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

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?

Stalin wrote some solid poetry, and Gaddafi is a lovely novelist

It can happen off duty as well. Just the other day at a picnic, after I’d revealed my profession to a group of strangers, one of them asked, without an ounce of irony, ‘So, do you get much Hitler, then?’ I laughed awkwardly, as if he and I were on the inside of a joke, and offered a sort of apology: ‘Well, no, not really. I don’t tend to do Nazis.’ They murdered my family, I should have added, which sort of puts me off selling their autographs.Though, as you bring it up, I’m as obsessed with Nazis as the next man. But then, I’m Jewish. What’s your excuse?

Some time ago, I confess, I did have a brief period of doing Nazis. A signed copy of Mein Kampf came up in auction and I had an overwhelming urge to buy it. I fought with myself, wondered whether my desire for a Hitler autograph meant that I was an anti-Semite. And then I got tired of the discussion and asserted my Third Generation right to buy Nazi memorabilia. So, I bought it. And it was mine. Mein Kampf arrived, I installed it on my bookshelf, and I found that I kept on picking it up and touching it, tracing my finger over the handwriting, showing it to friends.I still wasn’t sure if I was a traumatised victim identifying with and appeasing the aggressor or just another despicable Hitler fanatic. As serendipity would have it, I owned one of Sigmund Freud’s walking sticks at the same time, which I kept under my bed. I remember handling both objects simultaneously, creating a sort of Freud-Hitler axis of good and evil. I trusted Freud to represent my interests and explain away my Hitler obsession. Or was I just using Freud as cover for my own Nazism? It was hard to tell.

Anyway, the point is that I don’t do Nazis anymore, though Hitler still remains a fascination, something of a guilty pleasure.I guess it’s not surprising,when every other book in my childhood home had Hitler or Holocaust in the title. Plus, my father fanatically collects postcards of synagogues that were destroyed by the Nazis. I have dreams about Hitler sometimes, including a recent one where he and I met at a dinner dance, finding ourselves both tragically without partners. I tell myself that it’s OK to dream about the man who killed my family, that it’s my entitlement. But what possible excuse can a non-Jew have for a Hitler fixation? Shouldn’t they stick to poets or Presidents or ice-skating champions? Something less, well, Jewish?

One of the paradoxes of collecting is the attention the collector pays to the unique blend of items he assembles, whilst simultaneously denying absolutely that the collection says anything at all about him personally, about his issues. I can say from experience that this is because the collector feels himself to be accumulating items not for himself, but for mankind.The collector is so mind-bogglingly un-self-aware,that it never crosses his mind that his collection of, say, autographed photographs of actresses who died very young in tragic circumstances, just might suggest that he has an unhealthily keen interest in the deaths of glamorous young women, which perhaps stems from a repressed desire to kill his own disappointing mother, whose absence from his early years resulted in his spending much of his childhood sat on the sofa beside an au pair, watching Marilyn Monroe movies. No, the collector is oblivious to the cause and effect, and anyway doesn’t want to dwell on his childhood.As far as he is concerned, he is doing what any other rational human being would do if they only had the bright idea, the eye for rarity, and the desire to preserve ‘culture’.

Armed with this kind of insight into the mind of the collector, it’s understandable that I would feel queasy to see another sale of Hitler’s paintings come up for auction in Shropshire last month. Now, I’m not against dictators dabbling in the arts per se—Stalin wrote some solid poetry, and Gaddafi is a lovely novelist—but this is something different. This auction house has been conducting regular Hitler Art sales for several years now, including an auction in 2009 that featured a supposed self-portrait by Hitler, who was shown sitting on a bridge in soulful self-contemplation. There has been much media speculation about the authenticity of the Hitler paintings that keep showing up (they are probably all fakes), but that doesn’t seem to stem the flow. As the auctioneer explained, ‘there is a tremendous fascination in Hitler these days and this sale will provide bidders with a rare opportunity of obtaining a work by Hitler at a time long before he started his campaigns of mass murder and world domination’. Well, I’m glad the auctioneer reminds us that the paintings all date from before all the Holocaust stuff, because otherwise we might be tempted to lump the early, kindly Hitler together with the later meaner Hitler, which seems unfair. Indeed, the auctioneer makes the point that the pictures are ‘all peaceful subjects, without exception, no military, no violent subjects’. It does make you sort of start wondering whether there is real credence to the argument that Adolf Hitler was, primarily, a struggling oil painter.

