Jewish Icons
Jewish Icons

Author: Richard I. Cohen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780520917910

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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.

Holocaust Icons
Holocaust Icons

Author: Oren Baruch Stier

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-11-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0813574048

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The Holocaust has bequeathed to contemporary society a cultural lexicon of intensely powerful symbols, a vocabulary of remembrance that we draw on to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible horror of the Shoah. Engagingly written and illustrated with more than forty black-and-white images, Holocaust Icons probes the history and memory of four of these symbolic relics left in the Holocaust’s wake. Jewish studies scholar Oren Stier offers in this volume new insight into symbols and the symbol-making process, as he traces the lives and afterlives of certain remnants of the Holocaust and their ongoing impact. Stier focuses in particular on four icons: the railway cars that carried Jews to their deaths, symbolizing the mechanics of murder; the Arbeit Macht Frei (“work makes you free”) sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, pointing to the insidious logic of the camp system; the number six million that represents an approximation of the number of Jews killed as well as mass murder more generally; and the persona of Anne Frank, associated with victimization. Stier shows how and why these icons—an object, a phrase, a number, and a person—have come to stand in for the Holocaust: where they came from and how they have been used and reproduced; how they are presently at risk from a variety of threats such as commodification; and what the future holds for the memory of the Shoah. In illuminating these icons of the Holocaust, Stier offers valuable new perspective on one of the defining events of the twentieth century. He helps readers understand not only the Holocaust but also the profound nature of historical memory itself.

Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank
Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank

Author: Batya Brutin

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-04-06

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 3110656914

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The photographs of the unknown Warsaw Ghetto little boy and the well-known Anne Frank became famous documents worldwide, representing the Holocaust. Many artists adopted them as a source of inspiration to express their feelings and ideas about Holocaust events in general and to deal with the fate of these two victims in particular. Moreover, the artists emphasized the uniqueness of both children, but at the same time used their image to convey social and political messages. By using images of these children, the artists both evoke our attention and sympathy and our anger against the Nazis’ crime of killing one and a half million Jewish children in the Holocaust. Because they represent different sexes, and different aspects - Western and Eastern Jewry - of Holocaust experience, artists used them in many contexts. This book will complete the lack of comprehensive research referring to the visual representations of these children in artworks.

Virtually Jewish
Virtually Jewish

Author: Ruth Ellen Gruber

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-01-15

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9780520920927

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More than half a century after the Holocaust, in countries where Jews make up just a tiny fraction of the population, products of Jewish culture (or what is perceived as Jewish culture) have become very viable components of the popular public domain. But how can there be a visible and growing Jewish presence in Europe, without the significant presence of Jews? Ruth Ellen Gruber explores this phenomenon, traveling through Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, and elsewhere to observe firsthand the many facets of a remarkable trend. Across the continent, Jewish festivals, performances, publications, and study programs abound. Jewish museums have opened by the dozen, and synagogues and Jewish quarters are being restored, often as tourist attractions. In Europe, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, klezmer music concerts, exhibitions, and cafes with Jewish themes are drawing enthusiastic--and often overwhelmingly non-Jewish--crowds. In what ways, Gruber asks, do non-Jews embrace and enact Jewish culture, and for what reasons? For some, the process is a way of filling in communist-era blanks. For others, it is a means of coming to terms with the Nazi legacy or a key to building (or rebuilding) a democratic and tolerant state. Clearly, the phenomenon has as many motivations as manifestations. Gruber investigates the issues surrounding this "virtual Jewish world" in three specific areas: the reclaiming of the built heritage, including synagogues, cemeteries, and former ghettos and Jewish quarters; the representation of Jewish culture through tourism and museums; and the role of klezmer and Yiddish music as typical "Jewish cultural products." Although she features the relationship of non-Jews to the Jewish phenomenon, Gruber also considers its effect on local Jews and Jewish communities and the revival of Jewish life in Europe. Her view of how the trend has developed and where it may be going is thoughtful, colorful, and very well informed.

