Jewish culture – From Under the Fig Tree

Number 1535

joselitSeptember 17, 2017December 10, 2017Leave a comment

More than a century ago, visitors to London’s Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition encountered an embarrassment of riches: nearly 3,000 items that ranged from a Hebrew version of “God Save the Queen” to a brass model of Solomon’s Temple.

An attempt to shore up and secure Anglo-Jewry’s relationship to the British Empire, an exercise in both apologetics and cultural pride, the exhibition dazzled the eye, or so we are told.

The students in my grad seminar, “Displaying Jewish Culture,” where we recently took the measure of the exhibition, were not so much dazzled as baffled. Its sweep and scale they understood as strategic, a way to make the case that the Jews had a rich and complex cultural patrimony, but the paucity of interpretive information that accompanied the objects on display was something else again.

Consider, for example, item number 1535, a shofar, or, as the catalogue explained, a “ram’s horn trumpet.” Housed in a section of the exhibition given over to music, it was identified simply as “quaint and old.” Ditto for item number 1540, a shofar described as “very old,” and its companion, number 1548, which featured “black from age” as its label.

Where, oh, where, wondered the students, was information about context or usage or significance?
Surely, vague descriptive phrases on the order of ‘old’ and ‘very old’ didn’t do much for the shofar, especially among the uninitiated.

As we batted about the absence of detail from our latter-day perches, generating lively conversation about the sea changes in museological conventions and expectations since 1887, it occurred to me that the curators of the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition had gotten it right.

When it came to the shofar, what really mattered was not so much its materiel or place of origin or maker. A blast from the past, the ram’s horn trumpeted the values of historicity, connecting one generation with another.

On that note, here’s wishing one and all a sweet new year and a vibrant and meaningful 5778.

Playing with blocks

joselitAugust 28, 2017November 29, 2017Leave a comment

In what has become an annual tradition come late August, GW’s Program in Experiential Education & Jewish Cultural Arts welcomes its new, and hopefully merry, band of students to town by hosting a whirlwind orientation called Mosaic.

Click on image to read the brochure

Drawing loosely on the theme of building blocks, this year’s Mosaic had us both poolside, sipping cocktails, and in an old-fashioned parlor, playing the 21st century equivalent of parlor games.

When not sitting down, we walked around Dupont Circle, taking in its architectural delights; made our way downtown to Sixth and I for a lively exchange about institutional sustainability; and took the measure of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s deployment of space. We ate a lot, too.

The point throughout was to think about what it takes to build relationships, institutions and community. Without literalizing matters too much, the big idea behind this year’s Mosaic was to cast a searching eye on the constituent elements — the building blocks — that the students will draw on in the course of their training
as well as in their subsequent careers.

What kind of “structures” will they end up fashioning? It’s too early to tell, of course, but over the course of the next 13 months, they will have ample opportunity to pick up and assemble the right tools.

Mixtape

joselitJune 8, 2016November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Building a new academic program ain’t easy. There are forms to fill out, deans to convince, donors to cultivate and students to recruit. The number of hoops you have to jump through before you get off the ground, much less succeed, can daunt and discourage even the most energetic and determined of souls.

What lifts the spirit and sustains it is the opportunity to try one’s hand at something novel: to stretch. It’s not quite the same thing as seizing the brass ring, but it comes awfully close. For me, that opportunity took the form of SymPop.

Inspired by the contemporary pop-up phenomenon as well as by the age-old notion of a symposium, I hit on the idea of mixing up both by bringing together a highly select (dare I say ‘curated,’ the word du jour) assemblage of artists and educators to spend an immersive 24 hours in one another’s company. We would eat together, cook together, learn from one another and collaborate -- all with an eye towards enriching one another as well as the Jewish communal landscape.