Oh, and did you know that one of the pictures in the collection—again, questions about authenticity—may have once hung in the offices of Sigmund Freud? (It seems I’m not the only one to summon Freud when cornered by his conscience.) Yes, they found Freud’s address penned on the reverse of a dodgy painting of a church, and it all adds up: Hitler was a struggling artist in Vienna at exactly the same time as Freud was in private practise there. So, Freud must have met the young Hitler, and found him personable enough to buy one of his paintings and hang it on his wall! And presumably Freud must also have recognised some talent in the young Hitler, some possibility of future greatness you’d think, for isn’t future greatness the currency of the art collector?

I have come to realise that collecting itself is a form of revisionism. You focus on a particular person, or period of history, and you necessarily draw attention away from the larger context. You distort historical events, because you have to bend history in order to see your reflection in it, at least the reflection you want to see. It’s ultimately about repair. I shouldn’t be against it, especially as I rely on the psychopathology of the collector to make a living. But it’s not always healthy. Someone once came to my table at a New York autograph fair, wearing a sharp suit and bow-tie, and announced, smugly, that he was looking for unsuccessful Presidential candidates. Sorry, nothing at all, I said. What I should really have done is throw a blanket over him, make him a cup of hot cocoa, and give him some of the love he missed out on as a child, during those months when his parents’ marriage was on the rocks and he was sent away to boarding school and failed all his exams and cried himself to sleep every night. You’ll always be a success in my eyes, I should have told him, but I can’t help thinking that maybe collecting isn’t for you.

Adam Andrusier studied music at Cambridge, where he performed piano recitals and a concerto. He has since formed his own company, selling rare autographs and manuscripts. He has written two novels.

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.

An Israeli-born, New-Yorkraised illustrator, designer, children’s-book author and artist across many media, Kalman is best known for her December 2001 The New Yorker cover with Rick Meyerowitz, a map of ‘New Yorkistan’ including such neighbourhoods as Botoxia and Upper Kvetchnya. Her two year-long series of monthly blogs blending image and text for The New York Times are now available in two books, And the Pursuit of Happiness (2010) and The Principles of Uncertainty (2007). In a visual essay for the latter, ‘Collecting Myself ’, Kalman calls the objects she collects ‘tangible evidence of history, memory, longing, delight.’ The history and memory evoked by the Danzig suitcase are all too familiar; of it, Kalman writes, ‘as if I need reminders of the Holocaust. That’s all I think about.’ Grief runs through her work, which draws on the partial survival of her own family, but by grounding her stories in objects, she tempers her grief with the longing and delight these objects elicit.  In the beautifully written The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), de Waal tells the story of his ancestors through a collection of 264 netsuke, tiny Japanese carvings, purchased in the 1870s in Paris and passed down by Charles, a cousin of de Waal’s greatgrandfather Viktor, to Viktor, to his son Iggie, and to Edmund himself. De Waal, a renowned British ceramic artist, has been making pots since he was a child and left school at seventeen to apprentice in England and Japan. ‘How objects get handled, used, and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me. It is my question,’ he writes. It is a desire to understand the netsuke better that leads him, albeit warily, into his family story. Inheriting the netsuke, he writes, ‘means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited about where the parameters of this responsibility might lie.’

Objects used to memorialise the Holocaust usually represent absence; they are invoked as traces of the dead and reinforce a story of destruction.  Quantity plays a vital role in this process of reinforcement. Twenty-five thousand pairs of shoes sit in the Auschwitz Museum, representing one day’s collection at the peak of the gassings. The museum also contains 3,800 suitcases and 12,000 pots and pans. The artist Christian Boltanski, whose Jewish father hid under the floorboards during the Nazi occupation of Paris, emerging in 1944 to beget Christian, has made a career out of memorial art. His work The Children of Dijon uses blurred, anonymous photographs of children’s faces to create dozens of tiny shrines; his 2010 installation, Personnes, includes a 50-tonne pile of old clothes. Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial in Vienna’s Judenplatz, Nameless Library, works on a similarly vast scale; it is a cast of the inside of a reading room with hundreds of books.