Too Jewish or Not Jewish Enough
Too Jewish or Not Jewish Enough

Author: Jeffrey Abt

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2024-02-02

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 1805392786

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Displays of Jewish ritual objects in public, non-Jewish settings by Jews are a comparatively recent phenomenon. So too is the establishment of Jewish museums. This volume explores the origins of the Jewish Museum of New York and its evolution from collecting and displaying Jewish ritual objects, to Jewish art, to exhibiting avant-garde art devoid of Jewish content, created by non-Jews. Established within a rabbinic seminary, the museum’s formation and development reflect changes in Jewish society over the twentieth century as it grappled with choices between religion and secularism, particularism and universalism, and ethnic pride and assimilation.

Mapping Jewish Identities
Mapping Jewish Identities

Author: Laurence J. Silberstein

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2000-07

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0814797687

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In his opening remarks, Silberstein (Jewish studies, Lehigh U.) reflects on the current trend of viewing identity as a mapping process of becoming rather than a fixed construct to be traced. Essays by 13 other US and Israeli contributors further advance this non-essentialist perspective in regard to Jewish identity viewed through personal narratives, photographs, Spiegelman's Holocaust Maus comic books, the Yiddish question, a critique of Zionist ideology, Israeli identity and literature, Judeo-Christian kinship, sex differences as discussed in Levinas' work, and postmodern ideas of individuation without identity. c. Book News Inc.

The Jewish Life Cycle
The Jewish Life Cycle

Author: Ivan G. Marcus

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0295803924

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In this original and sweeping review of Jewish culture and history, Ivan Marcus examines how and why various rites and customs celebrating stages in the life cycle have evolved through the ages and persisted to this day. For each phase of life--from childhood and adolescence to adulthood and the advanced years—the book traces the origin and development of specific rites associated with the events of birth, circumcision, and schooling; bar and bat mitzvah and confirmation; engagement, betrothal, and marriage; and aging, dying, and remembering. Customs in Jewish tradition, such as the presence of godparents at a circumcision, the use of a four-poled canopy at a wedding, and the placing of small stones on tombstones, are discussed. In each chapter, detailed descriptions walk the reader through such ceremonies as early modern and contemporary circumcision, weddings, and funerals. In a comparative framework, Marcus illustrates how Jewish culture has negotiated with the majority cultures of the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity, medieval European Christianity, and Mediterranean Islam, as well as with modern secular and religious movements and social trends, to renew itself through ritual innovation. In his extensive research on the Jewish life cycle, Marcus draws from documents on various customs and ritual practices, offering reassessments of original sources and scholarly literature. Marcus’s survey is the first comprehensive study of the rites of the Jewish life cycle since Hayyim Schauss's The Lifetime of the Jew was published in 1950, written for Jewish readers. Marcus’s book addresses a broader audience and is designed to appeal to scholars and interested readers.

Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History?
Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History?

Author: Daniel R. Schwartz

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-11-25

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 9004215344

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These twenty studies ask whether changes in different fields of ancient Jewish culture were caused by the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, what changed for other reasons, and what did not change despite that event.

Jewish Art in Late Antiquity
Jewish Art in Late Antiquity

Author: Dr Shulamit Laderman

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-12-06

Total Pages: 86

ISBN-13: 9004509585

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This survey of ancient Jewish art traces Tabernacle implements and their iconographic development from the Second Temple period until late sixth century CE. It examines appearances of seven-branch menorah, Torah ark, and other motifs found in archeological discoveries of burial art synagogue decorations.

Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council - Revised Edition
Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council - Revised Edition

Author: Ambrosios Giakalis

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2005-08-01

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 9047407288

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This book, newly revised and updated, examines the Eastern Church's theology of icons chiefly on the basis of the acta of the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787. The political circumstances leading to the outbreak of the iconclast controversy in the eighth century are discussed in detail, but the main emphasis is on the theological arguments and assumptions of the council participants. Major themes include the nature of tradition, the relationship between image and reality, and the place of christology. Ultimately the argument over icons was about the accessibility of the divine. Icons were held by the iconophiles to communicate a deifying grace which raised the believer to participation in the life of God.