If you’re not salivating yet, you’re not a huge nerd, and shame on you. Just check out just a few of these gems:

This is a contemporary (2007) kiddush cup by an Israeli artist that looks like a chicken. What are you going to do with this? Make kiddush on matzo ball soup? Put on a little puppet show? Who knows! Either way, amazing:

Or, there’s nothing quite like an illuminated manuscript, straddling the line between beautifully surreal and absurd to the point of being silly. And of course, it wasn’t only monks going at it— the Index includes Jewish illuminated manuscripts, and at times they’re just as weird as their Christian counterparts:

WHAT IS THAT THING ON THE TOP? Some sort of centaur with a dragon head for a tail that really likes the music the reverse human top part plays, while an additional face sticks out of the chest? Here. For. It.

Not everything is funny, of course; there’s an entire section featuring cemeteries, a different kind of fascinating (this one, for example, is from 18th century Ukraine).

Plus, nearly half of the quarter-million images are related to architecture (“We cannot physically preserve all Jewish buildings everywhere, but we can preserve them visually through documentation and drawings,” said Dr. Vladmir Levin, the Center for Jewish Art’s director, in a statement).

The database does have a search function, but it’s more fun to just lose yourself in a hole, classic Internet-surfing style. There are detailed descriptions of every entry to provide context.

So, choose your poison. Beautiful early twentieth century painting of Jewish life? Medieval interpretations of Biblical stories? Modern sculpture of the very same story (you can compare them!)? More blueprints than you can shake a lulav at?

Work can wait. See you in several hours.

Images courtesy the Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art

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Only one man has the time for highly publicized feuds over the color pink, and to win awards for representing the Jewish community.  That man is Anish Kapoor.

Though first of all, it’s Sir Anish Kapoor to you. He was knighted a few years back.  That was for his work as a visual artist; he’s known for decadent, almost tactile works rich in light, shape, and especially, color. He has an upcoming installation in Brooklyn, where he’s going to create a water funnel that looks like the endless dark void we all feel we’re falling into these days.

His career has also intersected with his Jewish identity; he’s exhibited at the Jewish Museum in Moscow in part as a political statement, for example. Most notoriously, in 2015, his work at Versailles was defaced several times with anti-Semitic graffiti, and when Kapoor elected to not remove it to highlight underlying problems, a right-wing politician successfully sued to force him to cover up the vandalism.

But Kapoor has been trending in pop culture recently for other reasons; he became Internet famous earlier this year for his famous color wars (and we don’t mean Maccabiah). They’re all in good fun; Kapoor acquired the rights to a pigment known as the darkest black in the world (queue more jokes about the state of current events). As revenge, another artist, Stuart Semple, manufactured what he claims to be the pinkest pink, and which he forbade Kapoor from getting anywhere near.

In fact, in order to even buy the pigment, purchasers needed to affirm that “You are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor.” (Anti-Semitism!)

How did Kapoor respond? Oh, he got some of that pink:

The game continued with the forbidden “Glitteriest glitter,” and so on. It was a delightful back and forth of petty. Also there were the memes:

Despite the likes of Tumblr leaning wholeheartedly into this fight, the Internet largely doesn’t know that Kapoor is Jewish; he was born in Bombay to a Hindu father and a Jewish mother born in Baghdad and raised in India’s Jewish community in Pune (where her father was a cantor). Unfortunately, most articles summarize Sir Anish as having an “Indian father and Jewish mother,” but that’s frankly reductionist and erasing the nuance of his heritage (also, Indian clearly doesn’t necessarily mean gentile, duh). Kapoor also lived in Israel for a time as a young man, working on a kibbutz, but has lived in the U.K. for decades.

He’s also this year’s recipient for the Genesis Prize, awarded to members of the Jewish community who have excelled in their fields and improved the world. Kapoor has said he will use the $1 million the prize entails to help refugees. He said:

“Jewish identity and history have witnessed recurring conditions of indifference, persecution and Holocaust. Repeatedly, we have had to repossess ourselves and re-identify our communities. As inheritors and carriers of Jewish values, it is unseemly, therefore, for us to ignore the plight of people who are persecuted, who have lost everything and had to flee as refugees in mortal danger. Outsider consciousness resides at the heart of Jewish identity and this is what motivates me, while accepting the honor of the Genesis Prize, to re-gift the proceeds to refugee causes.”

So just consider this your reminder that the subject of your Tumblr jokes is also a Jewish person of color winning awards for his philanthropy. Way to contain multitudes, Sir Anish!

Image of Kapoor via Wikimedia. Image of his middle finger from Instagram.

The post Anish Kapoor. Artist. Jewish. Color Renegade. appeared first on Jewcy.

Less than a month ago, Shia LaBeouf used his hipster-performance-art-powers for good, with his video project, HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US. But in the past few days, the installation has reached a (very) premature end.

