Jewish American Heritage Month

A strikingly original exploration of the profound impact of World War II on how we understand the art that survived it By the end of World War II an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books had been seized from their owners by Nazi forces; many were destroyed. The artworks and cultural artifacts that survived have traumatic, layered histories. This book traces the biographies of these objects--including paintings, sculpture, and Judaica--their rescue in the aftermath of the war, and their afterlives in museums and private collections and in our cultural understanding. In examining how this history affects the way we view these works, scholars discuss the moral and aesthetic implications of maintaining the association between the works and their place within the brutality of the Holocaust--or, conversely, the implications of ignoring this history.   Afterlives offers a thought-provoking investigation of the unique ability of art and artifacts to bear witness to historical events. With rarely seen archival photographs and with contributions by the contemporary artists Maria Eichhorn, Hadar Gad, Dor Guez, and Lisa Oppenheim, this catalogue illuminates the study of a difficult and still-urgent subject, with many parallels to today's crises of art in war. Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York Exhibition Schedule: Jewish Museum, New York (Opens August 2021)

The sixth volume of the annual publication of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Art and Its Uses analyzes the levels of meaning present in a wide range of visual images, from high art by Jewish artists to Judaica, caricatures, and political propaganda. The use of such material to illuminate aspects of modern history and society is rather uncommon in the field of modern Jewish studies; these essays provide the tools necessary for understanding the image in its proper social and political context. The distinguished contributors include Richard I. Cohen, Michael Berkowitz, Milly Heyd, Irit Rogoff, Chone Shmeruk, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Vivianne Barsky, and Vivian Mann. Accompanied by more than 160 illustrations, the essays shed new light on such topics as Jewish nationalism, Jewish identity, and Jewish-gentile relations. In addition to the symposium, the volume contains articles by major scholars of contemporary Jewish studies, a substantial book review section, and a list of recent dissertations in the field.

The story of dealers of Old Masters, champions of modern art, and victims of Nazi plunder.   Since the late-1990s, the fate of Nazi stolen art has become a cause célèbre. In Belonging and Betrayal, Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to acquire so many old and modern masterpieces in the first place - and what this reveals about Jews, art and modernity. This book tells the epic story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a small number of eminent art dealers and collectors who, against the odds, played a pivotal role in the migration of works of art from Europe to the United States and in the triumph of modern art. Beautifully written and compellingly told, this story takes place on both sides of the Atlantic from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is set against the backdrop of critical transformations, among them the gradual opening of European high culture, the ambiguities of Jewish acculturation, the massive sell-off of aristocratic family art collections, the emergence of different schools of modern art, the cultural impact of World War I, and the Nazi war against the Jews.  

The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films--including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment--Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent his films a sense of the peril that could engulf any society. In this critical study, Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder's work, stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer-director. In contrast to the widespread view of Wilder as a hardened cynic, McBride reveals him to be a disappointed romantic. Wilder's experiences as an exile led him to mask his sensitivity beneath a veneer of wisecracking that made him a celebrated caustic wit. Amid the satirical barbs and exposure of social hypocrisies, Wilder's films are marked by intense compassion and a profound understanding of the human condition. Mixing biographical insight with in-depth analysis of films from throughout Wilder's career as a screenwriter and director of comedy and drama, and drawing on McBride's interviews with the director and his collaborators, this book casts new light on the full range of Wilder's rich, complex, and distinctive vision.

Modern Jerusalem, a city central to Jewish, Muslim, and Christian religious imaginaries and the political epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, is to put it mildly a highly contested space. More surprising, perhaps, is that its musical landscape not only reflects these rifts but also helped to define them as the ancient city transitioned to modernity during the twentieth century. In City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem, author Michael A. Figueroa argues that musical renderings of Jerusalem have been critical to the formation of Israeli political consciousness. The book demonstrates how Israeli songwriters helped to shape their public's territorial imagination-- creating images of a city at once heavenly and earthly, that dwells in longing, that must not be forgotten, that compels one to bereave the dead, that represents the fulfilment of prophecy, and that is the site of immense cultural diversity. The dynamic history of its representation in lyrics and music helps dispel any notion that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is timeless, intractable, and based on static, essential identities; while there are continuities across historical divides, radical change constantly transpires. City of Song combines analyses of musical meaning, political discourse, and public performance over the long twentieth century (1880s-2010) to reveal how the Israeli-Palestinian crisis' territorial fixation on Jerusalem has been constructed, historically contingent, and subject to artistic intervention in modernity. Through a musical history of Jerusalem, Figueroa introduces a novel, humanities-centered approach to one of the world's most contested cities, and one of the defining cultural and political questions of our era.