So many ideas sound marvelous on paper, but land with a thud when it comes to actualizing them. Not SymPop. Thanks to its participants, who were generous, open, spirited and, above all, game, what might have been yet another dutiful exercise in professional development took flight. Deploying all manner of stuff -- paper, scissors, smartphones, musical instruments, images, grids, flowers, their feet, pots & pans -- as well as one another, they buzzed with ideas, infusing Jewish texts, practices, places, foodways and sounds with newfound sparkle and depth.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the SymPopniks had to say when asked to come up with a slew of adjectives and nouns to describe their experience. First the adjectives: “Awesome, inspiring, thoughtful, fun, satisfying.” Now, the nouns: “sharing, connections, sprouting, whole-making, gratitude, trust.”

Power to the people

joselitJuly 13, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I’ve just returned from a busman’s holiday in San Francisco where I ate myself silly, walked until my shins ached and talked and talked -- with former GW students and their families (what a treat!), with colleagues, with friends -- until my voice turned into a veritable foghorn.

I had come to San Francisco at the invitation of the Contemporary Jewish Museum to give a presentation about the relationship between mid-century design and the Jewish experience, the subject of a current exhibition “Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Design.” For years now, I’ve been interested in the ways in which taste and style are as much collective phenomena as individual ones and am grateful to the museum for the opportunity to share some of my thoughts on the topic.

What really galvanized me, though, was the Contemporary Jewish Museum itself. Housed in a former power station that once provided electricity to downtown San Francisco and fortuitously located in a bustling area of San Francisco -- the Yerba Buena district -- that draws visitors and natives alike, the museum is a monument to thinking big.

But it’s not just the museum’s compelling location or its visually arresting architecture that powers the imagination. What really gets things going is the institution’s commitment to re-conceptualizing the ways in which museums might function these days.

Taking its cue from teaching hospitals, the Contemporary Jewish Museum likens itself to a teaching museum. Under the innovative stewardship of its new executive director, Lori Starr, it doesn’t just mount exhibitions, dispense information or engage in creative programming (an “Out of Order Seder,” anyone?). Without a permanent collection of its own, the CJM, as it’s called, places more of a premium on process than on display, on exposure more than exhortation, on collaboration in lieu of showmanship. It invites participation at every turn, from commissioning artwork and sponsoring pop-up stores like Dwell, a timely response to its current exhibition, to bringing educators together with technologists so that they might benefit from one another’s company.

In the course of things, the CJM reverses the traditional relationship between the front of the house and the back of the house, between what is known and how we know it, underscoring the primacy of discovery. It calls on the viewer as much as the curator to make connections.

What a concept! Here’s hoping the notion of a teaching museum given over to Jewish culture in all of its many manifestations will serve as a beacon bright from coast to coast.

On the go

joselitJune 23, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This past week marked the debut of GW’s Program in Experiential Education and Jewish Cultural Arts, which has been in the works for quite some time now. Although I’ve written often, at some length and with passion about the program here and elsewhere, I’m delighted to report that nothing quite beats the thrill of implementation.

Mosaic The Institute — Mosaic brochure (click to open)

To set things in motion, GW hosted a three day retreat for students and faculty before the formal start of classes. Actually, to call it a ‘retreat’ isn't quite apt: ‘embrace’ is more like it. On the go from morning to night, we went behind the scenes at GW’s museum-in-process and gathered in front of the footlights at Theater J; participated in a master class on Jewish art song and another class on trans-media and the Jews; and listened as professionals from a wide variety of institutions from grand museums to aspiring ones spoke freely about the challenges they face, day in and day out. Through it all, the students began to lay claim to and take the measure of the vast array of treasures, both human and institutional, that make up the arts and culture scene in D.C.

Our whirlwind encounter, at once dazzling and dizzying, was called ‘Mosaic,” a testament to the process by which fragments constitute a whole, as well as a call to the students to pick up the pieces that define Jewish culture and to fit, or, as the current lingo would have it, “embed,” them in new patterns of meaning.

It won’t be easy. But the rewards of thinking smartly and imaginatively about loss and absence, demystification and exposure, process and context – to name just a few of the themes that surfaced, time and again, these past few days – are well within reach.

