Jewish Art in America

An Introduction

By (author) Matthew Baigell

Not available to order

Publication date:

16 November 2006

Length of book:

280 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781461665632

In this first book-length study of Jewish art in America, Matthew Baigell explores works from the early settlers of America to the present. It concentrates on exploring and examining Jewish subject matter employed by artists as they illustrated aspects of their religious and ethnic heritage and as they responded to major events over the decades, including the Great Migration, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel, as well as the dispersal of Jewish artists around the country and the rise of feminism and spiritualism in the late-twentieth century. Subjects include genre scenes of 'the Jewish street,' religious and spiritual themes derived from the Bible and the Kabbalah, and images that record the artists' participation in and witnessing of major events in their lifetimes. The author also considers the often asked questions: Is there a Jewish art? and, Is there a single Jewish Experience?

Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Introduction
Chapter 3 Until 1920, Preliminaries and Beginnings
Chapter 4 The 1920s, Settling In
Chapter 5 The 1930s, Social Issues
Chapter 6 The 1940s, The Holocaust Years and After
Chapter 7 The 1950s and After, The Older Generation
Chapter 8 The 1950s and After, The Younger Generation
Chapter 9 The 1970s and After, Representative Figures
Chapter 10 The 1970s and After, Later Holocaust Responses
Chapter 11 The 1970s and After, Spiritualism
Chapter 12 The 1970s and After, Feminism
Chapter 13 Conclusion
Chapter 14 Works Cited
Chapter 15 Index

The editors hope that 'by historicizing the Jewish art question, the essays in this volume pose the question in different ways and, above all, keep it alive and unpredictable as a question that can shed light on the relationship between Jews, the arts, and modernity' (18)…. What is impressive about The Art of Being Jewish, and marks it as the most significant edited volume in the field since Catherine Soussloff's Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, published a decade ago, is the overall rigorousness and variety of its contributions…. Once thought to be a liability, it is precisely the imprecision of the term 'Jewish art,' its fecund ambiguity, which makes it most worth holding on to.