The idea started out simply enough: Anyone was invited to go up to a wall outside of the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Participants would say “He will not divide us” as many times as they liked. The camera was hooked up to a live stream, set to run continuously until Trump is no longer president.

At first, the installation was the stuff of inspirational clickbait, it attracted the likes of Jaden Smith, and ordinary folks from high school students performing the mantra as a rap to people holding vigils in the middle of the night. But there were also early signs of trouble. Within days, the white supremacists started showing up to troll, and LaBeouf himself shouted one down.

The project grew more hectic; one protestor may have said something anti-Semitic to LaBeouf, who responded by shoving the harasser, and was arrested (though not jailed) as a result.

Even though that incident was weeks ago, the Museum cited it as a primary example for why it had to shut the project down on Friday. Its statement read in part:

The installation created a serious and ongoing public safety hazard for the Museum, its visitors, staff, local residents, and businesses. While the installation began constructively, it deteriorated markedly after one of the artists was arrested on the site of the installation and ultimately necessitated this action. Over the course of the installation, there have been dozens of threats of violence and numerous arrests, such that police felt compelled to be stationed outside the installation 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

LaBeouf, and his co-artists Luke Turner and Nastja Säde Rönkkö are obviously not happy about the turn of the events. The live stream website is still up, but the video only displays the words “THE MUSEUM HAS ABANDONED US.” The artists’ statement on the site has been updated:

“On February 10, 2017, the Museum of the Moving Image abandoned the project.

The artists, however, have not.”

Keep your eyes peeled, folks. This story doesn’t seem to be over yet.

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In case you were eagerly awaiting Shia LaBeouf’s next durational art installation, know that the wait is over! The actor, recent husband, potential Christian convert, and Louis Stevens, has released perhaps his most political work yet: HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US.

HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US is fairly straightforward; there’s a camera outside of the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. You walk up to the camera, and say the words “He will not divide us.” If you like you can say it again— and again, and again, until you feel you have done your part and you let someone else take a turn. Lather, rinse, repeat until Donald Trump is no longer president.

No, really, the camera is streaming 24/7, for as long as Trump is in office. That’s the “he” in question, here.

According to LaBeouf and his collaborators Luke Turner and Nastja Säde Rönkkö, “the mantra ‘he will not divide us’ acts as a show of resistance or insistence, opposition or optimism, guided by the spirit of each individual participant and the community.”

Actually, so far it’s rather compelling.The first performer, on Inauguration Day, was Jaden Smith (because of course he was), so there’s always that Marina Abramović-esque “Who’ll show up next?” factor. And in only a few short days, and lots of interest, several tiny dramas have played out, from singing the mantra as a duet to the stream freezing up (OK, less dramatic, and more the way of all technology).

Most notably, considering that the point of the project is to not divide us, multiple fights have already ensued, when white supremacists, having gotten wind of the thing, have shown up to be trolls. Shia used the mantra to shout one of them down himself (rock on, Shia!), and one woman left her bed in Brooklyn in the middle of the night to come support a man holding vigil despite harassment. Aw!

Can’t make it to New York to participate yourself? You can still view the project; the camera live stream is on HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US.

Image via Twitter.

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Walking into the current installation at Soapbox Gallery in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn is like walking into an alternate reality.

At the gallery’s entrance sits a twin bed made up with worn, floral linens. On the wall, the outfit of an ultra-Orthodox girl hangs unassumingly. A sign indicates that this piece is called Gut Nacht Hindy (“Good Night Hindy”). The bed is flanked by two aged bedside tables. On the left-hand side, a tattered book of tehillim (psalms) lies unopened. To the right, dying flowers sit in a mason jar, atop an open drawer exposing a collection of old family pictures.

The exhibit—emphatically titled “BE!“—is a personal memoir of sorts, inspired by artist Sara Erenthal‘s upbringing as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, and subsequent departure from that world.

Erenthal, 33, resides in New York, and has been showing her work publicly for the last two-and-a-half years. “I was challenged to bring my life story into this gallery,” she says, and indeed she has: while I was there, one of her cousins—who also “broke free” from Orthodoxy (his words)—visited the gallery to show his support, and recognized himself and his parents in a few of the family photos.

Erenthal was raised by Neturei Karta parents in ultra-Orthodox communities in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem, Borough Park in Brooklyn, and Kiryas Joel in upstate New York. She ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage at 17, and her entire community rejected her.

The community, she remembers, is a strict one. A large-scale sculpture that stands out as the centerpiece of the show, Eidele Meidele, channels this very memory. The giant papier-mâché sculpture depicts a girl’s face, eyes turned down, with long, thick braids made of coarse rope. Braids were the singular hairstyle permitted to the artist as a child; here they are secured to the floor, representing the community’s expectations and limitations.

In Erenthal’s world, “everything is imperfect, it’s flawed in some way.” Her portrait series of an ultra-Orthodox mother, father, and son are deliberately imperfect. The portraits, which hang prominently around the gallery, are made of different materials, including burlap, like the sacks Neturei Karta members wear to anti-Zionist protests. Their clothing is frayed, with strands still sticking up from the final product. “It’s imperfect,” Erenthal reiterates, “but it’s intentional.” It tells her story.

