The Burden of Conscience: French Jewish Leadership During the Holocaust

The Burden of Conscience: French Jewish Leadership During the Holocaust (Modern Jewish Experience)

History

Cohen, Richard I.

Military

Indiana Univ. Pr

With the help of over one hundred illustrations spanning three centuries, Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. The interaction of Jews with the visual arts takes place, as Cohen says, in a vast gallery of prints, portraits, books, synagogue architecture, ceremonial art, modern Jewish painting and sculpture, political broadsides, monuments, medals, and memorabilia. Pointing to recent scholarship that overturns the stereotype of Jews as people of the text, unconcerned with the visual, Cohen shows how the coming of the modern period expanded the relationship of Jews to the visual realm far beyond the religious context. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the study and collecting of Jewish art became a legitimate and even passionate pursuit, and signaled the entry of Jews into the art world as painters, collectors, and dealers.

Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

University of California Press

In the last two decades, Jewish historians worldwide have developed and refined the discussion of an “early modern” period in Jewish culture, spanning roughly three centuries from 1500 to 1800, and have increasingly found this periodization to be a useful heuristic for interpreting historical developments. Thirty-one leading scholars both within and beyond Jewish studies advance, refine, and challenge how we understand the Jewish early modern period. The collection includes a comprehensive range of topics, beginning by examining authority structures of Jewish communities following the expulsions and migrations that reshaped the geographical contours of the Jewish world. The formation of Jewish communities, communal autonomy, and cultural representations of leadership are explored, pointing to a geographical remapping of a Jewish early modernity that can contribute to a better understanding of the integrated economic and cultural landscape of the time. The volume then moves to consider Jewish intellectual life in light of demographic, political, and technological change―especially the advent of print culture. From there, the discussion moves to cultural and intellectual interchange, especially between Jews and Christians, and next, to eighteenth-century Jewish culture as a fulcrum of the early and late modernity. Finally, the book concludes by tracing the early modern as it is both etched into and effaced from later eras, reflecting on the project of historiography as both retelling the past and connecting to the past in the present. Read individually, the essays in this volume are finely detailed case studies that illuminate specific aspects of Jewish culture. Read as a mosaic, the studies combine to form a rich and nuanced portrait of a culture that is both a contributor to and a product of early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman

World

Hebrew Union College Press

Review\n"This book makes a valuable contribution to the field of Jewish art history in eastern Europe and adds new layers to our understanding of nineteenth-century Jewish life and culture more generally. Hirszenberg is an important and original, yet understudied artist, and this very readable and richly illustrated biography, based on much new material, will be enjoyed and cited for many years to come." 
Marcin Wodzinski, University of Wroclaw\n"This comprehensive and well-researched book by two leading Israeli historians of Jewish art provides a fascinating account of Hirszenberg's life and work, based on material preserved in Polish museums, private collections and archives, along with paintings, drawings and archival material in Israel, the United States, England, France, and Switzerland. Through its exploration of the complex situation of the Jews in partitioned Poland, how Jews fitted into the fin-de-siècle artistic world, and early Zionist visual culture, it will appeal to scholars and a wider public interested in the history of Jews in east-central Europe and in Jewish art." 
Antony Polonsky, Chief Historian of the Global Education Outreach Program, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw\n"Hirszenberg is a fascinating and important artist who deserves to be known more widely, The authors have produced an authoritative volume about his life and work, his studies and travels, his patrons and fellow artists, opening a most interesting window on the world of Polish Jews and their various milieux- Jewish, Polish, and European- during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The intellectual approach is sophisticated and speaks to current concerns in the social and cultural history of art more generally." 
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw\nSamuel Hirszenberg is an artist who deserves to be more widely known: his work intertwined modernism and Jewish themes, and he influenced later artists of Jewish origin.\nBorn into a traditional Jewish family in Lódz in 1865, Hirszenberg gradually became attached to Polish culture and language as he pursued his artistic calling. Like Maurycy Gottlieb before him, he studied at the School of Art in Kraków, which was then headed by the master of Polish painting, Jan Matejko. His early interests were to persist with varying degrees of intensity throughout his life: his Polish surroundings, traditional east European Jews, historical themes, the Orient, and the nature of relationships between men and women. He also had a lifelong commitment to landscape painting and portraiture.\nHirszenberg's personal circumstances, economic considerations, and historical upheavals took him to different countries, strongly influencing his artistic output. He moved to Jerusalem in 1907 and there, as a secular and acculturated Jew who had adopted the world of humanism and universalism, he strove also to express more personal aspirations and concerns. This fully illustrated study presents an intimate and detailed picture of the artist's development.

Samuel Hirszenberg, 1865–1908: A Polish Jewish Artist in Turmoil (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization)

Rajner, Mirjam

Humor & Entertainment

The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

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Books by Cohen, Richard I.