By ballasting their stories with the specificity of objects, Kalman and de Waal counteract this traditional narrative of loss with a celebration of the stubborn ‘thinginess’ of these things. This celebration both pulls the viewer repeatedly back to the present and plays with the darker desire to experience history and memory through these remainders of the past. Under Kalman’s brush, the Danzig suitcase, part of her suitcase collection, does not become a symbol of lost multitudes, as in the piles of suitcases at Auschwitz. Rather, she delights in the specifics of this one suitcase, announcing that it was made by Josef Winker and Sons, who owned a shop on Himmelpfortgasse. This irreducible thinginess, with its random humour, cannot be abstracted into the symbolic. Rather, the vibrancy of detail draws the viewer into the unique world of each object, a rich world replete with creativity, taste, humour, and individuality that counteracts absence with presence and loss with discovery.

The writer and scholar of Jewish philosophy Philipp Blom suggests in his book, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, that collecting is a way of building up meaning, a way to ‘make sense of the multiplicity and chaos of the world’ while also allowing collectors to ‘overcome the limits of their time and upbringing.’ For Kalman and de Waal, objects provide novelty and memory, meaning and escape. Kalman juxtaposes her image of the Danzig suitcase with other ordinary things she has amassed—egg slicers, pieces of white linen, notes on the mosses of Long Island. De Waal’s collection of netsuke—‘figures and animals and erotica and creatures from myth: they cover most of the subjects that you could expect in a comprehensive collection’—testifies to the fact that ‘someone with knowledge has put this group together.’ Kalman’s oeuvre contains collections within collections: her father-in-law, ‘transplanted in 1957 from soigneÅL Budapest to lumpy Poughkeepsie,’ collected insults in a tiny notebook, and her friend collects air from around the world in labelled jars.

The netsuke, and the exacting attention their individuality demands, help quell the unease de Waal feels about telling his family history; he catches himself turning it into dinner-party conversation and feels ‘slightly sickened by how poised it sounds.’ Recording his great-uncle’s memories of Vienna feels ‘formal and inappropriate…also greedy: that’s a good rich story, I’ll have that.’ Wary of falling into the nostalgia trap, he writes in the preface, ‘I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.’ As he rolls a netsuke of a medlar fruit between his fingers, he muses, ‘melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness…and this netsuke is an explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return.’ Tracing the netsuke allows de Waal to tell the story of his ancestors through the art, clothing and houses they acquired, loved and lost. De Waal’s ancestors, the Ephrussis, parlayed their success as Odessa grain merchants into a banking empire in the late nineteenth century, marrying into the Rothschild family and building fabulous residences in Vienna and Paris. Charles, a ‘spare son’ and the model for Proust’s character Charles Swann, avoided the world of finance to become an art collector and critic, planning assignations with his lover in Parisian dealerships at the height of Europe’s craze for Japonisme. He gave the netsuke as a wedding present to his Viennese cousin Viktor, de Waal’s great-grandfather, in the 1890s, and Viktor’s wife installed the figurines in her dressing room at the Palais Ephrussi for her children to play with, where they remained until World War II.

