Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Looking Jewish: Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora
ISBN: 9780253015426
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Indiana University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Jewish art; Jews in art; Art Modern -- 20th century; Art Modern -- 21st century;

"Thanks to Carol Zemel's provocative study, we are invited to look at Jewish art in new ways . . . provides a deeper understanding of the ordeal of diaspora." -- Studies in American Jewish Literature

Jewish art and visual culture--art made by Jews about Jews--in modern diasporic settings is the subject of Looking Jewish . Carol Zemel focuses on particular artists and cultural figures in interwar Eastern Europe and postwar America who blended Jewishness and mainstream modernism to create a diasporic art, one that transcends dominant national traditions.

She begins with a painting by Ken Aptekar entitled Albert: Used to Be Abraham , a double portrait of a man, which serves to illustrate Zemel's conception of the doubleness of Jewish diasporic art. She considers two interwar photographers, Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic; images by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz; the pre- and postwar photographs of Roman Vishniac; the figure of the Jewish mother in postwar popular culture (Molly Goldberg); and works by R. B. Kitaj, Ben Katchor, and Vera Frenkel that explore Jewish identity in a postmodern environment.

Carol Zemel is Professor Emerita of Art History and Visual Culture in the Department of Visual Arts at York University, Toronto.