“My family didn’t really fit in anywhere,” she recalls. There is no Neturei Karta community in New York, so even though Erenthal grew up among other ultra-Orthodox Jews, she was never really fully one of them. Furthermore, she revels, “my mother’s a little bit of a hippie and artsy,” which is not mainstream within those communities. When asked more specifically about her family, she looked visibly uncomfortable. “I’d rather not talk about them,” she said.

In addition to telling her story, Erenthal’s exhibit also considers what her life would have looked like had she not fled her community and marital expectations. Taking up a prominent section of the gallery, 22 Styrofoam wig heads manipulated with papier-mâché sit in near-perfect lines on the cement floor. The installation, she explains, depicts “what would have happened if I stayed in the community and got pregnant and then kept getting pregnant.” She chose the number 22, she explains, “because it is visually powerful.” Above the heads, speakers provide a soundtrack of ultra-Orthodox Israeli children playing in Hebrew and Yiddish, courtesy of Matan Dorembus, a film student in Be’er Sheva.

Directly parallel to this hypothetical reality, Erenthal depicts her actual reality. She did not remain in her community, nor get pregnant. Instead she forged a new path for herself, enlisting in the Israeli army and then backpacking through India. A video installation dramatically depicts this process of emancipation. In the video, she stands naked, bound in tefillin, at first looking dejected and passive, and then trying with growing intensity to break free of the religious bonds.

The show is open at Soapbox Gallery this Thursday, Friday and Saturday through September 13, with a special concert this Friday night from 7-10pm.

(Image by the author)

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Inspired by this historic, poignant correspondence, comic artist Liana Finck—a Fulbright and Six Points fellow whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Forward and Tablet—wrote a graphic novel, also called A Bintel Brief. Slate‘s Dan Kois describes her style as “sharp, evocative,” and reminiscent of Ben Katchor and Roz Chast. I spoke with Finck talk about art, becoming a book person, and the making of A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York.

So, basic question: how’d you get to A Bintel Brief?

It started as a grant proposal for the Six Points Fellowship. I decided to become a serious comic book artist after college, and I gave myself one year. I had a Fulbright grant that was going to last less than a year, so I needed to finish a great comic. I was planning this amorphous, ambitious first novel and when the nine months were almost up I realized it wasn’t going to be finished and I needed another grant that would give me another year or two. I wanted something less ambitious and more limited, so I wouldn’t have to figure out how to locate and bare my soul. I was being calculating; jadedly I thought, “I can pretend to be the version of me that I’m not.” I can pretend to be this nice Jewish girl from the suburbs and write this small, nostalgic, non-intellectual Jewish story. If I could’ve sold my soul and done something that wasn’t me, that’s what I would have done with A Bintel Brief, but I really fell in love with it long before I finished the grant proposal—I fell in love the minute I started reading the letters. Once I read the letters I wasn’t jaded anymore.

What spoke to you from the letters?

They’re very simple and at the same time they’re seething with emotion. I’d always felt apart from the people I knew, especially people who were artists. I think I had a lot of feelings when I was a teenager and in my early twenties and I related a lot more to books and art than to people. I was expecting these letters to be things that I didn’t relate to, because they weren’t literature in my mind; they were in the human camp. But I did relate to them. Reading them made me realize that I wasn’t actually a high art person in an ivory tower; I was just a person who seeks human intensity.

Do you think that’s a part of growing up?

I think when you’re in your teens and early twenties—at least for me—you are a much more intense person than a full-fledged adult. I felt like I was miles away from other people with their small talk. I couldn’t find humanity in them. Just in Chekhov, etc.

I used to like books about people, but not people.

It’s so strange. I’m still like that, but I think it’s a delusion. We refuse to see humanity in people because we are so scared of them. They are layered and full of veils and contradictions. I used to think I liked it because only smart people could understand it, but I’ve realized that I like it because it’s abstract, and not trying so hard to make sense of all the feelings and mysteries. Abstraction does not lie.

It was The Catcher in the Rye’s anniversary last week. I re-read that book five times before I really got it—

I keep on seeing people reading it, I look at this guy and think, “He’s a brute of a Wall Street stock broker,” or “He’s a gangster wannabe,” and then I’ll see he’s got Catcher in the Rye in his back pocket. It changes everything. That’s the best feeling, seeing Catcher in the Rye in the back pocket of a pushy guy in a loud suit. I have to read it again. I read it when I was a young teenager and then an older teenager. I liked it but I don’t think it changed my life. I didn’t understand parts of it, and I wasn’t a book person yet.

When did you become a book person?

