Multiple ties bind this blog and the university that hosts it to George Washington. We proudly take our name and many of our cues from him.
George Washington, Public Garden, Boston, Mass. Flickr/Eric Hatch Under the circumstances, then, fans of the first president of the United States would do well to consult the June 24 issue of The Forward, which features both an editorial and a front-page article about the fate of the famous 1790 letter assuring the Jews of Newport of religious liberty.
As it turns out, this foundational document, a staple of American Jewry’s political and civic identity, currently reposes in a Maryland storage facility, where it’s kept under wraps. “What a loss!” The Forward declares, coming down hard in favor of publicly displaying the text.
At a time when simulacra have taken the place of the real thing, and historical literacy is increasingly an artifact of the past, taking the measure of an 18th century text with our own eyes is an experience to be cherished.
One of my greatest joys and, along with brushing my teeth, one of the great constants in my life, is making lists.
While my abiding affection for ordering, lining up and then crossing out (what pleasure!) the things I need to do every day may strike some as oddly misplaced, I come by this crochet honestly. My father, you see, happened to be a great one for lists, filling yellow legal pads with line after line of “to-do” this and that.
Adolf Konrad, packing list, December 16, 1963. Adolf Ferdinand Konrad papers, 1962–2002. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution. He was in good company. H.L. Mencken liked making lists, as did Ad Reinhardt and dozens of other celebrated artists and writers whose tabulations are currently on display at the Morgan Library & Museum in a small but winsome exhibition titled Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists’ Enumerations.
Some items such as Franz Kline’s grocery list (cornflakes, milk, toilet paper) are rather humdrum. Others such as Eero Saarinen’s list of 13 reasons why he loved Aline Bernstein – Reason #8, fittingly enough, applauds her organizational skills – are more romantically inclined. And still others such as Germain Seligmann’s late 1940s list of household items and artwork seized by the Vichy government are exercises in restoration.
Whatever their contents, these lists give shape, voice and line to the human longing for control.
Be sure to put a visit to the Morgan on your list of things to do and see.
Many moons ago, when I was in college, I rarely pulled an all-nighter. I had too hard a time staying up until the wee hours of the morn. But now, when my internal clock sees to it that I’m wide awake in the middle of the night, I have come to understand what I missed way back when. Pulling an all-nighter is fun, especially when you have someone to keep you company.
Shavuot postage stamp, designed by Asher Kalderon. Flickr/Karen Horton. Just the other evening, I had lots of company, when, in celebration of Shavuot, the ancient Jewish festival that commemorates, among other things, the giving of the Torah, hundreds upon hundreds of American Jews, myself among them, descended en masse on the JCC in Manhattan for a tikkun leil Shavuot, which commenced at 10 p.m. and ended at sunrise. An age-old custom that has been revived of late, the tikkun infuses the rhythms of the all-nighter with religious and cultural meaning.
Flooding the lobby, the halls and the stairwells of the JCC, some of us came for the cheesecake, others in search of companionship and still others for the learning, which ran the gamut from traditional text study to film screenings and classes in meditation and dance.
What was most striking, though, wasn’t the wide and determinedly untraditional array of classes or the spiritedness of those who, in the middle of the night, were avidly engaged in a discussion of one fine point or another. What was most eye-opening, even exhilarating, was the heterogeneity of those in attendance.
The variegatedness of modern Jewish life is often cause for dismay, much less the butt of humor. Most of the time, American Jewry shuttles between joking and fretting about its seemingly characterological inability to agree on anything.
But last Tuesday night, when so many different kinds of Jews came together under one roof and in celebration rather than protest, our variegatedness was, quite literally, a sight to behold and applaud.
Now that June is upon us, it’s high season for weddings — and reason enough for the Jewish Museum in New York to mount an exhibition of ketubot, Jewish marriage contracts.
The Art of Matrimony showcases 30 different versions of the age-old document. Some hail from the Cairo genizah of the 12th century, others from the atelier of a contemporary artist. Some bear flowers, others fish and still others a sturdy handshake. For all their differences, each ketubbah reflects a union of heart and head.
A "cheeky" Cupid. Flickr/Cinnamon Cooper Elsewhere within the museum world, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia has gone a step further in its commitment to the ketubbah by operating a Ketubah Gallery where happy couples can have this “monumental milestone marker,” as one museum official would have it, made to order.
