In Our Time

A selection of Judah Passow’s portraits of Jewish Britain can be found in the issue 220 of the Jewish Quarterly.

No Place Like Home, an exhibition of Judah Passow’s photographs, opens at the Jewish Museum on February 1st. Information can be found here

www.judahpassow.com

Proximity Talks

Buying Hitler

On the psychpathology of the collector and the attraction of dictator art

Anyone like to buy Schindler’s list? I don’t mean a DVD of the film: I mean Schindler’s list. It’s available for $1.2 million on a U.S. website, apparently ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’. But what kind of person would take such an opportunity? The dedicated collector of Holocaustiana? Someone seeking that elusive dinner party ice-breaker? Or a different kind of collector altogether, the military history kind? There are other more sinister things on the market too: Dr. Mengele’s diary, anyone?

As a Jewish manuscript dealer, there can be those awkward moments when autograph collecting merges effortlessly into Neo-Nazism. When that Floridian collector turned out to have a moat around his house, guns and fourteen signed portraits of Hitler on his wall, for instance. Oh, and that time when a young German dealer added to his display a schoolbook penned by the nine-year-old Heinrich Himmler. It’s hard to know how to respond at such moments—produce a Magen David and twiddle it nervously, smile at the embarrassing whiff of anti-Semitism and hope that it will all go away, or just call the police?

Read more

History, Memory, Longing, Delight

Objects as antidotes to loss in the work of Maira Kalman and Edmund de Waal

Empty boxes, some child-made, some commercial.  Sponges from around the world. Postcards from the Hotel Celeste in Tunisia. A suitcase that belonged to a man who fled Danzig in 1939. Whistles.  A figurine of a stag scratching his ear with a hind leg. A snake curled on a lotus leaf, in ivory.  Three sweet chestnuts. A hare with amber eyes.  These are items in the respective collections of Maira Kalman and Edmund de Waal, two very different artists and writers who turn traditional Holocaust memoir-writing on its head by telling the stories of their Jewish families through objects like the ones above.

Read more

Never Looked Better

An ideological last-days-of-pompeii atmosphere has prompted even official institutions such as Beth Hatefutsoth Museum to comission an exhibition that examines the contemporary instability, even dissolution, of Israel’s formative myths. The concept behind its exhibition Never Looked Better was an invitation to participating artists to re-read the Sonnenfeld archive of classic Zionist photographs as if visiting from Mars. Approaching this epochal collection, as it were, tabula rasa, was a chance to examine the symbolic and emotional legacy of the Zionist aesthetic. Beth Hatefutsoth’s readiness for an essentially ‘post’ discourse is challenging both subscribers and critics of the Zionist ethos, calling for a profound discussion across the board.

It is clear to everyone that the title, Never Looked Better, is ironic. It postulates that the discursive glue unifying the curators, artists and visitors is the shared acknowledgement that such a glue no longer exists.  While scornful of the period in which we really thought we looked our best, the exhibition looks back with a tangible, conflicted nostalgia. The title indeed seems to say that we never looked better than we did in the Sonnenfelds’ photographs. Why did we look so good? Because we believed in the rightness of our cause. Because we had a narrative. We looked good because we were good.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

The Persistence of Memory: Text and Image in the Art of Arnold Daghani

According to those who knew him best, the artist Arnold Daghani (1909–1985) had an exceptionally retentive memory for events, names, dates and places. For him, as for other survivors, memory became what Laurence Langer, in his study Holocaust Testimonies, calls an ‘insomniac faculty’, implying that the process of remembering is not one of reviving memories, for ‘there is no need to revive what has never died’. Read more

Radicalism and Conformity: Jewish Collectors of New Art

I was asked to write an article on Jewish art collectors in England. For a few seconds I felt tempted to reel off a list of names of the most prominent art collectors, investors, Russian oligarchs and celebrity bidders in the main auctions of the major salerooms. But such articles are legion and widely available in Hello or the opening pages of the Evening Standard magazine. I wanted to avoid all the spin and promotion too often associated with the world of contemporary art and instead penetrate a little deeper to discuss why people collect art and why Jews appear to have been disproportionately drawn to it. Read more

The Ethical Challenge in the Object Quality of the Problem

In the summer of 2008 Penelope Curtis, advised by Israeli architect and cultural theorist Eyal Weizman, curated an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds entitled The Object Quality of the Problem. This exhibition won the Visual Arts Award 2008 at the London Jewish Cultural Awards. The citation by the proposing judge, Jeremy Lewison, reads:

Above all the exhibition eloquently and quietly laid bear the dilemmas faced by diaspora Jews in the face of the Palestinian-Israeli problem: how do we judge our fellow Jews who commit acts that in British society we would deplore; how long can we go on making allowances for the Holocaust in condoning belligerent behaviour? In indirectly raising such issues this exhibition makes a valuable contribution to Jewish culture in the United Kingdom.

I suppose I disagree. Read more

The Long Journey Home

A bit of reinvented truth. A child with a story full of holes, can only reinvent for herself a memory. Of this I am certain. Therefore the autobiography in all of this can only be reinvented.  Memory is always reinvented in a story full of holes as if there is no story left. What to do then? Try to fill in the holes — and I would say even this hole — with an imagination fed on everything one can find, the left and the right and the middle of the hole. One attempts to create one’s own imaginary truth.
Chantal Akerman

Read more

Seeing Shlock: Jewish Humour and Visual Art

A Jewish couple visits the Sistine Chapel. The guide points up and says: ‘It took Michaelangelo five years to paint this ceiling!’ The husband turns to his wife and says:  ‘Wow. He must have had the same landlord as us.’ (Old Jewish Joke)

It is well known that Jewish humour is a not a common cultural fixture in Britain so imagine my surprise, while walking around the fashionable Hayward Gallery, when I heard ‘Two wise men of Chelm went out for a walk…’ relayed in a loud ‘New York’ accent. A string of Jewish jokes was emerging from a plastic yellow joke box adorned with a clown face, attached to the wall, and named Joke Master Jr. On closer inspection I learned that this was, in fact, ‘art’ by the American-born London-based artist Doug Fishbone. Granted, it was an exhibition — and one of the first of its kind — about laughter, humour and visual art. But still, among the cool works of Finnish photographers and fictitious Korean performance troupes, the hot hyper-vowelization, and volume of the Jewish comedy stood out. Read more

Testament of Youth

Musrara, Jerusalem: the Naggar School of Photography, Media and New Music is situated on the border between the old city and the new, poverty and wealth, the Jewish and the Arab worlds. With Teen Spirit, recent graduates of the school interrogate another difficult border: that between childhood and adulthood. The result is a portrait of contemporary Israeli youth, illuminating stark contrasts between the tribalism of the social group and the isolation of the teenage bedroom, a desperation to conform and a desire to assert an individual identity.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.