I became a poetry person at 13 and then a book person at 17. I stayed a poetry person until I was 21 and realized I wouldn’t be a poet because the poetry world seemed like a storm of ice crystals. I think I was always a story person, fairy tales and kid novels, but poetry was something totally different. When I was seventeen I realized that there were books that had the things I loved about poetry. I had a teacher who recommended great books to me when I was a junior in high school, and I started to read modernist novels like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Much earlier, my mom had given me [Vladimir] Nabokov and [Isak] Dinesen; I loved them the way I loved fairy tales as a kid, then I rediscovered them as puzzles as I got older.

Does your art mimic the puzzled thing that you liked in poetry?

I think working on art is a puzzle in of itself. I tried to be a poet and abstract painter when I was in college because that was the kind of art that really moved me, but I realized I liked abstract art and poetry because, looking at and reading it, I was doing a lot of work in my head that the artist or poet generously left unfinished. I’m not that generous in my work. I like to figure out the puzzles myself, and give the reader something more packaged and dogmatic.

What’s your favorite piece in the book?

I liked the first stories I started. I did more drafts of those, and was able to figure out slowly what the mood of the story was—time was my friend. I’m also fond of the blue parts [between the stories], I made those pages after I made the stories. The stories are adaptations—which is a limiting, tricky form to work in—you keep having to ask yourself, “Why does this letter need to be transmuted into comics?”—but also a safer art form. You aren’t telling your own story, so if the story turns out badly it’s not a reflection on your soul. Working on the narrative between stories gave me a very small, safe venue for telling my own semi-autobiographical story. I felt so free when I made it. It was also the least ambitious work of fiction I’ve ever tried to make, and working on it taught me that dry ambitiousness is NOT my friend.

One last question: Why did you draw Abraham Cahan with a heart-shaped face?

Because my mom used to draw heart-faced people on my lunch bags as a kid. She said I had a heart-shaped face. Cahan was a total brain-man. In creating A Bintel Brief, he tried to access his heart and he succeeded; he turned his brain into a heart. Sometimes I’m afraid his head looks like a turnip like the guy in Howl’s Moving Castle. Afraid is not the right word. The right word is delighted.

Image: © Liana Finck, reprinted from A Bintel Brief, published in 2014 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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Who says you have to be a high school graduate to go to Brown University? Well, in most cases you do, but Gabriel Kahane is an exception. The 33-year-old “indie-classical” musician and composer goes beyond musical genres in every way possible, particularly on his new album, The Ambassador.

L.A.-born, New York bred Kahane recently found himself back in his birth-state, enraptured by the architecture and history of a city that gets a bad rep for being transient, superficial, and bottomless. The Ambassador focuses on the little known history of L.A.: its buildings and stories; its hopefulness and tragedies.

I met up with Kahane at Littlefield in Brooklyn before a recent show, as he was rehearsing with his three-piece orchestra. He crooned poetic lyrics while playing the piano, and was quick to jump on and off stage to direct the band towards a more “perfect” sound. Afterwards, we spoke about his inspiration for his new album, the restrictions of musical categories, and his newfound interest in architecture.

How does someone without a GED get into Brown University?

I was definitely somewhat of a fuck up in high school. I was in some ways a ne’er-do-well, and in other ways a very high achiever. I was a nationally ranked chess player and had acted professionally in operas and plays, but just couldn’t really get my shit together academically; partly out of boredom and partly out of some ADD that prevented me from learning study skills… I ended up going to New England Conservatory for a year as a jazz pianist, and found it pretty myopic, intellectually. After my first semester I started to think about transferring elsewhere; I ended up playing a concert at Brown and briefly dating someone there, and sort of fell in love with the campus.

I decided on a whim to apply as a transfer student… I wrote this impassioned letter, in addition to the regular application, explaining how my hubris had led to my failing out of high school. I included all these ancillary materials in my application; like a book about chess, to which I had contributed a chapter, as well as musical materials. The year that they accepted me, they took 100 too many transfer students; they made an error in calculating the matriculation rate of the freshman class—so I probably shouldn’t have gotten in. It was basically a fluke.

Tell me about the inspiration for your album. Why did you choose to focus on L.A.?

Starting in 2007, I began to return to L.A. frequently as an adult. I was born in L.A. but I didn’t grow up there… I had sort of adopted the dogmatic antipathy for L.A. that a lot of New Yorkers have—and also having spent my high school years in northern California, I was primed to hate L.A. Going back there as a young adult, I was pretty vulnerable, and I found myself getting in touch with the 90 per cent of Los Angeles that wasn’t the film and TV industry; the Los Angeles that aches constantly.

I was reading Joan Didion and Mike Davis for the first time, and I just saw the layer immediately beneath the veneer, and then it was about four years later that BAM commissioned me to do a new piece, and right around the same time Sony Masterworks starting courting me. I began thinking about BAM and the kind of work that they do; their Next Wave Festival tends to have a strong visual component.