Come Blow Your Horn

joselitNovember 17, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Cue the trumpets: GW has just launched a brand new MA program in Experiential Education and Jewish Cultural Arts. A sibling to the MA program in Jewish Cultural Arts, which made its shining debut just a few short months ago, it will supplement that initiative through its attentiveness to the ways in which the practices and pedagogy of experiential or informal education enhance Jewish culture -- and the other way around.

The wonderful details -- of which there are many -- can be found on the respective websites of each program: Master of Arts in Jewish Cultural Arts and Experiential Education and Jewish Cultural Arts.

What I want to herald here, within the context of the blog, is the broad communal significance of these two undertakings. At a time when the American Jewish community is feeling rather beleaguered and perhaps even unloved and under-appreciated, GW’s decision to throw its weight behind the formation of not one, but two, programs devoted through and through to the critical study, promotion and dissemination of Jewish culture is something to cheer about.

What’s more, that the Jim Joseph Foundation, one of the Jewish community’s most far-sighted and imaginative philanthropies, saw fit to make the MA in Experiential Education and Jewish Cultural Arts possible through its generous support and thoughtful stewardship, should encourage us to cheer more loudly still.

Jewish culture, as growing numbers of people have come to understand, isn't just a tool of engagement or an alternative form of commitment. Yes, it contains all those possibilities. But what truly renders Jewish culture such a vital and generative phenomenon -- let’s call it a life force -- is its status as a gift. From one generation to another and from one iteration to another, Jewish culture gives us license to be creative.

Kulturkampf 1

joselitJune 2, 2013November 16, 20171 Comment

The decision of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies in New York, one of the mighty engines of American Jewish philanthropy, to pull the plug on the Six Points Fellowship, one of the most creative Jewish organizations around, isn’t just bad news for the artists among us. It’s bad news for the entire American Jewish community.

I’m sure that Federation had its reasons and that, as is its wont, the organization arrived at its decision after considerable to-ing and fro-ing.

Six Points fellow Kristen Smiarowski's Sleep, Staring, Well

Even so, from where I sit, it’s the wrong call. It’s also misguided and shortsighted.

There’s no beating around the bush: I feel very strongly about this issue. If American Jewish life is not only to endure but, more critically still, to flourish, the arts and other forms of cultural expression must be its lifeblood.

Too many people at Federation and elsewhere within American Jewry’s organizational structure are inclined to see Jewish culture as an ornament or as an occasional pleasure, a detour or a distraction from other, more pressing, needs. More disturbingly still, the powers-that-be are all too often inclined to set Jewish artistic and cultural expression on its own axis, to render it an independent and parallel universe, rather than one whose fortunes are inextricably bound up with that of the larger Jewish community.

But Jewish cultural arts are anything but incidental or autonomous. They form a cultural eco-system that is as generative, vital and integral to the ongoing well-being of the American Jewish community as its synagogues, social welfare and civic groups and its Israel engagement initiatives.

Those who inhabit this eco-system are a varied lot. Some are actively engaged in preserving the past and its patrimony. Others are excited by the complexities of the present day, while still others, with an eye toward the future, make a point of turning things inside out and upside down.

Whatever they do and however they do, the digital and visual artists, actors, composers, musicians, film-makers, dancers, choreographers, playwrights and writers among us keep American Jewish life humming and in circulation.

Ecosystem

joselitMay 17, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Say you blundered one wet and dreary evening into a town hall meeting in downtown Manhattan and sought to take its measure by listening attentively to the words bandied about by those in the know, words such as ‘ebb and flow,’ ‘cycle,’ ‘crisis,’ and ‘ecosystem.’ You might easily have come away thinking that the matter at hand had to do with stewarding the environment.

You wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but in this instance the environment in question was not Mother Nature’s but rather, the American Jewish community or, more to the point, its relationship to Jewish forms of cultural expression.

Some of the culture mavens at the town hall meeting that evening – a glittering array of talent representative of the “new Jewish culture” - believed that the relationship between the two was enfeebled, perhaps even on “life support.” Others thought it healthy and vital.

