Menachem Wecker
By Menachem Wecker
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News Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Teachers Leader Share Faith — But Little Else
Last Halloween, 17-year-old Eleanor Glockner threw a red wool jacket over an old black dress of her mom’s. She dyed her hair gray, pinned it into a bun and stuck a homemade Chicago Teachers Union button on her lapel before marching down the street to trick-or-treat at the home of her neighbor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel….
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Culture The Dark Comic Arts of Daniel Clowes
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibit “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” (on view through October 13) ought to come with a parental advisory about its explicit content. Although the cover of one of the comic books that hangs in the show — “Eightball” No. 8 (1992) — is recommended “for mature readers,”…
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Culture Is Jewish Girl Star of Edouard Manet’s Famed Painting ‘The Railway’?
Cast in the major exhibition “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” (through September 29 at the Art Institute of Chicago), certain paintings expose their undergarments, so to speak. The exhibit, jointly organized with Paris’s Musée d’Orsay and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was shown earlier this year, features a Who’s Who of impressionist painters….
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Culture Buddha Meets the Kabbalah in San Francisco
Barnett Newman’s steel sculpture “Zim Zum 1” typically resides on the roof of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It now sits across the street, on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where it is the first piece to confront viewers of the exhibit “Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in…
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Culture 11 Ways To Show Moses Breaking the Tablets
On the 17th of Tammuz, which will be observed as a fast day on June 25 this year, Moses smashed the Ten Commandments on the foot of Mount Sinai after hearing the sounds of and seeing the idolatrous celebrations devoted to the Golden Calf. The idea, presumably, was that the bovine abomination was so atrocious…
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Culture The Jewish Designer Who Taught Marc Chagall
‘Though raised in a religious family, I threw off the old faith when I started to live my own life, as did so many men of my age,” the 21-year-old Sergei Diaghilev wrote to Leo Tolstoy in 1893. “I had to convince myself that many things I had previously accepted were merely fairy tales, which…
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Culture Holocaust Museum, Turning 20 Years Old, Confronts 21st Century Challenges
When the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s 20th Anniversary National Tour comes to Chicago in June, Suzy Snyder, the museum’s associate curator, hopes that survivors and their children in the Windy City will consider donating their Holocaust artifacts and documents. “We want people to understand that we don’t have enough. There’s no such thing as…
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Culture Ancient Tchotchkes Deepen Our Understanding of Jewish Pilgrims
Many of the tourists who trek to Israel inevitably pack for their return flight with a variety of kitschy souvenirs and gifts for friends back home: red “Kabbalah” bracelets; Israel Defense Forces T-shirts; clocks with the Hebrew alphabet; Israeli flag or hamsa key chains. Fourteen centuries ago the props were different, but the business model…
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