Jewish Museums of the World celebrates more than 150 Jewish museums from every point on the globe. Treasures from unexpected collections are featured in more than 400 illustrations, whose scope spans ceremonial to fine arts to history. A directory of all the museums contained in the book, as well as other, important sites of Jewish historical interest, provides basic information, including phone, fax, and Web sites. Combing the breadth of knowledge, the magnificence of the illustrations, and the inclusion of its encompassing directory, this book will make you feel as if you’ve taken a virtual tour of Jewish museums around the world.

In The Jewish Museum: History and Memory, Identity and Art from Vienna to the Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem Natalia Berger traces the history of the Jewish museum in its various manifestations in Central Europe, notably in Vienna, Prague and Budapest, up to the establishment of the Bezalel National Museum in Jerusalem. Accordingly, the book scrutinizes collections and exhibitions and broadens our understanding of the different ways that Jewish individuals and communities sought to map their history, culture and art. It is the comparative method that sheds light on each of the museums, and on the processes that initiated the transition from collection and research to assembling a type of collection that would serve to inspire new art.

A selection of children's poems and drawings reflecting their surroundings in Terezín Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia from 1942 to 1944.

An illuminating study of Amedeo Modigliani's early drawings and how they reflect the artist's conception of identity One of the great artists of the 20th century, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is celebrated for revolutionizing modern portraiture, particularly in his later paintings and sculpture. Modigliani Unmasked examines the artist's rarely seen early works on paper, offering revelatory insights into his artistic sensibilities and concerns as he developed his signature style of graceful, elongated figures. An Italian Sephardic Jew working in turn-of-the-century Paris, Modigliani embraced his status as an outsider, and his early drawings show a marked awareness of the role of ethnicity and race within society. Placing these drawings within the context of the artist's larger oeuvre, Mason Klein reveals how Modigliani's preoccupation with identity spurred the artist to reconceive the modern portrait, arguing that Modigliani ultimately came to think of identity as beyond national or cultural boundaries. Lavishly illustrated with the artist's paintings and over one hundred drawings collected by Dr. Paul Alexandre, Modigliani's close friend and first patron, this book provides an engaging and long overdue analysis of Modigliani's early body of work on paper.

The Jewish tradition has held and healed the Jewish people for centuries. As we live through "unprecedented" times, there is wisdom in locating ourselves in precedent, in stories of plague-biblical, contemporary, and in between-in an effort to meaningfully find our way through. Torah in a Time of Plague is meant to provide guidance and offer provocations for the conversations we need to orient ourselves anew. This collection brings together academic and rabbinic voices from within the Covid-19 epidemic to wrestle in real time with its resonances and implications. Drawing on theology, philosophy, literature, history, liturgy, and legal theory, essays both rigorous and raw explore the many layers of this tumultuous period. Torah in a Time of Plague thus reflects on and contributes to Torah in our time.

Daniel, whose family suffers as the Nazis rise to power in Germany, describes his imprisonment in a concentration camp and his eventual liberation.

Museum Worlds: Advances in Research' is a new, multidisciplinary, refereed, annual journal from Berghahn Journals that will publish work that significantly advances knowledge of global trends, case studies and theory relevant to museum practice and scholarship around the world. It aims to trace and comment on major regional, theoretical, methodological and topical themes and debates, and encourage comparison of museum theories, practices, and developments in different global settings. Each issue includes a conversation piece on a current topic, as well as peer reviewed scholarly articles and review articles, book and exhibition reviews, and news on developments in museum studies and related curricula in different parts of the world. Drawing on the expertise and networks of a global Editorial Board of senior scholars and museum practitioners, the journal will both challenge and develop the core concepts that link different disciplinary perspectives on museums by bringing new voices into ongoing debates and discussions.

"The Kindertransport Quilts are a form of folk art which allows multiple artists, each with their own artistic expression, to produce a work with a unifying theme. Each square expresses its creator's view of the Kindertransport experience: pictures of the past, fears and nightmares, memorials to lost family. They express traumatic childhood experiences, as recalled with the perspective of maturity ... We are grateful to Kirsten Grosz for having produced these quilts, touching and artistic reminders of the Holocaust."--p. 7

Jews are part and parcel of American history. From colonial port cities to frontier outposts, from commercial and manufacturing centers to rural villages, and from metropolitan regions to constructed communities, Jews are found everywhere and throughout four centuries of American history. From the early 17th century to the present, the story of American Jews has been one of immigration, adjustment, and accomplishment, sometimes in the face of prejudice and discrimination. This, then, is a narrative of minority-majority relations, of evolving norms and traditions, of ongoing conversations about community and culture, identity and meaning. Interpreting American Jewish History at Museums and Historic Sites begins with a broad overview of American Jewish history in the context of a religious culture than extends back more than 3,000 years and which manifests itself in a variety of distinctive American forms. This is followed by five chapters, each looking at a major theme in American Jewish history: movement, home life, community, prejudice, and culture. The book also describes and analyzes projects by history organizations, large and small, to interpret American Jewish life for general public audiences. These case studies cover a wide range of themes, approaches, formats. The book concludes with a history of Jewish collections and Jewish museums in North America and a chapter on “next practice” that promote adaptive thinking, continuous innovation, and programs that are responsive to ever-changing circumstances.

With the help of over one hundred illustrations spanning three centuries, Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. In these images and objects that reflect, refract, and also shape daily experience, he finds new and illuminating insights into Jewish life in the modern period. Pointing to recent scholarship that overturns the stereotype of Jews as people of the text, unconcerned with the visual, Cohen shows how the coming of the modern period expanded the relationship of Jews to the visual realm far beyond the religious context. In one such manifestation, orthodox Jewry made icons of popular tabbis, creating images that helped to bridge the sacred and the secular. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the study and collecting of Jewish art became a legitimate and even passionate pursuit, and signaled the entry of Jews into the art world as painters, collectors, and dealers. Cohen's exploration of early Jewish exhibitions, museums, and museology opens a new window on the relationship of art to Jewish culture and society.