Stories about how we look at Jewish artists and how Jewish artists look at the world.
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Culture She’s 16. She’s Jewish. She’s Gotham’s newest superhero.
Willow Zimmerman is a 16-year-old activist. When she isn’t in school or holding up a picket sign, she can be found batch-baking rugelach or splitting a Reuben with a stray Great Dane she named Lebowitz (after Fran). But Willow has a secret set of extracurriculars. She helps run an illegal poker game for one of…
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Culture How a Jewish photographer found his true calling in Chinatown
The life’s-work of the bespectacled, bow-tie wearing photojournalist Emile Bocian might have been lost forever if not for the foresight of actress Mae Wong. After Bocian died in 1990, Wong, his close friend, discovered over 120,000 photographs, negatives and contact sheets stuffed into cigarette and shoeboxes in his apartment. Knowing he had no children, and…
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Culture ‘A lot of Black artists feel that burden — the atypical ascent of choreographer Claudia Schreier’
In the late afternoon and evening light of August, two solo hikers meet by a yellow steel structure in a grassy field. Their faces are obscured behind masks etched with anxiety as they navigate a world inhospitable to Black bodies like theirs. When they happen upon each other, their masks come off as they find…
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Culture In St. Louis, a Torah curtain tells the story of a woman of valor
In the basement of the Saint Louis Art museum a luminous tapestry — the centerpiece of the exhibit “Signed in Silk: Introducing a Sacred Jewish Textile” — dazzles as if lit from within. The acquisition of this 18th century Italian ark curtain, or parokhet, created by the Jewish teenage girl Simhah Viterbo in Ancona, Italy,…
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Culture A contrarian artist who took inspiration from a Hasidic rabbi and a Vietnamese general
The French artist Christian Boltanski, who died on Bastille Day at age 76, expressed emotions through conceptual art associated with Judaism as well as universal experience. His Ukrainian Jewish father escaped deportation during the Nazi Occupation of Paris by hiding in a space under the floorboards of the family apartment for 18 months. Boltanski’s mother,…
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Culture How Judy Chicago became part of art history
Judy Chicago, whose immense body of work draws on overlooked women’s history, the tragedy of the recent Jewish past and features no small amount of literal fireworks, is having yet another moment. Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in (naturally) Chicago, the artist, whose name is regularly appended with words like “controversial,” will receive her first-ever retrospective…
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Culture Meet the husband and wife behind Williamsburg’s first Hasidic art gallery
Just off Flushing Avenue, a bustling thoroughfare in Hasidic Williamsburg, there’s a basement full of art. Chiaroscuro portraits of eminent rabbis. Scenes of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. Modernist sculptures of men kissing their tefillin, tender floral still lifes, a collection of old violins splatter-painted in exuberant colors. Housed in a lower-level ballroom in the Condor Hotel,…
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Culture When the beginning meets the end: a year in reflection from a resident of the Chelsea Hotel
When I look back at the past year, my life seems to resemble a Rorschach test. Like the events of the past months were a blob of ink violently slapped into the center of a sheet of paper, folded in half and then pulled apart. The beginning mirrors the ending. It all started when I…
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News Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
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Music For Bob Dylan’s biographer, ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction
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