In March 1938, hope for an independent Austria was crushed by the Anschluss; the Palais Ephrussi was raided on the first night in an ‘unsanctioned Aryanisation.’ Next month, the house was turned into Gestapo headquarters, and most of de Waal’s family fled Vienna. His grandmother Elisabeth returned after the war to find that Austria, considering itself the ‘first victim,’ was unwilling to help her trace her family’s belongings. But back at the Palais Ephrussi, an ‘emptied house,’ she is reunited with the family maid Anna, who produces the 264 netsuke. She had smuggled them past the Gestapo and hidden them under her mattress during the war. Elisabeth takes the netsuke back to her home in England, where her brother Iggie claims them and takes them with him to Tokyo, where he spends the remaining forty-seven years of his life. De Waal now keeps them in an unlocked cabinet for his children to play with.  Throughout the text, the immediacy and charm of the netsuke short-circuit the vagueness of nostalgia. They provide a touch of gentle, selfreferential humour; the medlar is a hard object made from a fruit only edible when rotten, and another, of a cooper at work, is about ‘finishing something on the subject of the half-finished.’ Moments given over to description of the netsuke provide interludes of delight; there are rats, ‘because they give the maker the chance to wrap those sinuous tails round each other,’ and ratcatchers, erotic carvings and beggars bent over bowls. De Waal picks up this teasing humour; when his glasses break in Vienna, he jokes, ‘I am 400 yards… from the front door to Freud’s apartment, outside my paternal family home, and I cannot see clearly.  Bring on the symbolism.’ Nostalgia depends on an idealisation of the past, but this humour precludes fogginess; the netsuke give shape to the stories of this reluctant biographer, allowing him to work with specific memories rather than a vague concept of memory.

On the level of story, de Waal resists using the netsuke as tokens of hope to recuperate his memoir from loss. He writes, ‘the survival of the netsuke…is an affront. I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism.  Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not?’ The netsuke do not redeem his family story, but create a space for its telling while circumventing an overfamiliar Holocaust narrative of gradual loss.  Like de Waal, Kalman uses ‘explosions of exactitude’ as points of entry into her family memories, saving them from spiraling entirely into a story of disappeared worlds by providing moments of contrapuntal humour. In ‘Heaven on Earth,’ Kalman’s aunt tells her the story of Maishel Shmelkin, the genius of Lenin (the Russian village her family comes from), who once went for a walk wearing no trousers. Maishel recurs—again with no trousers—in Kalman’s stories for children. This story invokes a certain sadness for a vanished world of such characters, but an illustration of Maishel (from the chest up) shares space with drawings of Tolstoy, fruit platters from around the world and Kalman as a rabbit wearing shoes. The blog begins with an image of the Princesse de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette’s best friend; playing with autobiographical expectations, Kalman writes, ‘she is not my relative…there is no obvious reason she is here, other than that we may linger for a moment and say, “How extraordinary.”’

After an illustrated discussion of Dostoevsky’s love life (he was infatuated with the writer Polina Suslova, who hated him) Kalman’s conversation with her aunt becomes more personal. ‘We talk about my mother and why she did not marry the man she loved, but instead married my father, who accidentally fell out of the 2^nd-floor window of our apartment in Tel Aviv, but bounced and did not get hurt. Perhaps that is why he was a little crazy.’ Food punctuates these family stories, sometimes introducing and sometimes banishing gloom—the honey cake she shares with her aunt, baked in a Bundt pan (invented, as Kalman notes, by the late H. David Dalquist, who ‘had a very good obituary’), the Mocha Cream Cake from Mother’s Bakery on Johnson Avenue in Riverdale, N.Y. served at a 1963 tea party at which her parents were barely speaking, attended by a mustachioed lady ‘dentist [who] served meatloaf sprinkled with colored cookie crumbs.’

The randomness and humour of these surprising juxtapositions allow Kalman to conjure up but not surrender to loss, addressing it in her trademark tangential fashion. Sometimes, she achieves this within a single image. In ‘The Impossibility of February,’ Kalman evokes the lost world of Jewish Europe with an image of two matching objects:

‘twin sisters…there are black stripes on their sleeves. One sister…will become my mother-in-law.’

The setting is not depicted in the image but written in careful curlique—Budapest. The vanished pre-war community is recalled, but as backdrop; Kalman’s reference to the sisters’ matching yellow dresses with black trim protects the image from the vagueness of nostalgia and introduces a note of delight.  The final instalment of The Principles of Uncertainty, ‘Finale’, is a masterpiece of selective juxtaposition and object celebration. Her depictions of Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans post-flood sit alongside a cheeseburger deluxe from her favourite coffee shop (Joe Junior, where ‘you cannot order a deluxe grilled cheese sandwich—there are limits to deluxe’) and Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, balancing a giant wig on her head ‘at the tender age of nine or ten. She did it. Amazing.’ At the close of The Hare with Amber Eyes, de Waal notices that the netsuke—a sleeping rat, the medlar, the eponymous rabbit—have been moved around by his children. ‘It is not just things that carry stories with them,’ he writes. ‘Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina.’ Fittingly, he is unsure whether this patina is a process that adds or rubs away. In Kalman and de Waal’s stories, it may be both.

