Stories about how we look at Jewish artists and how Jewish artists look at the world.
Forward with the Arts
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Culture Can anyone help Kathryn Grody and Mandy Patinkin find their lost boys?
For 15 years, Kathryn Grody and Mandy Patinkin have been searching for their sons. Apparently, during an apartment-move in 2006, they lost the two boys, ages 5 and 2. Well, not the real-life boys, but a painting of them that used to hang chez Grody and Patinkin. “I noticed the frame seemed slightly warped, so…
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Culture After a house is destroyed in a fire, a Jewish artist finds a way to preserve its spirit
Driving up the hill, there was a point where you could always catch the first glimpse of the house, the pitch of the roof and the top of this one tall tree. Whenever Windy Dougall came home to visit her family, that spot in the road was when she knew she was home. “It was…
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Art In a Jewish Bestiary, lions, leviathans and bears — oh my!
Did you know frogs are scholars of Torah, the Leviathan was God’s favorite pet and gazelles were the carrier pigeons of ancient Judea? From the time Adam named the animals, the Jewish imagination has been preoccupied with creatures of the sea and creeping things of the land, referring to them in proverbs and deploying them…
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Culture How a Jewish woman from Baltimore found a new religion in Henri Matisse
Growing up in the tightly-knit Jewish community of Baltimore in the 1960s, I took special pride knowing that the dazzling paintings — by such modern masters as Picasso, Cezanne, Monet and especially Matisse — that lined the gallery walls of a special wing in the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) were all there thanks to…
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Culture How a unique Torah scroll scribed by a woman led to a historic bar mitzvah
When Gavriel Kedem became a bar mitzvah, he was focused on the usual things: chanting the parsha, giving his dvar, the people watching. He wasn’t thinking about it as a historic moment. But it was — Gavriel was chanting from a scroll written by his mother, Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem, the first woman ever to be…
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Art In Frank Lloyd Wright’s only synagogue, a masterful blending of color and light
Driving south along Old York Road in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, a giant milky-glass tetrahedral dome, cross-hatched with cast-aluminum, seems to rise from the surrounding woods. A bold pastiche of prehistoric, modern and biblical, it simultaneously evokes Mayan ruins, a Japanese pagoda and Mount Sinai, while creating a wholly new form. Beth Sholom, dedicated on Sept….
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Culture How an unapologetically vulgar collector horrified fellow Jews — and revolutionized the art world
As two exhibitions in Philadelphia and New York showcase the seven-decade career of America’s greatest living artist, 91-year-old Jasper Johns, two new histories have arrived, revealing the crucial role that has been played by Jewish art collectors, “The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France”and “Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews…
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Culture Your art, your stories — a collection of the paintings and sculptures that inspire our readers
On a wall in Barbara Sander’s apartment in Sarasota, Fla., a seabird flies between two palm trees across a pinkish-orange sky. Ellen Green feels inspired by a deep forest, one she used to gaze at for hours when she was a child. Chani Miller of Highland Park, N.J. finds peace and content when she looks…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Fast Forward Was the viral Ta-Nehisi Coates interview a hit piece or fair play? A journalism ethics expert weighs in.
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Culture How my odious cousin Roy Cohn was responsible for creating Donald Trump — and me
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Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
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