art

Art and Remembrance: The Fabric Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz

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In the 1970s a Holocaust survivor with no formal art training tried to show her daughters what her lost childhood home and family looked like. Trained as a dressmaker, Esther Nisenthal Krinitz used embroidery, fabric collage, and fabric wash to recreate images of 1930s Poland, and her parents, siblings, neighbors, community, and friends who died under the Nazis. Over the next two decades, the project transformed into a visual narrative of her story, entitled “Through the Eye of the Needle: Fabric of Survival.” Her work takes the viewer from her happy childhood, through Nazi occupation, to the loss of her loved ones and the resourceful daring that kept her alive, and finally to a new life in the U.S. Most pieces include brief hand- stitched captions, but the images alone tell a moving and remarkable tale. You can view the whole series sequentially, as it’s intended, in our gallery or on Art and Remembrance’s website.

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The Feast of Mary Magdalen: Celebrating Incarnation

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I would like to declare July 22nd a feast day to celebrate our incarnation on this earth, something all of us alive and who have ever lived share with all life and life to come. We are made of the same substance; we are subject to the same joys and sufferings of the flesh.

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New book on Israel's Relationship with Apartheid South Africa

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Sometimes a review of a book is a good substitute, for those with limited time, for actually reading the book. This may be the case with what appears to be a thoughtful review by Bernard Porter of a new book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Although the book does not seem to concern itself with the extent to which Israeli society itself is similar to apartheid South Africa, the reviewer discusses that question in passing, noting disanalogies. Not discussed, so far as I can tell, is whether the term “global apartheid” can be applied to the global socioeconomic system and if so, to what extent Israeli society, like our own, is complicit in it. The review starts by considering the issue of whether Israel did or did not offer nuclear weapons technology to South Africa in 1975 and then continues:
We have known for some time that Israel consistently dissembled, in the 1970s and 1980s, about its wider alliance with South Africa: this is the far more interesting puzzle that Polakow-Suransky’s well-researched, readable and (I think) balanced book sets out to unravel.

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Jesse Rifkin: Real "Bad Jew"

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I’m a bad Jew,” a friend said, grinning ear to ear and then biting into a bacon-egg-and-cheese bagel sandwich. Even looking back on the Jewish gangsters of the 1920’s, socialist Jews of the 1930’s, hippies of the ’60’s and punks of the ’80’s, seldom has being a “bad Jew” seemed so trendy. Time and time again, American Jews simultaneously act and critique their own actions, rigidly adhere to ancient precepts and then question them. As a community, we create the counter thesis to our own tradition through rebellion, with the rebellion itself long since becoming a tradition. The problem is that “bad Jews” don’t always play their part so well.

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Feminist Filmmaking – Ida Lupino's "The Trouble With Angels"

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Mary Clancy, the ne’er-do-well protagonist of the 1966 comedy The Trouble With Angels is the Catholic education system’s worst nightmare: she is clever, irreverent, wise beyond her sixteen years, and full of “scathingly brilliant ideas.” She is sent (along with her best friend and most loyal follower, Rachel) to St. Francis Convent to be “straightened out.” It is there that she meets her foil and foe — the venerable Reverend Mother (played by the equally venerable Rosalind Russell), a stern nun with a fondness for order and cooperative, obedient young women. Shenanigans, of course, ensue.

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Mark Twain’s Early Protest against the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

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We are delighted to start presenting occasional one-off posts by guest authors with this fine essay by Cynthia Wachtell, author of War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914. By Cynthia Wachtell
I sometimes wonder what Mark Twain would make of America’s many modern wars. This year marks the centenary of Twain’s death, which means he died before World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and our current contretemps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh what a century he missed! Of course, Twain wrote the American classics Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but he also spilled a lot of ink about war.