While in L.A., I took a drive to the airport at 5 o’clock one morning, and decided to take service roads. I felt really overwhelmed by the pathos of the city; its failed aspirations, the beauty in decay, the weird poignant beauty of a city that has trouble remembering to have memory, and so I decided around then I wanted to do something on Los Angeles. That fed into a more specific interest in architecture. I intuitively felt drawn to the architecture, but I didn’t know exactly why.

So you weren’t always into architecture?

No, it’s a very recent thing for me. I just found myself really drawn to the buildings. When I’m in L.A., I stay in this small servants’ quarter that’s attached to a house that Rudolph Schindler heavily remodeled. I was living and working in this house built by one of the great modernist masters, but then I started thinking about the extent to which there are two L.A.s: the L.A. of film and fiction and TV, that is experienced through mediation, versus the very vulnerable, physical, tactical city; the city of the 1994 North Ridge earthquake, the city of raging fires in Malibu, the city of Joan Didion’s Santa Ana Winds. Architecture sets up the intersection of these two L.A.s because architecture is aesthetic, it is mythology—but buildings are vulnerable, they burn down, they crumble. I could draw from film by thinking about buildings as film locations; I could draw from fiction as scenic locations; from history, and so on and so forth.

What was the research component like?

I watched a lot of movies; I watched Die Hard many, many times. I’ve come to believe that it’s a very, very important film. It’s the apotheosis of commerce and well-crafted entertainment meeting in a perfect marriage. It also made Bruce Willis a star. I jest a little bit; I did watch a lot of old films, tracing the trajectory of noir from the early adaptations of Raymond Chandler novels, up through the Cold War noir of Kiss Me Deadly, to the neo-noir, Blade Runner set in the Bradbury Building. I read a lot of detective fiction, histories, and critical theory, and spent a lot of time in L.A. just walking and driving. I made a list of 25 addresses; initially I was going to write 25 songs—I ended up writing 20 and put 10 on the record. I would just visit all of these addresses and sit in the places and meditate on their history.

You write from multiple perspectives, which indicates a strong literary background. You also seem very keen on writing on themes, not so much personal/romantic hardships like many others musicians. Can you speak to that?

A lot of artists/song writers focus on confessional themes, and I think that’s something that becomes tiresome to some people, and then they look elsewhere… I think that there comes a moment where you want to have the lens go elsewhere. And having written for the theater, and continuing to write for the theater, that’s an imperative. You have to be able to look inside someone else and find that negative capability for empathy. There are writers who inform in subtle ways the kind of work I’m trying to do. Among them, the German novelist W.G. Sebald, who for me just defies categorization. He creates this tapestry of beautiful prose… Anne Carson is someone else who in a different way achieves the same thing. She’s known mostly as a poet, as a classicist; Autobiography of Red, it’s a predominately a verse novel, but it’s so much more than that. So that kind of stuff that knows no bounds, that was important for me with this record.

You pull from so many genres—classical, indie, pop, and rock—in a way that is difficult to categorize. But in music, people want to label you, like you’re the “classical-indie guy.” How does that make you feel?

The sort of pathological need to categorize comes from a cultural discomfort with emotion. People are actually really uncomfortable taking things in and judging them for themselves. This is not limited to music, it happens in all of the arts. The need to categorize is a short-hand for what something is going to make someone feel, and that’s something that I obviously reject. I sort of wish that people would never use these genre-monikers.

But in writing about an album, don’t you have to describe the music? I mean, how do people know what they’re going to hear without some sort of categorization?

To me, the thing that creates unity is storytelling. What all of these songs have in common is that they tell stories. And for me, that transcends questions of style. I think that when listeners read about music, what they really want to know is if something is going to make me feel or not; is it going to make me think or not; not does it fit neatly into some preordained category that ‘I know and like.’

I’m sure it’s something that will continue to irritate me forever, but I do also think that we may be on the cusp; it feels like in the past five years there’s been this narrative of genre-bending, genre-less, etc. At a certain point, even from a crass, economic standpoint, whoever is the head honcho at “X” website is going to say these headlines no longer do well with clicks. And people will have to start figuring out new ways to attain order. So maybe it will go away.

Out of all the song titles, is there a place whose story resonated the most?

Yes, getting to know the story of Latasha Harlins and her tragic death. She was shot and killed in a grocery store when she was 15-years-old by a Korean woman over a bottle of orange juice. It’s a story that is wholeheartedly part of the fabric of black, contemporary history. It’s something that Angelenos know about, but it’s not really a story the rest of the country knows; and generally not the story that white people know. And the parallels with the Trayvon Martin shooting are many.

What are you listening to now?

This new Sylvan Esso record, which came out about a month ago. That record has been on repeat since it came out. I’ve listen to some other new music that hasn’t spoken to me that much, but that record really captured my attention in a real way.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on another piece for the Public Theater. I wrote a piece for them in 2012 entitled, “February House.” I’m also in the process of doing research for a piece for them on Alcoholics Anonymous. And then there’s the stage version of The Ambassador, which is happening at BAM in December. And I’m making some very preliminary plans for writing an opera.

