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A retrospective exhibit these last few weeks at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris—perhaps too generously big an undertaking—has allowed a wider public to appreciate the originality and importance of…
In this seventeenth-century map, Jerusalem is depicted as a fairly dense city within a wall, with only a few structures outside. Men in Arab dress stand in small groups conversing with one another in…
The Jewish community of Syria dates back to biblical times. After 1492, the original community was augmented by refugees from Spain and Portugal. The centers of Syrian Jewish life were in the cities…
The title of this painting, Flight into Egypt, refers to the story in the Christian Gospels in which Joseph and Mary flee with the infant Jesus to Egypt to escape the wrath of King Herod. Rabin, born…
Simcha (Gimar) Belmonte (born Vaz; 1582–1643) was the wife of Jakob Israel Belmonte (a poet, writer, and trader). She and her husband were among the founders of the Jewish community in Amsterdam after…
These program notes were prepared for the Radical New Jewish music performances which were part of the ART PROJEKT Festival held in Munich in September of 1992.American New Music has always been noted…
Drawing of a wooden synagogue from Maximilian Syrkin’s 1910 article, “Drevníya derevyannyye sinagogi v pol’she litve” (Wooden Synagogues in Polish Lithuania). Wooden synagogues were a common form of…
Day unto day bequeaths its fading sun,
and night after night laments for night.
Summer after summer is gathered in fall
and the world in its sorrow gives song.
Tomorrow we’ll die, the word in us…
The world is full of armies.
But that is not what will kill us.
Béla Balázs
If there is culture today, it can only be an aesthetic culture. If one wants to raise seriously the question whether there…
Arnold Böcklin is dead—yet who among you knew that he lived? If I were to tell you that he was the man who knew how, with paintbrush dipped in colors upon a piece of canvas, to shake every heart…