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This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite, is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.

By Menachem Wecker

"Black woods howl in the stove/Our dog turned into a lion/but today the grownups are/Frowning like a mean witch." So go the lyrics to Karel Berman's song "Children at Play" from his 1944 work "Poupata" (Buds), sung by Canadian bass Robert Pomakov.

Walter Braunfels
Walter Braunfels

Berman's lyrics convey a naïve perspective but were composed for a bass on purpose, according to James Loeffler, research director of Pro Musica Hebraica, an organization that revives neglected Jewish music.

"If the cantor is the sound of a grown man crying, this is the sound of a grown man being reduced to a child," said Loeffler in a November 18 lecture, "What Is Jewish Classical Music and Why Does It Matter?" at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The talk preceded the 90-minute performance "War and Exile: The Music of Berman, Braunfels, and Ben-Haim," featuring the works of Jewish composers Karel Berman, Paul Ben-Haim, and Walter Braunfels. Pianist Dianne Werner accompanied Pomakov, while the Ben-Haim and Braunfels pieces featured violins (Benjamin Bowman and Marie Bérard), viola (Steven Dann), cellos (Bryan Epperson and David Hetherington) and clarinet (Joaquin Valdepeñas).

According to Loeffler, the Holocaust was a "backdrop" to the lives of the three composers, "but they are also three different key figures in a kind of mid-century moment of reconfiguring and rethinking what it means to talk about Jewish classical music."

Pomakov, who is not Jewish and does not speak Hebrew, said prior to singing the Berman music he had never sung Hebrew opera. The new experience opened his mind as a musician, he said. "You can get very stuck doing Beethoven and Brahms and all the usual stuff."

The performance also drew on his childhood. "I'm Catholic, and half of our Bible is the Torah," he said. "I grew up singing religious texts my whole life. It's something I can look to my past for."

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Charles Krauthammer, chairman of the board of Pro Musica Hebraica, introduced the performance.

"We started from the premise that this is a very neglected area of Jewish culture, and a neglected area of classical music," Krauthammer said of the organization he co-founded with his wife Robyn four years ago. "This is a small room in the mansion of Jewish culture, and an equally small room in the mansion of Western classical music."

According to Krauthammer, people tend to identify "Jewish music" with klezmer, songs like Hava Nagilah, or liturgical music sung in the synagogue. "This whole world of Jewish classical music, which is so rich and moving, has been neglected,”"he said.

Asked if he thought Pro Musica Hebraica's audience was mostly classical music nuts wanting to learn more about Jewish culture, or Jewish music aficionados looking to expose themselves to more classical music, Krauthammer said, "I'd like to do an exit poll." He estimated that two-thirds of the audience fits the latter category, and one-third was the former group.

However exposed to Jewish classical music the audience was, it was treated not only to something other than the usual stuff, as Pomakov explained, and not only to Jewish works on par with secular classical music, as Krauthammer suggested, but also to a program that was defined as much by its sounds as by its effect on the musicians.

Berman had Pomakov grinning at the humor of the childish lyrics, and Ben-Haim's and Braunfels's compositions moved the musicians into a symphonic game of Twister, where they were swaying in their chairs and coaxing palpable emotion out of the music.

James Loeffler will be coming to GW on March 8th to deliver the annual Fleischman Lecture in Judaic Studies. His theme: the storied relationship between the Jews and the violin. Stay tuned for details.

This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite, is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.

By Menachem Wecker

Though about half of the 16 artists in the current show at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., are Jewish, curators Eloise Corr Danch and David Zuckerman unabashedly admit there is nothing Jewish about the exhibit, beyond the Jewish venue.

In the catalog to “I’ve Gone Looking for that Feeling Everywhere: An Exhibition of Emerging Artists,” which hangs through Nov. 2, the curators identify “an insistent urge to examine and discover” as a thematic tie-that-binds.

Orrery courtesy of Sam Zuckerman

“This exhibition celebrates the idea of art as the product of (or byproduct) of that curiosity, of the artists’ need to engage their surroundings and indulge their fascinations,” they write, insisting the art is “visceral, emotional, curious, playful,” rather than “steeped in concept or theory.”

In fact, not only do the curators say there isn’t even anything Jewish, or even spiritual, about the works in the show — though they refer in their statement to “the restless yearning spirit that drives the action” — but the title derives from a Denis Johnson novel, Jesus’ Son, about a drifter.

But Sam Zuckerman, David’s cousin, says his contribution to the show — which is in fact the first work of art he has ever made — has at least a partial Jewish component.

...continue reading "A gadget for Gods and days"

This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite , is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.

By Menachem Wecker

Though it features illustrations of a menagerie of animals that carry Jewish symbolism, an ancient Roman mosaic discovered in Lod, Israel, in 1996, is not a religious work, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the fourth-century artifact is on exhibit for the first time until April 3, 2011.

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
According to the museum's press release, "because the mosaic's imagery has no overt religious content, it cannot be determined whether the owner was a pagan, a Jew, or a Christian."

But virtually all of the animals depicted in the work — birds, bulls, a deer, a donkey, ducks, an elephant, fish, gazelles, a giraffe, hares, leopards, lions, a sea monster, a snake, peacocks, a rhino and a tiger — carry Jewish symbolism.