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The fifth annual Stern College Senior Art Exhibition, on display at Yeshiva University Museum through July 13, showcases the work of this year’s graduating Studio Art major. The theme, fitting for a student show, is “In Progress,” and it is the process of creation itself that is being celebrated. The senior exhibition is the culmination of the students’ education up to this point—even the design of the display is largely the work of an exhibition design class.

Framed with blue tape to emphasize their ever-developing nature, the pieces that line the walls of the space are as diverse as their creators. Utilizing a range of different media, from painting to sculpture to film, the young artists offer glimpses into their varied sources of inspiration. Jewish identity and connection to Israel is a recurring theme: Emily Wolmark‘s digital prints, for example, put a modern spin on posters created by Israeli tourism agencies in the 1950s and 60s. Victoria Chabot’s Visual Text uses pen and graphite on paper to arrange biblical verse in striking visual patterns that correspond with the theme of the text. Chabot says her piece allows her to combine her two greatest loves, art and the study of Torah: “The Tanakh is filled with such depth and such beauty, and I wanted to relay that in images.”

Some artists have cast a creative eye on their local environs, with paintings of New York City buildings, and photographs of streets and subway stations. Some pieces hark back to the past, others are rooted in the present: from Esther Hersh’s sculptures, which are reminiscent of ancient Greek discus throwers, to a typographic poster series by Adina Eizikovitz Rubin called The Hate List, which lists aggravations such as “When websites don’t tell you if it’s your username or password that’s wrong” and “Please swipe again.”

The Yeshiva University Museum is located at the Center for Jewish History, close to Union Square, which allows the artists to access a wider New York audience who may not be familiar with Stern’s creative output. Says faculty member and curator Traci Tullius, “This group of really deep thinking, creative young women are making art. I think a lot of people don’t even know that Stern has an art department, let alone one that’s as ambitious and contemporary as ours is.” In fact, with 23 graduates this year, the Studio Art program is one of the college’s most popular majors.

Tullius has been with the students since the beginning of their creative process, and she described the delight of witnessing the transformation from “the potential you saw in the student and what they were doing” to “seeing it come out of that messy studio and in the context of a white walled gallery.”

Indeed, the students openly invite us into their messy studios: in a display outside of the exhibition, photographs show the complex works stripped down to their most basic parts. We see the preliminary sketches behind large canvases, as well as diagrams and scribbled notes that would later be turned into intricate multidimensional works. The camera is flipped on completed films; now, the actors and directors stand smiling on set. Looking at these images turns the viewer from a distant observer into a participant in the process of creation. This celebration of the artistic process points to the lovely theme of humility that characterizes the show. The artists don’t minimize the fact that they are students just starting out on their journeys, both artistic and personal. They invite us to share in every step of their growth thus far, but they also remind us that what we see is only the beginning.

Isabel Fattal is a student at Wesleyan College and an intern at Tablet Magazine.

(Image courtesy of Yeshiva University Museum)

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28-year-old artist Michael Levin has always used concepts of Jewish identity as inspiration, whether it was building a shrine to the apocryphal “Red Jews” or painting on shaimos, aka “retired” pieces of scripture. His newest series, Jews of Today, features arresting, intricately detailed depictions of Hasidim in Williamsburg, and is on display starting tomorrow at 7 Dunham Gallery in South Williamsburg. He’s also publishing Jews of Today, an illustrated primer on Hasidic dress, in conjunction with the exhibit.

In the series, Levin zeroes in on the sartorial aspects of Hasidic culture: various styles of beaver hats, the ornate robes worn by the Satmar rebbes, and the “rebbish” hems of shirts worn by boys from prominent families. While his fascination with his pious neighbors borders on reverence, his outsider status and sense of humor keeps the work from becoming a strict homage. I talked to Levin about Italian conversos, Tay-Sachs, Plato, and Orientalism.

Where did you grow up? What is your Jewish background? Was your family observant?

I grew up in Los Angeles, born and raised. Only my father’s family is Jewish; my mother is from an Italian Catholic family in San Francisco, and converted when she married my dad. Of course, there is much speculation about her family origins. Her maiden name is Bonfilio, which is a common name for Italian conversos (Jews who converted to Catholicism during the inquisition).

Regardless, having a mixed background while being raised with a strong Jewish consciousness—a term I use because we were not, nor am I now, religiously observant in any significant way—brought up a lot of issues. For one, friends would constantly say I wasn’t really Jewish, because my mother wasn’t born Jewish. This wasn’t said maliciously at all, just in that casual way that can really stick with you. It was often followed by the acknowledgement that I was the most “Jewish” of all of our friends anyway (in some intangible way that I also could sense but never understand). I guess it got me thinking from an early age about what constitutes “Jewishness,” what that je ne sais quoi is that can make someone so Jewish even without the risk of Tay-Sachs—or without even keeping kosher.

