A survey of the long and varied career of the great American Social Realist painter Ben Shahn, featuring striking reproductions of paintings, begins with his well-known Depression-era works and goes on to include an appreciation of his lesser-known later paintings. UP.
Published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition organized by The Jewish Museum, Susan Chevlowe writes about renowned artist Ben Shahn, known for his Social Realist paintings of Depression-era America. She combines beautiful reproductions of Shahn's art with essays by leading experts on his life and career to present a groundreaking survey of his powerful and engaging mature style. 32 color plates. 74 halftones.
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.
Among the intellectual luminaries dotting the millennia of Jewish history, none shines brighter than Maimonides (1138-1204). He was a rabbi, jurist, Talmudist, philosopher, physician, astronomer, and communal leader, and produced a myriad of writings on halakhah, theology, medicine, and philosophy that have attained near-canonical status. We have more source material from or about Maimonides than possibly any other Jewish figure in the medieval period, and more has been written about him than perhaps any other Jew in history. Epithets like the ‘Great Eagle’ and the ‘Western Light’ – and the glorifying statement ‘From Moses to Moses, none arose like Moses’ – reflect centuries of authority, influence, and fascination. The Golden Path traces the impact and reception of Maimonides and his thought through a study of materiality, specifically the production and dissemination of textual objects. It consists of two sections: a descriptive catalogue of an exceptional private collection of manuscripts and rare books; and essays from leading scholars on aspects of Maimonides's cultural context, influence, and appropriation through disparate eras and geopolitical spheres. Combining intellectual, reception, and book historical research, the heavily illustrated volume explores his effects in assorted social and political circumstances, across diverse intellectual and cultural environments.
This comprehensive, novel and exciting interdisciplinary collection brings together leading international authorities from the history of sport, social history, art history, film history, design history, cultural studies and related fields to explore the ways in which visual culture has shaped, and continues to impact upon, our understanding of sport as an integral element within popular culture. Visual representations of sport have previously been little examined and under-exploited by historians, with little focused and rigorous scrutiny of these vital historical documents. This study seeks to redress this balance by engaging with a wide variety of cultural products, ranging from sports stadia and monuments in the public arena, to paintings, prints, photographs, posters, stamps, design artefacts, films and political cartoons. By examining the contexts of both the production and reception of this historical evidence, and highlighting the multiple meanings and social significance of this body of work, the collection provides original, powerful and stimulating insights into the ways in which visual material assists our knowledge and understanding of sport. This collection will facilitate researchers, publishers and others with an interest in sport to move beyond traditional text-based scholarship and appreciate the powerful imagery of sport in new ways. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.
Often seen as backward-looking and convention-bound, genre painting representing scenes of everyday life was central to the work of twentieth-century artists such as John Sloan, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence, and others, who adapted such subjects to an era of rapid urbanization, mass media, and modernist art. Re-envisioning the Everyday asks what their works do to the tradition of genre painting and whether it remains a meaningful category through which to understand them. Working with and against the established narrative of American genre painting’s late nineteenth-century decline into obsolescence, John Fagg explores how artists and illustrators used elements of the tradition to picture everyday life in a rapidly changing society, whether by appealing to its nostalgic and historical connotations or by updating it to address new formal and thematic concerns. Fagg argues that genre painting enabled twentieth-century artists to look slowly and carefully at scenes of everyday life and, on some occasions, to understand those scenes as sites of political oppression and resistance. But it also limited them to anachronistic ways of seeing and tied them to a freighted history of stereotyping and condescension. By surveying genre painting when its status and relevance were uncertain and by looking at works that stretch and complicate its boundaries, this book considers what the form is and probes the wider practice of generic categorization. It will appeal to students and scholars of American art history, art criticism, and cultural studies.
The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures explores the diversity of Jewish cultures and ways of investigating them, presenting the different methodologies, arguments and challenges within the discipline. Divided into themed sections, this book considers in turn: How the individual terms "Jewish" and "culture" are defined, looking at perspectives from Anthropology, Music, Literary Studies, Sociology, Religious Studies, History, Art History, and Film, Television, and New Media Studies. How Jewish cultures are theorized, looking at key themes regarding power, textuality, religion/secularity, memory, bodies, space and place, and networks. Case studies in contemporary Jewish cultures. With essays by leading scholars in Jewish culture, this book offers a clear overview of the field and offers exciting new directions for the future.
This authoritative and cutting edge companion brings togethera team of leading scholars to document the rich diversity andunique viewpoints that have formed the religious history of theUnited States. A groundbreaking new volume which represents the firstsustained effort to fully explain the development of Americanreligious history and its creation within evolving political andsocial frameworks Spans a wide range of traditions and movements, from theBaptists and Methodists, to Buddhists and Mormons Explores topics ranging from religion and the media,immigration, and piety, though to politics and social reform Considers how American religion has influenced and beeninterpreted in literature and popular culture Provides insights into the historiography of religion, butpresents the subject as a story in motion rather than a snapshot ofwhere the field is at a given moment
How progressive good intentions failed at Coxsackie, once a model New York State prison for youth offenders. Should prisons attempt reform and uplift inmates or, by means of principled punishment, deter them from further wrongdoing? This debate has raged in Western Europe and in the United States at least since the late eighteenth century. Joseph F. Spillane examines the failure of progressive reform in New York State by focusing on Coxsackie, a New Deal reformatory built for young male offenders. Opened in 1935 to serve “adolescents adrift,” Coxsackie instead became an unstable and brutalizing prison. From the start, the liberal impulse underpinning the prison’s mission was overwhelmed by challenges it was unequipped or unwilling to face—drugs, gangs, and racial conflict. Spillane draws on detailed prison records to reconstruct a life behind bars in which “ungovernable” young men posed constant challenges to racial and cultural order. The New Deal order of the prison was unstable from the start; the politics of punishment quickly became the politics of race and social exclusion, and efforts to save liberal reform in postwar New York only deepened its failures. In 1977, inmates took hostages to focus attention on their grievances. The result was stricter discipline and an end to any pretense that Coxsackie was a reform institution. Why did the prison fail? For answers, Spillane immerses readers in the changing culture and racial makeup of the U.S. prison system and borrows from studies of colonial prisons, which emblematized efforts by an exploitative regime to impose cultural and racial restraint on others. In today’s era of mass incarceration, prisons have become conflict-ridden warehouses and powerful symbols of racism and inequality. This account challenges the conventional wisdom that America’s prison crisis is of comparatively recent vintage, showing instead how a racial and punitive system of control emerged from the ashes of a progressive ideal.