According to Shlomo Pesach Toperoff, author of The Animal Kingdom in Jewish Thought, the following animals carry biblical and rabbinic symbolism: donkeys (transportation, redeeming firstborn donkeys per Exodus 13:13, symbol of Issachar), birds (the mother must be shooed before accessing the eggs, doves as peace symbols), elephants (per Berakhot 56b, a wonderful sign when seen in dreams), fish (eaten on Rosh Hashanah to symbolize multiplying), gazelles (frequent appearances in Song of Songs, its speed idealized in Ethics of the Fathers), harts and hinds (symbol of Naphtali), bulls (the Red Heifer), leopards (a character in Daniel's dream, cited in the same part of Ethics of the Fathers as the gazelle), sea monsters (the Leviathan, a Talmudic regular), lions (tribe of Judah), peacocks (brought by King Solomon from Tarshish) and serpents (Edenic embodiment of evil, symbol of Dan).

Hares are sometimes depicted in scenes of Esau returning from the hunt in haggadahs, according to Marc Michael Epstein, professor of religion and Jewish studies at Vassar College and author of the book Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature, which examines animal references in medieval art.

The Torah is referred to as a "loving doe" in the Shavuot prayers, Epstein adds, and hare hunts appear in haggadahs.

The ducks, giraffes, rhinos and tigers stand alone, but shouldn't 13 of 17 be compelling enough?
...continue reading "Is an Ancient Menagerie Pagan or Jewish?"

This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite, is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.

By Menachem Wecker

According to the MoMA website, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe screen-print series challenged "the concept of the unique art work by repeating the same mechanically produced image until it appeared to be drained of all meaning."

It's tempting to cite Warhol's Marilyns as the inspiration for the 18 screen prints in Miriam Mörsel Nathan's Greta series, each of which shows a different colored version of the same dress.

But whereas Warhol used redundancy to emphasize triviality, Mörsel Nathan's series is intentionally repetitive, leaving no color palette untried in its search for the answer to a particular question.

Leafing through pre-World War II photographs, Mörsel Nathan, former director of the Washington Jewish Film Festival, discovered a picture of her aunt Greta, whom she had never met. When she started making prints based on the image, she realized she had no idea what color to use for her aunt's dress.

"The series of screen prints is of the same dress but in many different colors, as if to say to my aunt Greta, 'Which of these do you like?'" says Mörsel Nathan in a wall text at the exhibit "Memory of a time I did not know…" at the Washington D.C. JCC's Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery. "There is little that I know about my aunt…These walls of many dresses remind me of what I don't know."
...continue reading "On Marilyn Monroe, Aunt Greta and a Dress of Many Colors"

4

From Under the Fig Tree is delighted to announce another first: a content sharing partnership (aka "cross-posting") with the Forward's culture blog, The Arty Semite and its curator, Dan Friedman, who is also the newspaper's arts and culture editor.

To mark the occasion, Menachem Wecker, a staff writer for GW Today and himself a celebrated blogger for the Houston Chronicle, has moderated a conversation between Jenna Weissman Joselit and Dan Friedman on the relationship of the academy to journalism and the arts.

MW: Dan, as someone with a lot of experience in Jewish journalism, what are some of the challenges inherent in interviewing scholars of Jewish history or culture? Is it tough to get professors to speak in anything close to sound bites? What are some of the things you wish all Judaic studies professors hopeful of appearing in the Forward’s arts and culture section knew about your beat?

DF: Well I don't want professors to talk in sound bites, not in my section. But I think that for those professors who write for my section, it's a struggle to get the right mixture of clarity, complexity and conciseness. Coming from an academic background myself, I know that timeliness, brevity and accessibility were not particularly prized in Ph.D. programs. I wonder whether Jenna, who has written in a number of different venues, addresses questions of writing for her students.

MW: Jenna, what's your reaction?

JWJ: Like Dan, I, too, prize the three C's of writing and make a point of sharing them with my students as they work on their papers and presentations. Then again, I also make a point of staying away from the dreaded red pencil markings, which various online editing systems have imported, lest my students flee in horror. I much prefer the more gentle stylings, and nudges, of a gray lead pencil. As Dan points out, I've had the good fortune to write for a number of different venues and this, I have to say, has done wonders for my writing as well as my embrace of deadlines.

MW: Let's try a flipped version of the first question. Jenna, how willing have you found your colleagues in academia to be interviewed by reporters at Jewish publications? Do you think professors tend to see media engagement (and reaching out to the larger, non-scholarly public) as part of their teaching responsibilities? One often hears professors complain that they interview at length with a reporter only to have a sentence-or-two-long quote appear in the final story. Have you encountered this challenge in your own work, or have you heard from colleagues about this?

JWJ: Once upon a time, academics might have held the media at arm's length, but these days as the distinction between high and low culture is increasingly blurred, that's no longer the case.

In fact, many of my colleagues relish the opportunity to engage with the press. At times, admittedly, it's frustrating to speak at length and with subtlety to a reporter only to find one's pearls of wisdom variously mangled, twisted out of context and so radically truncated that you come off sounding like a drunken sailor. Still, it's a risk well worth taking.
...continue reading "Moving Forward"