Some placed a premium on the kind of affirmation that comes from a strong sense of self, insisting fervently on the integrity of the idiosyncratic. Others underscored the primacy of Jewish cultural literacy, claiming equally as fervently that contemporary American Jews would be well served were they to “connect to something larger than themselves.” ...continue reading "Ecosystem"

Object lesson

joselitMarch 7, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In my household, Sundays are usually given over to two rituals: reading The New York Times and taking in a museum exhibition. I suspect your household is no different.

But, as I explained recently to a group of GW alumni who had come together on a rainy Sunday morning to visit the brand new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia as part of an alumni series called “GW Culture Buffs,” the mere thought of doing exactly what we were doing had once generated more than its fair share of controversy.

We take our Sundays-at-the-museum for granted; earlier generations of culture buffs did not. Many museum officials and their elite patrons were initially rather resistant to the idea of opening the doors of, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on a Sunday, fearful lest it attract the wrong kind of people—those with “vandal hands” or broken English. A Sunday at the Met, they warned, was a “perilous experiment.”

Metropolitan Museum button — Once upon a time, Met entry buttons were useless on a Sunday. Credit: Charley Lhasa/Flickr

Americans, especially Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side, didn’t see things quite that way and joined hands with socially conscious civic reformers to expand the franchise of museum-going by writing editorials in the Yiddish press and circulating petitions on the Jewish street.

Where America’s elite believed that visiting a museum was a privilege, Americans at the grass roots believed that it was a right, a perquisite of urban citizenship.

Were it not for the zealousness and passion with which they defended that belief, the nation’s museums would be grand, if empty, spaces.

Writing on faith

joselitJanuary 13, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Guest post by Menachem Wecker

During the Q&A period of a Dec. 1 event at the National Press Club titled "Why journalists must understand religion," I asked Sally Quinn, founder and moderator of the Washington Post's On Faith, if it was an advantage for reporters to approach the religion beat with insider knowledge of the faiths they are covering.

typewriter — Credit: Flickr user Helen Black.

After all, I've found that some of my most creative stories have stemmed from a nuanced understanding of rabbinic and biblical Judaism, whether it was noticing Hebrew typos in William Blake's paintings, mistranslations in the promotional materials of Hebrew inscriptions on rings in a gift shop at a mega-church or examining seemingly incongruous visual elements (like rabbit hunts or twisted pillars) in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and synagogues.

On the other hand, I've written for Catholic, Arab American and Mormon publications, and invariably, I learn the most from writing for those audiences, because I'm forced to do more research and to double- and triple-check my work.

Ms. Quinn responded that experience clearly helps a reporter understand the story, but it is not a prerequisite to good reporting.

I was replaying the Press Club event in my head when my editor at the Houston Chronicle asked me to write a news story for the paper on Christmas. It sounds like the beginning of an off-color joke: a kid named Menachem starts writing a story on Christmas art...

I have to say, though, that in the process of researching the story -- which ran Dec. 23 as "Fine Art displays haven't forsaken the Nativity" -- I definitely found myself enjoying the process all the more so because I knew I was treading holy water.

Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, an adjunct professor of religious art and cultural history at Georgetown University, sent me a handful of articles and chapters she’d written on the subject, and I happily and hungrily devoured them word for word -- several times each.

I also got a kick out of emailing back and forth with art blogger Tyler Green, who had created an online Adventist and Chanukah calendar on the micro-blogging platform Tumblr.

Some might say that chutzpah draws me to non-Jewish stories, but I prefer to see it as an expression of a different Jewish value: sakranut, or curiosity -- the same sentiment that motivated the famous monkey Curious George, who according to the latest wisdom, might even have been Jewish himself.

What would Curious George have had to say about Christmas art? Probably not a whole lot, but I can just see him getting caught up in some mischief as he tried to track Santa (b. 1881) down to personally deliver his wish list -- sure to be a whole lot of bananas.