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REVIEWS Visual Arts daring and explicit past. There is indeed some fine artwork here; G-d’s endless white beard and flowing mane depict a sense of enlightenment and mightiness, his re-construction of Noah and his arc is masterful, and Abram’s haunted sleep when the Lord tells him his seed will be scattered for 400 years is powerfully delivered with perplexing dread. Reference the back of the book for Crumb’s personal comments and observations on each chapter. EF PHOTOGRAPHING THE JEWISH NATION, PICTURES FROM S. AN-SKY’S ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPEDITIONS Eugene M. Avrutin, Valerii Dymshits, Alexander Lvov, Harriet Murav, Alla Sokolova, eds. Brandeis University Press/UPNE, 2009. 212 pp. $39.95 ISBN: 978-1-58465-792-7 Shlyome-Zanvl Rappoport, known by his pen-name S. An-Sky (1863–1920), was not only “the father of Jewish anthropology and folklore,” but also the uncle of Jewish visual ethnography. He took his nephew, Solomon Borisovich Iudovin (1892–1954), then a young man of 20, with him on his ethnographic expedition to Volynia, Podolia, and Kiev provinces as the expedition photographer. Iudovin took over 2000 photographs, most of which An-Sky deposited, together with the rest of the material he collected during the three research seasons in 1912–1914, in the museum of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society (JHES) in St. Petersburg. However, apparently, Iudovin gave a portion of the photographs, for safe keeping, to the painter Natan Isaevich Al’tman (1889–1970). Upon his death, the theater designer Alexander Pasternak moved to his studio and there he found a trove of 350 photographs. He showed them to Alina Orlov who conducted research for a biography of Al’tman, and she, in turn, consulted with Viktor Kel’ner and Valerii Dymshits, both from Petersburg Judaica, a research center affiliated with the European University at St. Petersburg. They realized their provenence and value, acquired them for the institution and included them in a five volume collection Fotoarkhiv ekspeditsii An-skogo (St. Petersburg, 2005–2007). The 169 photographs in the present volume are taken from this collection, and they are accompanied by six informative and interpretive essays by 60 Jewish Book World Spring 5770/2010 members of the Petersburg Judaica. The photographs are of utmost importance. They include portraits, some as mug-shots for anthropological documentation, craftsmen staged at their works, teachers and children in traditional schools and views of shtetl homes and squares. An-Sky set out on his expedition to discover and recover the Jewish folk culture and traditions in order to make them available for modern Jewish artists as building blocks for the creation of modern national Jewish culture. 170 photographs. BBA REINVENTING RITUAL: CONTEMPORARY ART AND DESIGN FOR JEWISH LIFE Daniel Belasco; Contributors: Arnold M. Eisen, Julie Lasky, Tamar Rubin, Danya Ruttenberg Yale University Press/The Jewish Museum, 2009. 149 pp. $39.95 ISBN: 978-0-300-14682-0 To judge this book by its illustrated cover and contents page is a challenge: witty or provocative? The Jewish Museum exhibition organizers probably aimed for ambivalence and they succeeded, in display and in this catalog, which accompanies an exhibition traveling from New York to San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum. This book is in the tradition of “Too Jewish?”—an earlier, controversial exhibition at the Museum. Interpretation of Jewish ritual objects, espe- AHMA, 2008 (Shalom Bat Chairs); acrylic on wood cially those focused on home-based ritual, is risky when done by practitioners of outrageous art, be they Jewish or non-Jewish, female or male. The curators/writers/artists don’t deny themselves lofty references—among others, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s comment that Gd’s revelation of the Torah is always ongoing. So empowered, artists conceive of limitless Bible portions rolled into gel capsules, perhaps to be ingested, on a regular basis. An austerely designed yad (pointer) incorporates a compass, verifying East; another includes a magnifying glass, reassuring impeccable Torah reading. Combining a kitchen apron and a tallit may be another matter for reader/viewer. Certainly some objects are refreshing, others vexing to consider, nevertheless the book is tied to a serious, nearly ponderous level by its topic, ritual—always ongoing. Acknowledgements, bibliography, contributors, exhibition checklist, index, notes. ABS TOBI KAHN: SACRED SPACES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Ena Giurescu Heller, ed. GILES in association with The Museum of Biblical Art, 2009. 110 pp. $39.95 ISBN: 978-1-904832-64-5 The book published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York City is comprised of short essays exploring themes of sacredness in abstract images and objects created by the artist Copyright: 2009 by Tobi Kahn. www.jewishbookcouncil.org