You studied Classics at the University of Chicago. Does this influence your work at all?

I have always been an artist, but not a committed one until my early twenties, after University of Chicago had made an intellectual of me. My studies do inform my painting, but more in terms of big ideas and ways of thinking. I don’t sit down to paint thinking about Plato, but I do think about the issues that interested me in the classics, which centered around the process of cultural exchange and integration, and ways of constructing the insider/outsider dynamic.

When did you move to Williamsburg?

I moved to South 2nd and Bedford in January 2007, about six months after graduating. At that time this was still on the outskirts of what young college grads thought of as “Williamsburg.” I started seeing Hasidim around here and there, and, after deciding to commit myself as an artist, they became the center of my work. At Chicago we were always trained to find “problems”—more like questions that carry the flavor of something wrong or amiss—and make them the starting point for any research. So because of this training, I got very little out of painting landscapes or self-portraits. Hasidim were the only subjects in my view that constituted a “problem” for me. So my painting became a kind of extension of my academic study, and Hasidim a new subject for the same set of questions I had already been dealing with, only now in a more personal sphere, because of my abiding difficulties in establishing my own Jewish identity. Add to that how strangely arresting and beautiful the Hasidic look is, to me at least, and there you have the genesis of this work.

Do you draw mostly from memory? What I’m trying to ask here is: how much skulking around Williamsburg do you do?

It’s almost all from memory, but the way I get my memories is by skulking around Williamsburg, a lot. Part of the reason I’m going to Pratt next year for my MFA and not somewhere else is that I can walk there, and that walk takes me right through the heart of the Hasidic neighborhood. I don’t take pictures of people on the street. I take pictures from my window sometimes, but putting a camera in someone’s face doesn’t feel right to me. Painting is my alternative, a way to preserve my memories and also push my conceptual agenda into them.

Are there any other artistic traditions that inspire your work?

Definitely miniature painting, especially the international Islamic miniature style popular from Persia to India. I want to take Jews out of the European narrative, and there is something about Mughal painting in particular that really suits this subject. Of course 19th century Orientalist painting is a big influence too. I kind of see myself as an Orientalist, because (if you’ve ever read Edward Said), the Orientalist approach was to use exotic cultures to reflect one’s feelings about one’s own heritage, and not to objectively document a different culture.

So I’m looking at Hasidim as this “primitive” eastern culture that nonetheless carries some essence of what makes me me. It’s a laughable idea, and I mean it as a little joke about alienation most of the time. Besides, there is the view that most people have (and never question) that Hasidim are the real, authentic Jews; that we all used to dress like that and then some of us decided to sneak out and put on “white people” clothes. The Hasid is the primitive Jew in the popular imagination, a view which is utterly baseless yet very stubborn.

What’s on the horizon for you? Do you think you will stick with Hasidim as subjects, or do you feel yourself moving in a different direction?

More Hasidim is where my heart is, but the MFA process is bound to push me in some unexpected direction. Whatever happens, I have unfinished business with this subject and will most definitely return to it (if I ever leave it, that is).

Jews of Today is on display at 7 Dunham gallery in South Williamsburg from July 20-31, with an opening reception July 20 from 7-10 p.m. The book is available online and at the exhibit.

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“The Ladies Guild Collection is a series of paper-cuts that combine rabbinic misogyny with sexualized images of women, all on a nice paper doily.”

That’s the introduction to artist Jacqueline Nicholls’ paper-cuts series, The Ladies Guild Collection, which focuses on misogynist rabbinic texts and their rigid depiction of women’s roles in Jewish life. Nicholls, now 42, grew up in an Orthodox home and was often angered by the representation of females in traditional Jewish texts—scenarios that were at times mirrored in her everyday life.

Nicholls’ interpretation of and frustration with specific Talmudic texts are portrayed through the mediums of embroidery, corsetry, drawings, and print, depending on the text she has chosen to analyze. Besides being a full-time artist and mother, she also teaches adult Jewish education, where she continues to question societal norms and open a dialogue for those around her.

I’m interested to know about your Jewish background and how you’ve mastered the texts so well.

I grew up in a very traditional Orthodox home and I went to a mainstream day school which wasn’t Jewish. But I grew up shomer Shabbat and observing kashrut, and then after I completed my degree I studied at Nishmat, which is where I fell in love with Jewish learning. What I gained most from Nishmat, which is a traditional women’s yeshiva in Jerusalem (a very unusual place; I went there the second year it was open which added to the excitement of being there) was direct engagement with textual learning—learning the skills but also having the sense that it’s your own personal responsibility to engage with these texts yourself and not be reliant on a teacher or rabbi to translate and interpret, but instead to come up with your own readings and understandings and develop your own relationship. I think that was very formative. I was about 20 or 21. It was a very serious, high-level textual study.

Were you always artistic? Did art and exploring Jewish texts become a natural marriage for you?

