This richly illustrated volume illuminates how the arts have helped Jews confront the challenges of modernity. There truly is an art to being Jewish in the modern world—or, alternatively, an art of being modern in the Jewish world—and this collection fully captures its range, diversity, and historical significance.

The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp, Editors

464 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 59 illus.
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4002-3 | $49.95s | £32.50 | Add to shopping cart
A volume in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series
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The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times is the first work to analyze modern Jewry's engagement with the arts as a whole, including music, theater, dance, film, museums, architecture, painting, sculpture, and more. Taken together, the essays in this volume entertain the hypothesis that the "modern Jewish experience" has in some sense been a pointedly artistic one.

In exploring the role of artistic expression in Jewish self-definition and various styles of contemporary Jewishness, this book works with a broad conception of what counts as art and attends to the organized contexts in which art of all kinds is made. What roles have commerce and politics played in shaping Jewish artistic agendas? Who determines the Jewishness of art and for what purposes? What role has aesthetics played in reshaping religious traditions and rituals?

The essays range geographically from the United States and Europe to Israel and take up such subjects as Yiddish theater and film; visual artists such as Ben Shahn, R.B. Kitaj, Ben Katchor, Max Liebermann, and Mark Antokol'skii; music forms such as Tin Pan Alley, Israeli popular music, liturgical composition; Jewish architectural presence at the New York World's Fair and Tel-Aviv as the first "Hebrew" city; and the way the Holocaust figures in film, the framing of Nazi art loot, and the fate of a Jewish dance critic in Nazi Germany.

This richly illustrated volume illuminates how the arts have helped Jews confront the challenges of modernity. There truly is an art to being Jewish in the modern world—or, alternatively, an art of being modern in the Jewish world—and this collection fully captures its range, diversity, and historical significance.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864-1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki), and They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt).

Jonathan Karp is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Binghamton University, SUNY, and author of The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638-1848.

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