East Germany's ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany's name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner - a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.

The definitive study of this powerful series of drawings by the influential artist   Internationally renowned as a printmaker, Mauricio Lasansky (1914-2012) unleashed his brilliant draftsmanship in his self-titled series The Nazi Drawings. The Argentina-born artist created the body of work largely in the 1960s, as the televised trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann awakened the world to the depths of Nazi atrocities. Lasansky's haunting interpretations reflect his response to the unfolding details. "I was full of hate, poison, and I wanted to spit it out," he said.  The thirty-three monumental drawings, made from charcoal, wash, and collage, examine the horrors of the Holocaust, especially the suffering of women and children. The series became Lasansky's most famous and notable work and was included among the opening exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1967. Envisioning Evil accompanies the exhibition of The Nazi Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2021. Curator Rachel McGarry provides comprehensive biographical, cultural, and historical context for the artist and the creation of this series in three essays and an illustrated timeline. McGarry also traces Holocaust awareness before and after the 1961 Eichmann trial and examines the role of art, literature, and popular media in bringing the genocide into public discourse. Rabbi Barry D. Cytron, former chaplain and professor of religious studies at Macalester College, contributes an essay on the international religious response to revelations about Nazi crimes and their relation to Lasansky's art. Created as a reaction to the crimes committed against the Jews during the Holocaust, The Nazi Drawings endure as a condemnation against all persecution and extermination of humanity.

In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews--pillars of an embattled community--invested their fortunes in France's cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country's army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt--the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers--McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of "invading" France's cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind--many ultimately donated to the French state--were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.

This book studies how the Jewish community of Mantua established, normalized, and maintained interrelations with the Christian community for over 130 years, from 1520 to 1650, by means of theatre performance for the Gonzaga Dukes. Performance is shown to have been a mutually beneficial "currency" that both the Dukes and Jews could use to calibrate their relations with one another. Seen in this light, the author demonstrates that performance was not the consequence of cultural exchange between Jews and Christians, but was one of the means by which the complicated nature of cultural communication and exchange took place. Jewish Theatre Making in Mantuadetails the performances created by the Jewish community of Mantua and argues that these theatrical events were a crucial component in the ability of Jews to live peacefully within Mantua, which became one of the few refuges left to Jews in the Italian peninsula and Catholic Europe.

What are the consequences of how Jews are depicted in movies and television series? Drawing on a host of movies and television series from the 1970s to present day, Jews in Contemporary Visual Entertainment explores how the media sexualize and racialize American Jews. Race and sexuality frequently intersect in the depiction of Jewish characters in such shows as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, UnREAL, The Expanse, and Breaking Bad, and in films such as Hester Street, Once Upon a Time in America, Casino, Radio Days, Inglourious Basterds, and Barton Fink. When they do, American sexual norms are invariably challenged or outright broken by these anti-Semitic representations of Jewishness. Insightful and provocative, Jews in Contemporary Visual Entertainment disturbingly reveals the far-reaching influence of popular visual media in shaping how American Jews are perceived today.

A biography of the elusive but celebrated Dada and Surrealist artist and photographer connecting his Jewish background to his life and art Man Ray (1890-1976), a founding father of Dada and a key player in French Surrealism, is one of the central artists of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most elusive. In this new biography, journalist and critic Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray's Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art.   Man Ray began life as Emmanuel Radnitsky, the eldest of four children born in Philadelphia to a mother from Minsk and a father from Kiev. When he was seven the family moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where both parents worked as tailors. Defying his parents' expectations that he earn a university degree, Man Ray instead pursued his vocation as an artist, embracing the modernist creed of photographer and avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. When at the age of thirty Man Ray relocated to Paris, he, unlike Stieglitz, made a clean break with his past.

This volume examines music's place in the process of Jewish assimilation into the modern European bourgeoisie and the role assigned to music in forging a new Jewish Israeli national identity, in maintaining a separate Sephardic identity, and in preserving a traditional Jewish life. Contributions include "On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth Century European Musical Life," by Ezra Mendelsohn, "Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village," by Philip V. Bohlman, "Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture," by Judit Frigyesi, "New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews," by Edwin Seroussi, "The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund," by Natan Shahar, "Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli Musical Style," by Jehoash Hirshberg, and "Music of Holy Argument," by Lionel Wolberger. The volume also contains essays, book reviews, and a list of recent dissertations in the field.

Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only. With incisive analysis, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews.

