Full Description
Continuing its distinguished tradition of focusing on central political, sociological, and cultural issues of Jewish life in the last century, Volume XXVI of the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry examines the visual revolution that has overtaken Jewish cultural life in the twentieth century onwards, with special attention given to the evolution of Jewish museums. Bringing together leading curators and scholars, Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History treats various forms of Jewish representation in museums in Europe and the United States before the Second World War and inquires into the nature and proliferation of Jewish museums following the Holocaust and the fall of Communism in Western and Eastern Europe. In addition, a pair of essays dedicated to six exhibitions that took place in Israel in 2008 to mark six decades of Israeli art raises significant issues on the relationship between art and gender, and art and politics. An introductory essay highlights the dramatic transformation in the appreciation of the visual in Jewish culture. The scope of the symposium offers one of the first scholarly attempts to treat this theme in several countries.
Also featured in this volume are a provocative essay on the nature of antisemitism in twentieth-century English society; review essays on Jewish fundamentalism and recent works on the subject of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territories; and reviews of new titles in Jewish Studies..
Contents
Symposium: Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History ; The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life - An Overview, Richard I. Cohen ; Displaying Judaica in 18th-Century Central Europe: A Non-Jewish Curiosity, Michael Korey ; Collecting Community: The Berlin Jewish Museum as Narrator between Past and Present, 1906-1939, Tobias Metzler ; Jewish Museums in the Federal Republic of Germany, Inka Bertz ; Post-trauma "Precious Legacies": Jewish Museums in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust and before the Fall of Communism, Ruth Ellen Gruber ; From Wandering Jew to Immigrant Ethnic: Musealizing Jewish Immigration, Robin Ostow ; Six Exhibitions, Six Decades: Toward the Recanonization of Contemporary Israeli Art, Ruth Direktor ; In Between Past and Future: Time and Relatedness in the Six Decades Exhibitions, Osnat Zukerman Rechter ; A Matrix of Matrilineal Memory in the Museum: Charlotte Salomon and Chantal Akerman in Berlin, Lisa Saltzman ; Between Two Worlds: Ghost Stories under Glass in Vienna and Chicago, Abigail Glogower and Margaret Olin ; Thoughts on the Role of a European Jewish Museum in the 21st Century, Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek ; Essay ; "The Forces of Darkness": Leonard Woolf, Isaiah Berlin, and English Antisemitism, Elliott Horowitz ; Review Essays ; It's Not All Religious Fundamentalism, Chaim I. Waxman ; One Step before the Abyss: Recent Scholarship on the Jews in Occupied Soviet Territories during the Second World War, Kiril Feferman ; Book Reviews