I was always drawing as kid. My family was always drawing as well, so I was involved in making things. Now I don’t have an issue speaking in front of people, but as a child I wasn’t so confident speaking my mind, so drawing was a way to communicate. We grew up very observant of all the holidays, but, when I was five or six, my mother allowed me to draw on Shabbat, because I was very upset that I wasn’t allowed to draw, and she was upset that I hated Shabbat because of that, so she let me. When I was older I began to better understand what Shabbat was about, but looking back now I think it’s really interesting that my mother did that.

It’s really nice she did that. You may have had different views about Judaism, or at least about Shabbat, if she hadn’t.

Yes. I also think it took a while as an adult to really feel that I had permission to call myself an artist and say, ‘Yes, I am an artist.’ And yes, the works that I’m doing in terms of this engagement with Jewish texts and ideas is a legitimate thing to make art about. It’s not Judaica, it’s not decorative, and it’s not always about making things beautiful. It’s about challenging, questioning and exploring to make art.

You also teach adult Jewish education. What topics do you cover?

I teach a couple of things: I teach Tanach, the Hebrew Bible. I also teach some other Jewish programs like Jewish law, but I mainly teach Tanach.

There’s a lot of anger in your work about Jewish textual depiction of women. How do your projects reflect the relationship between men and women in Judaism?

I don’t think it was one particular moment growing up of, ‘Gosh, it would be so much easier to do this if I was a boy,’ but it’s little things, and those little things all add up. That’s what my series of paper cuts is all about. It’s taking these lines that were written in a particular time and context that still carry a certain weight today because they reflect attitudes that are still present. It’s also not an attitude only within the Jewish community, treating woman as separate, and as objects.

It’s the view that having the women’s voice included in the discussion of halacha and how Jews should live is not valid. It’s very much a discussion in which men participate and women are talked about. I started the series of paper cuts with a couple of things that made me very angry, and I felt I had to get them out into the open. Then more and more frustration kept coming out and my anger increased.

How do you think the depiction of women in texts affects men?

There are very misogynist texts. Women are the direct victims but it also harms men that women are being treated and talked about in this way. But men’s roles in misogynist texts are also representative, like the fact that they can’t take sexual responsibility for themselves, so women have to cover up. That’s not a dignified way for men to be portrayed. I think it limits what a man can be and it keeps it fixed in a very rigid way. It’s a very black and white; there’s only male, and only female. It limits both of us and it harms everyone. The complexities of human life don’t fit into any category.

Do you feel a change is imminent?

Yes. Has it been fast enough? No. The fact that, recently we had the Yeshivat Maharat graduating female Orthodox rabbis, that wasn’t conceivable 20 years ago. It’s hugely groundbreaking, but it’s not a big deal that there are these knowledgeable women who learn to that level—it was groundbreaking that somebody gave them certification. What’s also groundbreaking is the demand for them. These women have jobs, and there’s a big demand among Orthodox communities who want female leadership.

I also think the democratization of traditional Jewish learning and text is progress. I’m sitting in London doing my Daf Yomi drawings, which include a page of Talmud a day, and I have the option to go online to share it or I can go on Twitter and have a conversation with people all over the world who are doing the same thing.

The ability to make connections has grown, and now we have easy access to these texts. I think the fact that we’re able to have immediate access to conversation about texts and issues even though we’re living in very different countries is very exciting.

How do you choose which art medium to use for each text?

I’ve used lots of different art forms, so when I was working with the misogynist texts, it felt right to use paper cuts. There’s something very satisfying about taking a sharp knife to these words, but also you’re left with a very stark black and white image which represents misogyny well.

I did a series of embroideries called Ghost and Shadows, based on various stories of women in the Talmud. They are anonymous women who aren’t main characters, and have no names. They’re fleeting but very haunting. I chose to use embroidery because it’s a very feminist craft—you can hide something and put it four layers down so you have a sense that it’s underneath the page, so it fits conceptually with that.

Do you find your audience is more male or female?

I think my work speaks to different people depending on what resonates with them and their own life experiences. I think some of the work speaks more readily to women, especially the Ladies Guild Collection because I think there’s a recognition of, ‘Oh yes, I’ve been really annoyed by that particular text, and now we’re going to laugh at it together.’ And in particular with the paper-cuts I try to have at least a bit of a sense of humor, although I do think they became angrier as that series went on. I don’t know if it speaks more to men or women, I’ve had really interesting reactions from both.

I always include a summary about the text I’m working on for each piece, so people can familiarize themselves with the story. I’m always really intrigued by people who have had a very traditional upbringing, like those who come from a Yeshivish world who can instantly recognize things which may be quite subtle. I try to use different aspects of Jewish ritual life as vocabulary within my work. So whether or not you recognize that is how familiar you are with Jewish ritual life. Sometimes I need to point it out, but its always interesting when I don’t have to translate and people just get it.

(Image from the Ladies Guild Collection, by Jacqueline Nicholls)

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