In Music in the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert provides the first large-scale, critical account of the role of music amongst communities imprisoned under Nazism. She documents a wide scope of musical activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos. Gilbert is also concerned with exploring the ways in which music - particularly the many songs that were preserved - contribute to our broader understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims. Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism. Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time.

Jewish Americans, many of them women, are creating ritual challah covers and prayer shawls, ink, clay, or wood pieces, and other articles for family, friends, or Jewish charities. But they are doing much more, Eichler-Levine shows: armed with perhaps only a needle and thread, they are reckoning with Jewish identity in a fragile and dangerous world. The work of these crafters embodies a vital Judaism that may lie outside traditional notions of Jewishness, but, as Eichler-Levine argues, these crafters are as much engaged as any Jews in honoring and nurturing the fortitude, memory, and community of the Jewish people.

Best known for his 1979 film David, Peter Lilienthal was an unusual figure within postwar filmmaking circles. A child refugee from Nazi Germany who grew up in Uruguay, he was uniquely situated at the crossroads of German, Jewish, and Latin American cultures: while his work emerged from West German auteur filmmaking, his films bore the unmistakable imprints of Jewish thought and the militant character of New Latin American cinema. Peter Lilienthal is the first comprehensive study of Lilienthal’s life and career, highlighting the distinctively cross-cultural and transnational dimensions of his oeuvre, and exploring his role as an early exemplar of a more vibrant, inclusive European film culture.

The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish "outsiders" to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness - as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text - these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.

Revolutionary Visions examines recent cinematic depictions of Jewish involvement in 1960s and 1970s revolutionary movements in Latin America. In order to explore the topic, the book bridges critical theory on religion, politics, and hegemony from regional Latin American, national, and global perspectives. Placing these theories in dialogue with recent films, the author asks the following questions: How did revolutionary commitment change Jewish community and families in twentieth-century Latin America? How did Jews contribute to revolutionary causes and what is the place of Jews in the legacies of revolutionary movements? How is film used to project self-representations of Jewish communities in the national project for a mainstream audience? Jewish involvement in revolutionary movements is rife with contradictions. On the one hand, it was a natural progression of patterns of political participation, based on the ideological affinities shared between Socialist movements and Marxist revolutionary politics. On the other hand, involvement in revolutionary politics would also upset the status quo of Jewish communities due to the extreme nature of revolutionary practices (e.g. guerrilla warfare), revolutionary groups' alignment with Palestine, and the assimilation into non-Jewish culture that revolutionary involvement often entailed. These contradictions between Jewish self-identification and revolutionary activity continue to confound cultural understandings of the points of contact between identities and political affinities. In this way, Revolutionary Visions contributes to timely debates within cultural studies surrounding identities and politics.

Pawel Pawlikowski's 2013 film 'Ida' was exceptionally warmly received in the United States, culminating in the Academy Award for Film Not in the English Language, but it was not without controversy. This book's introduction to the film explains the historical setting, including the violence that took place in the Polish countryside during World War II and was not exposed for sixty years, and provides political and cultural analysis to aid the reader in understanding the film's setting and narrative. The book also touches on the influence of the film on current events in Poland, where censorship of it by an increasingly nationalist government has polarized the country. It also situates Ida within the contexts of Polish and world film history. Scene-by-scene analysis is accompanied in each chapter by background information that gives context to the aesthetic and narrative choices made by the director.

By the end of the Second World War, Germany was in ruins and its Jewish population so gravely diminished that a rich cultural life seemed unthinkable. And yet, as surviving Jews returned from hiding, the camps, and their exiles abroad, so did their music. Transcending Dystopia tells the story of the remarkable revival of Jewish musical activity that developed in postwar Germany against all odds. Author Tina Frühauf provides a kaleidoscopic panorama of musical practices in worship and social life across the country to illuminate how music contributed to transitions and transformations within and beyond Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Drawing on newly unearthed sources from archives and private collections, this book covers a wide spectrum of musical activity-from its role in commemorations and community events to synagogue concerts and its presence on the radio-across the divided Germany until the Fall of the Wall in 1989. Frühauf's use of mobility as a conceptual framework reveals the myriad ways in which the reemergence of Jewish music in Germany was shaped by cultural transfer and exchange that often relied on the circulation of musicians, their ideas, and practices within and between communities. By illuminating the centrality of mobility to Jewish experiences and highlighting how postwar Jewish musical practices in Germany were defined by politics that reached across national borders to the United States and Israel, this pioneering study makes a major contribution to our understanding of Jewish life and culture in a transnational context.