Tobi Kahn for ritual and meditative space. The exhibition, which was at MOBIA until January 2010, included Kahn’s reinterpretation of traditional ritual objects plus an ensemble of abstract art panels lining the glass walls of a congregation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin which “exalt the ritual function of the space,” according to Ena Heller, an expert on art and religion. Other contributors include a professor of religion, a museum curator, and Daniel Sperber, professor of Talmud at Bar- Ilan whose essay, “Sanctity in Space,” addresses Kahn’s obsession with sanctity in space and gives a concise explanation of Kahn’s success in creating an “ethereality of the dimension of holiness,” always seeking “for representation of the spiritual in the material.” Kahn’s memorial for victims of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing and the meditative space created for the Health Care Chaplaincy in New York City are also illustrative of this quest. Nessa Rapoport’s poems (“songs”) introduce and accompany a section of exquisite photographs of works in the exhibition. This book gives the exhibition the permanence it deserves. EN WOMEN’S STUDIES MITZVAH GIRLS: BRINGING UP THE NEXT GENERATION OF HASIDIC JEWS IN BROOKLYN Ayala Fader Princeton University Press, 2009. 280 pp. $22.95 (pbk.) ISBN: 978-0-691-13917-3 (pbk.) This fascinating work by a modern liberal Jewish anthropologist explores daily life in the closed Hassidic community of Boro Park, Brooklyn. Dr. Ayala Fader, associate professor of anthropology at Fordham University, focuses on young Hassidic women, for it is they who will “bear and rear the next generation.” Submit a writing sample to jbc@jewishbooks.org Please include your name, address, phone number, e-mail address and areas of interest. www.jewishbookcouncil.org She surveyed an array of generally unfamiliar subject matter, including the values of Hasidic femininity; the intricacies of Hasidic linguistics (e.g., two variation of Yiddish, one that girls speak to friends to fit in and another that they speak to older folks); the hierarchies of pious modesty; defiance of Hasidic young women; and how the standards of women’s modesty are established by male religious leadership. The work maintains a scholarly character and possesses the intellectual nature of a scientific exploration, while remaining a pleasurable casual read. This is because throughout the volume, the author elaborated upon her interactions and her warm personal experiences with members of the community she was investigating. 2009 National Jewish Book Award Winner in Women’s Studies. ShA STILL JEWISH: A HISTORY OF WOMEN AND INTERMARRIAGE IN AMERICA Keren R. McGinity New York University Press, 2009. 307 pp. $39.00 ISBN: 978-0-8147-5730-7 Once upon a time, women who married “out” were considered lost to the Jewish faith; it was assumed they would follow their husbands into the Christian world, letting go of the Jewish culture and heritage they had been raised to honor, respect, and carry with them into the next generation. McGinity, a research fellow at the University of Michigan, set out to examine these assumptions and see whether they held up under the close scrutiny of a historian. The result is a very readable book, one which takes an academic topic and treats it with care and presence and manages, in a lively way, to unravel the tightly woven tapestry of women and interfaith marriage and expose the facts and feelings at its core. Women’s Studies REVIEWS Through detailed research, McGinity demonstrates, for example, that women who intermarried in the last half of the 20 th century were more likely than their counterparts in the earlier years to raise Jewish children. She documents how their Jewish identity followed them into their mixed marriage and provides a sharply defined historical perspective on the relationships that drove them and sustained them. The book is rich in history, and for those who desire more, the extensive notes at the back provide much additional information that supports and elucidates the text. Appendix, notes, selected index. LFB WOMEN AND JUDAISM Rabbi Malka Drucker, ed. Praeger, 2009. 300 pp. $65.00 ISBN: 978-0275991548 ight now I am the oldest and you are “Rthe youngest Bat Mitzvah” [sic], said Judith Kaplan Eisenstein to Rabbi Malka Drucker’s daughter on the Shabbat of her bat mitzvah. Drucker reflects on the significance of that poignant moment in the introduction to her book, Women and Judaism, many years after that occasion: “A single moment held seventy years of history as a gracious and wise woman blessed a bright-eyed and promising daughter of Israel.” The book is a collection of essays that address topics that are both diverse and broad: from the historical to the liturgical; from Biblical women to ‘women of the Holocaust’; from renewing ancient traditions to creating new ritual. Its strength, therefore, is also its weakness: the book tries to be too many things at once, bouncing from topic to topic, never truly finding its center. It is an ambitious book, a brave attempt to cover so many aspects of what it means (and has meant) to be a Jewish woman. JP Would you like to be a reviewer for Jewish Book World? Spring 5770/2010 Jewish Book World 61
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Spring 5770/2010 Vol. 28, Number 1
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Now available from the Jewish Book
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JEWISHBOOKAWARDS The following syno
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ANTHOLOGIES AND COLLECTIONS Winner:
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