The Human Figure and Jewish Culture

The Human Figure and Jewish Culture PDF Author: Eliane Strosberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Illustrated with more than one hundred full-color reproductions of works by the artists under discussion, The Human Figure and Jewish Culture is an essential addition to any library of art history or Judaica. --

The Human Figure and Jewish Culture

The Human Figure and Jewish Culture PDF Author: Eliane Strosberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
Illustrated with more than one hundred full-color reproductions of works by the artists under discussion, The Human Figure and Jewish Culture is an essential addition to any library of art history or Judaica. --

The Jewish Body

The Jewish Body PDF Author: Melvin Konner
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 080524266X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A history of the Jewish people from bris to burial, from “muscle Jews” to nose jobs. Melvin Konner, a renowned doctor and anthropologist, takes the measure of the “Jewish body,” considering sex, circumcision, menstruation, and even those most elusive and controversial of microscopic markers–Jewish genes. But this is not only a book that examines the human body through the prism of Jewish culture. Konner looks as well at the views of Jewish physiology held by non-Jews, and the way those views seeped into Jewish thought. He describes in detail the origins of the first nose job, and he writes about the Nazi ideology that categorized Jews as a public health menace on par with rats or germs. A work of grand historical and philosophical sweep, The Jewish Body discusses the subtle relationship between the Jewish conception of the physical body and the Jewish conception of a bodiless God. It is a book about the relationship between a land–Israel–and the bodily sense not merely of individuals but of a people. As Konner describes, a renewed focus on the value of physical strength helped generate the creation of a Jewish homeland, and continued in the wake of it. With deep insight and great originality, Konner gives us nothing less than an anatomical history of the Jewish people. Part of the Jewish Encounter series

The Human Figure and Jewish Culture

The Human Figure and Jewish Culture PDF Author: Elaine Strosberg
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0789210568
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This wide-ranging, intellectually provocative study argues that artists of Jewish descent have been especially devoted to the human figure, and resistant to abstraction, on account of their cultural heritage. Abundantly illustrated in full color. In the twentieth century, the avant-garde movements promoted abstraction and formal experimentation in the visual arts, often dispensing with the human form altogether. Yet many artists of Jewish descent resisted this trend and continued to depict the human figure with sympathy and understanding. Few of them portrayed overtly Jewish themes, but—as Eliane Strosberg argues in this thought-provoking volume—their persistent devotion to the human figure was itself a reflection of their Jewishness. Though their individual styles were diverse, they all used the human figure as a means of communicating, in secular terms, aspects of their Jewish intellectual heritage, such as their humanistic values, passion for social justice, and opposition to the nihilism that underlay so much of modern culture. For this reason, their work may be said to constitute an ethical, if not an aesthetic, art movement, which Strosberg aptly dubs “Human Expressionism.” Strosberg begins her highly readable text with an overview of Jewish tradition that illuminates the mindset of many Jewish artists. She also provides a concise history of Jewish art from Genesis to the Enlightenment, in which she demonstrates that figurative art has actually had a place in Judaism for thousands of years, despite the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images. However, Strosberg devotes the greater part of her study to a comparative analysis of those artists who fall under the rubric of Human Expressionism. Though her scope is impressively broad, ranging from Camille Pissarro to George Segal, she pays particular attention to the immigrant painters of the École de Paris, like Soutine and Modigliani; the American social realists, like Ben Shahn and Raphael Soyer; and the masters of the postwar School of London, like Lucian Freud and R. B. Kitaj. Illustrated with more than one hundred full-color reproductions of works by the artists under discussion, The Human Figure and Jewish Culture is an essential addition to any library of art history or Judaica.

A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age

A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age PDF Author: Linda Kalof
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350995584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities of medieval Western Europe conceived of the human body in manifold ways. The body was not a fixed or unmalleable mass of flesh but an entity that changed its character depending on its age, its interactions with its environment and its diet. For example, a slave would have been marked by her language, her name, her religion or even by a sign burned onto her skin, not by her color alone. Covering the period from 500 to 1500 and using sources that range across the full spectrum of medieval literary, scientific, medical and artistic production, this volume explores the rich variety of medieval views of both the real and the metaphorical body. A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on the centrality of the human body in birth and death, health and disease, sexuality, beauty and concepts of the ideal, bodies marked by gender, race, class and age, cultural representations and popular beliefs and the self and society.

Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-century America

Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-century America PDF Author: Samantha Baskind
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271059839
Category : Art, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Explores the works of five major American Jewish artists: Jack Levine, George Segal, Audrey Flack, Larry Rivers, and R. B. Kitaj. Focuses on the use of imagery influenced by the Bible.

Cultural Exchange

Cultural Exchange PDF Author: Joseph Shatzmiller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176183
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Demonstrating that similarities between Jewish and Christian art in the Middle Ages were more than coincidental, Cultural Exchange meticulously combines a wide range of sources to show how Jews and Christians exchanged artistic and material culture. Joseph Shatzmiller focuses on communities in northern Europe, Iberia, and other Mediterranean societies where Jews and Christians coexisted for centuries, and he synthesizes the most current research to describe the daily encounters that enabled both societies to appreciate common artistic values. Detailing the transmission of cultural sensibilities in the medieval money market and the world of Jewish money lenders, this book examines objects pawned by peasants and humble citizens, sacred relics exchanged by the clergy as security for loans, and aesthetic goods given up by the Christian well-to-do who required financial assistance. The work also explores frescoes and decorations likely painted by non-Jews in medieval and early modern Jewish homes located in Germanic lands, and the ways in which Jews hired Christian artists and craftsmen to decorate Hebrew prayer books and create liturgical objects. Conversely, Christians frequently hired Jewish craftsmen to produce liturgical objects used in Christian churches. With rich archival documentation, Cultural Exchange sheds light on the social and economic history of the creation of Jewish and Christian art, and expands the general understanding of cultural exchange in brand-new ways.

The Jewish Body

The Jewish Body PDF Author: Maria Diemling
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004167188
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
This volume explores perceptions of the "Jewish body" in variety of early modern Jewish sources. It discusses, among other topics, ideas of the ideal body in normative sources, the influence of Kabbalistic ideas on Jewish-Christian discourse and the link between melancholy and exile.

The Medieval Haggadah

The Medieval Haggadah PDF Author: Marc Michael Epstein
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300156669
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Discusses four illuminated haggadot, manuscripts created for use at home services on Passover, all created in the early twelfth century.

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination PDF Author: Leonid Livak
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804775621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.

In Search of American Jewish Culture

In Search of American Jewish Culture PDF Author: Stephen J. Whitfield
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584651710
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A leading cultural historian explores the complex interactions of Jewish and American cultures.