And if that weren’t enough to highlight the central role that the Jewish marriage contract plays, both contemporaneously as well as historically, the most current issue of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture features a fascinating article by Jeffrey Shandler on the multiple and varied meanings the ketubbah has accrued over time and space: at once a legal document and a work of art, a token of steadfastness and an emblem of idiosyncrasy.
In his Transformations of the Ketubbah; Or, The Gallery of Broken Marriages, Shandler does more than chronicle the ways in which the Jewish marriage contract has changed its stripes over the years. His account offers a smart and close reading of the mutually constitutive relationship between the ketubbah and its context, be it domestic or museological, a matter of ritual or of aesthetics.
Given his subject matter, one expects Shandler’s essay to end with a paean to the power of love or with a salute to the stability of Jewish identity. Instead, it concludes on a playfully ironic and decidedly post-modern note: Jewish museums are blessed with an abundance of Jewish marriage contracts because of the frequency of divorce. The “Jewish public,” Shandler tells us, “have repurposed the museum itself by using it as a repository for their unwanted ketubbot.”
In contemporary America, Cupid’s arrows, it seems, have found a new target.
When I think of Jewish cuisine, D.C. does not immediately spring to mind. But that’s about to change. Well, sort of.
Source: Sixth and I Historic Synagogue website. For starters, Sixth and I just launched its very own food truck, cleverly called “Sixth and Rye,” which will purvey a kosher corned beef sandwich, a black and white cookie and other longtime staples of the American Jewish diet on Fridays, just in time for lunch.
Years ago, in his luminous memoir, A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin observed that a family visit to the local deli on a Saturday night marked the conclusion of the Jewish Sabbath and the start of the work week.
These days, things have been turned around. If “Sixth and Rye” is any indication, not only does the deli come to us. Its arrival in the ‘hood -- and only on a Friday -- also heralds the advent of the Sabbath, symbolically linking Jewish food to the Jewish calendar.
Speaking of which, every Friday, Trader Joe’s bins are stocked with challah. What a lovely gesture, I thought as I bought one: a gastronomic salute to, and acknowledgement of, the Jewish Sabbath. That may well the case, but Trader Joe’s also makes a point of saluting challah’s potential as weekend brunch fare, cheering that the ritual bread makes “killer French toast.”
Now that grades have been submitted, the seniors have graduated and cap and gown have been returned to the back of the closet, it’s time to take stock of what the Program in Judaic Studies has accomplished over the course of the past academic year.
Whether exploring the millennial history of Jerusalem, taking the measure of Israeli culture, learning about the making of Jewish books, reckoning with the American Jewish experience and the challenges of memory or meeting weekly with contemporary Jewish writers, our classes have deepened our students’ critical encounter with the richness and complexity of Jewish arts and letters, geopolitics and philosophy.
Flickr/AJ Cann The faculty, too, has been energized by a wide array of informal, work-in-process presentations given each month by its colleagues on topics that encompassed art, politics and the self, the ancient Near East, medieval England, late 19th century Germany and contemporary Latin America.
Public programs, meanwhile, have enlarged our audience as well as our opportunities for partnerships with neighboring institutions. From the Cedar Film Retrospective, which was held on campus as well as at the D.C.-JCC, to “Tough Guys,” a cooperative venture with American University and the Foundation for Jewish Culture; from the annual Fleischman Lecture at The Phillips Collection to a behind-the-scenes tour of the new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, the Program in Judaic Studies has made a point of extending its reach into the community at large.
Since coming to Washington 18 months ago, I’ve had lots of rewarding experiences, but none quite as memorable as my recent excursion to the U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command at the D.C. Navy Yard, where I delivered a speech in commemoration of the Holocaust to a varied and engaged audience of military personnel and civilians.
Flickr/Paul Belson I came to the Navy Yard wearing two hats. One was that of an historian, whose charge was to suggest something of the ways in which history complicates and enriches the world we currently inhabit. Toward that end, my talk, “Past Imperfect,” explored how the past relentlessly and inexorably intrudes on the present, especially when it comes to the continuous stream of new revelations — archival, cinematic and material — about the Shoah.
In that connection, we screened and then discussed Yael Hersonski’s recently released documentary, A Film Unfinished, whose provenance is both fascinating and chilling. At the end of the war, 60 minutes of raw film was discovered in an East German archive. Labelled simply “Das Ghetto,” it trained its sights on daily life within the Warsaw Ghetto only three short months before its liquidation. For years, historians took this vividly detailed film to be an accurate ethnographic record of ghetto life but, as it turns out, many of its scenes had been simulated and staged by the Nazis.
