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Before he became known as a color field painter, Mark Rothko worked in other styles. During the 1940s, under the influence of surrealist artists who had fled Europe for the United States, he began to…
R. B. Kitaj considered himself a figurative artist at a time when abstract art was the dominant trend. His paintings, with their brightly colored and sometimes overlapping figures, produce a collage…
In a phrase of Hermann Cohen, Maimonides is the “classic of rationalism” in Judaism. This phrase appears to us to be correct in a stricter sense than Cohen may have intended: Maimonides’…
The Jews are probably the only people in the world to whom it has ever been proposed that their historic destiny is—to be nice. This singular concept has played such an important role in…
This sculpture of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was created by Tassaert, a distinguished sculptor of the day. Mendelssohn sat for him, and copies of the bust were later made for Mendelssohn’s closest…
[ . . . ] That the status of the Jews in Europe has been not only that of an oppressed people but also of what Max Weber has called a “pariah people” is a fact most clearly appreciated by those who…
You hold me now completely in your hands
My heart beats like a frightened little bird’s
Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is…
On the white garments of my great-grandfather
the cross of the middle ages flames anew.
My great-grandfather sits at the seder,
holding a staff from a wild almond tree
to rouse the forefathers.
Not…
It’s hard to be clever these nights,
And useless to be modern.
Useless to smile knowingly and observe with melancholy
The language bastardisms of history:
“The government of the Republic is delivered…
When our wild day is wiped like a tear
From cities and forest, from month and year,
Red Ridinghood walks on the road,
To pick a wild flower in the wood.
And following her is a duck and a cow,
Hobbl…