist movement provided the initial impetus as it looked to the social sciences to provide the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. The social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of the Jewish diaspora, and also charted emancipation and assimilation, viewed as dissolutions of and threats to Jewish identity. Liberal, assimilationist scholars also utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance

Born over a fifty-year period, the artists in this volume represent several generations of twentieth-century artists. Examining the work of such influential artists as Mark Rothko, Max Weber, and Ruth Weisberg, Baigell directly confronts their Jewish identity—as a religious, cultural, and psychological component of their lives—and explores the way in which this influence is reflected in their art. Drawing upon their common heritage, Baigell reveals the different ways these artists responded to the Great Immigration, the Depression, the Holocaust, the founding of the state of Israel, and the rise of feminism. Each artist’s varied Jewish experiences have contributed to the creation of a visual language and subject matter that reflect both Jewish assimilation and Jewish continuity in ways that inform modern Jewish history and changes in present-day America. Offering a fresh examination of well-known artists as well as long overdue attention to lesser-known artists, Baigell’s incisive observations are indispensable to our understanding of the Jewish themes in these artists' work. Written in a lively and spirited prose, this book is compulsory reading for those interested in modern American art and Jewish studies.

Artist Raphael Soyer (1899-1987), whose Russian Jewish family settled in Manhattan in 1912, was devoted to painting people in their everyday urban lives. He came to be known especially for his representations of city workers and the down-and-out, and for

The wide-ranging portrayal of modern Jewishness in artistic terms invites scrutiny into the relationship between creativity and the formation of Jewish identity and into the complex issue of what makes a work of art uniquely Jewish. Whether it is the provenance of the artist, as in the case of popular Israeli singer Zehava Ben, the intention of the iconography, as in Ben Shahn's antifascist paintings, or the utopian ideals of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, clearly no single formula for defining Jewish art in the diaspora will suffice. The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times is the first work to analyze modern Jewry's engagement with the arts as a whole, including music, theater, dance, film, museums, architecture, painting, sculpture, and more. Working with a broad conception of what counts as art, the book asks the following questions: What roles have commerce and politics played in shaping Jewish artistic agendas? Who determines the Jewishness of art and for what purposes? What role has aesthetics played in reshaping religious traditions and rituals? This richly illustrated volume illuminates how the arts have helped Jews confront the various challenges of modernity, including cultural adaptation and self-preservation, economic diversification, and ritual transformation. There truly is an art to being Jewish in the modern world—or, alternatively, an art to being modern in the Jewish world—and this collection fully captures its range, diversity, and historical significance.

The resurgence of ethnic consciousness over the past decade has had a profound effect on many Jewish artists, writers, performers, and the Jewish community at large. Surprisingly, however, Jewish identity remains one of the least explored terrains in contemporary discussions of multiculturalism and identity-based art. Too Jewish? takes a fresh, often confrontational and sometimes humorous, approach to newly considered representations of Jewish identity. This book, accompanied by a major exhibition at The Jewish Museum, New York, places the Jewish identity subjects in the recent art of such artists as Deborah Kass, Rona Pondick, Archie Rand, Elaine Reichek, Art Spiegelman, Hannah Wilke, and others within a larger continuum of influences ranging from nineteenth-century art history to twentieth-century media and pop culture. Essays by major writers explore the historic and scientific roots of the construction of the Jew's "otherness," assimilation strategies, and stereotypes inherent in past and present definitions of Jewish masculinity and femininity. The contributors include cultural critic Maurice Berger, sociologist Sander L. Gilman, playwright Tony Kushner, art theorist Rhonda Lieberman, art historian Margaret Olin, and anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell. Renowned art historian Linda Nochlin provides a clever and highly personal foreword that captures her complicated reaction to the Hasidic-inspired clothing from Jean Paul Gaultier's Fall 1993 collection. The exhibition curator and editor of this work, Norman L. Kleeblatt, offers an insightful introduction on the complex history of post war Jewish identity and its impact on visual artists. This is a lively and provocative book that offers a unique critical perspective on Jewish identity, multiculturalism, or contemporary art.