Complicating our understanding of what constitutes reality, let alone history, Hersonski’s affecting film not only draws heavily on “Das Ghetto,” but also includes interviews with five of its former inhabitants as well as testimony provided in the wake of the war by one of the film’s cameramen. This tangle of fact, fiction and personal memory mesmerizes and disturbs in equal measure. A must-see.
The other hat I wore was that of a daughter of a World War II veteran who, as a young and innocent sailor of 18, served on the flagship, the USS Augusta, during the Normandy invasion. My father was extremely proud of his service and, as he grew older, made a point of wearing a cap on which the words “USS Augusta” were prominently imprinted. He would have gotten a real kick out of learning that I had been asked to speak to a latter-day generation of the navy.
From where I sit, it’s not often that the personal and the professional come together quite like this, which made my presentation at the Navy Yard particularly meaningful to me. Citizen, scholar, daughter – for once the different strands of my life were neatly braided together like insignia on a uniform.
For decades now, Cecil B. DeMille’s cinematic extravaganza, The Ten Commandments, has held pride of place on television screens across America, its timing sandwiched between Pesach and Easter.
Source: Wikipedia. An invented holiday tradition if ever there was one, the annual broadcast of a nearly four hour film given over to the story of the ancient Israelites and their search for freedom puzzles as well as delights me.
I can well understand the film’s connection to Pesach, which, after all, commemorates the Exodus and exhorts its celebrants to remember. The movie version may even enhance the process of remembering, rendering the ancient story vivid and alive. As one movie-goer put it, way back when, “the story of Israel had laid frozen in hieroglyphics, manuscripts and books.” But thanks to DeMille, it has “thawed into something colorful.”
Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that some American Jewish households have even made a point of integrating bits of the film into their own seder, or so I’ve been told.
But the film’s connection to Easter seems more of a stretch. Does it have to do with renewal, perhaps? The maturation of a religious community? Or am I missing something?
I can’t help wonder whether the decision, year in and year out, to showcase The Ten Commandments between Pesach and Easter is a singularly American form of ecumenism designed to celebrate and salute what the members of the tv nation have in common.
This year, or so it seems to me, the American Jewish community is awash in new editions of the haggadah, the age-old ritual text that structures the Passover seder.
Haggadot. Source: Flickr/Sanford Kearns. At one end of the spectrum, there’s the stunning Washington Haggadah, a facsimile edition of a 15th century text. Its brightly colored illustrations of daily life -- women stir the pot, an entire family crowds atop a horse, birds chirp, a jester beats a drum -- dazzle the eye and enlarge our sense of wonder at the ways in which earlier generations of Jews claimed the haggadah as their own.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a brand new version of the Maxwell House Haggadah, whose very ordinariness belies its extraordinary hold on the American Jewish imagination. Households across the country may lack a Kiddush cup and perhaps even a set of Shabbat candlesticks, but chances are they own a copy or two of the unadorned and down-to-earth Maxwell House Haggadah, which has been around in one form or another since the 1930s.
These most recent iterations of the text are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. If history is any guide, and I sure hope it is, American Jewry and its sister communities around the globe have, over time, generated any number of fascinating Passover texts, many of which can be found at GW’s very own Kiev Collection. ...continue reading "Magid"
When people talk of travel as broadening, they usually have Paris in mind, not Toledo, Ohio. But as I discovered recently, travelling to the heartland of America can be just as eye-opening.
Aerial View of Toledo. Source: Flickr. I had come to the University of Toledo to deliver an illustrated lecture about the Ten Commandments and to participate in a Jewish-Christian-Muslim conversation about religion in contemporary America. By the end of my 24-hour stay, I had learned a lot.
For starters, I was exposed to the debilitating, corrosive effects of de-industrialization on the urban landscape. I then discovered that despite a first-rate women’s basketball team, the lecterns in the university’s student union are not equipped with digital technology. I subsequently drove all over town in search of a laptop as well as a clicker and, in the process, visited Corpus Christi Church where an interfaith dinner was being held.
While in church, I met a Jewish student clad in a yarmulke as well as a tallit, a ritual garment customarily worn only in the morning, much less in a Catholic house of worship. I found a laptop, too, courtesy of a professor of Islamic studies.
If this didn’t set my head spinning, the Q & A session that followed my formal remarks certainly did. ...continue reading "Holy Toledo!"