Fran Bigman is a PhD student in English at Cambridge studying the representation of abortion in British literature and film. After university, she spent two years teaching English at a high school in rural Western Japan.

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.

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While in Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre? A Singing Play (1941–1942) words and images are combined from the start, Daghani often presented the media side by side, complementing each other. This is the form adopted in his original slave labour camp diary, which records the experiences of Jews deported to the Mikhailowka labour camp (south-west Ukraine) and the Bershad ghetto (Transnistria). However, the two media became more closely interconnected in later works, notably his micrographic designs in which tiny words are set out in visual arrangements, or fused into hybrid hieroglyphic forms of an impenetrable hermetic language.

In his book The Building in which We Had a Narrow Escape, Daghani refers to his experiences in the slave labour camp at Mikhailowka, to which he and his wife, Nanino, were deported in June 1942. The notes that he made secretly in the camp formed the basis of a number of post-war diaries in which he combined his wartime material with later memories and reflections. When the 1960 German-language publication of his diary prompted legal investigations into the widespread killings in the camps in Ukraine, Daghani incorporated passages from the gathered testimonies into his diaries, further challenging the conventional separation between document and memory.

The Building focuses on one particular episode in their escape from Ukraine in July 1943, a nail-biting sequence of fateful events and near misses. The text ends with a quotation from Exodus, as a form of thanks for their survival, and part of a letter from the engineer Werner Bergmann. In August 1943, Mikhailowka was attacked by partisans and, while some escaped, the remaining slave labourers were relocated to the nearby camp of Tarassiwka where, as the Red Army advanced, they were all shot by their German captors. They were buried in the mass grave in the cherry orchard, forming the poignant title of Daghani’s diary: The Grave is in the Cherry Orchard.

The text of The Building is handwritten in the artist’s characteristic neo-Gothic script, rendering it highly visual and almost granting it the status of a legal document or sacred medieval manuscript. So obviously time consuming to produce, it signals a work of particular value or significance as well as authenticity. At the same time, the aestheticized writing and ornamentation may be seen as a distancing device; rather than write in his own hand, Daghani adopted a stylized form that enhances his authority.

In transforming words into images Daghani drew on the tradition of micrography in which minute words are written as abstract or representational forms. It is a practice found in medieval Hebrew and Islamic manuscripts and decorations, often as a means of overcoming the prohibition on images in religious contexts. In Hebrew manuscripts, for example, micrographic forms may be found in the writing of marginal notes or Masorah, adding a decorative border to the Biblical text. Daghani’s micrographic works are presented as autonomous word-image configurations rather than as supplementary decoration. In his most striking example he inscribes the names of dead slave labourers from Mikhailowka into the contours of a woman’s face, creating a very human form of memorial.

The book also contains eighteen sketches in black ink on silver paint, many of which are based on the drawings and paintings Daghani managed to smuggle out from Mikhailowka and the Bershad ghetto. Some of these drawings are memory-based; he not only rewrote his diary but remade many wartime images later on, appending to them further memories or new thoughts, often reworking them in materials previously available. Indeed, the persistence of memory is central to Daghani’s practice as evident in the book’s dedication: ‘To Nanino — this playback 1942/1943’.

These images are sketches and function as fragments, detail or quotation rather than as finished works. Each has a suggested narrative of its own: the face of an unknown slave; a guard; an SS officer, his status just visible on his collar; a guard with his rifle, dressed warmly against the cold; the misshapen feet of a sick person; figures huddled in prayer; the hands of a mother reaching out to her son, randomly shot by a guard; a wrapped body, handed down from an upper bunk in the camp accommodation. These last three images demonstrate the artist’s complex religious identity. In addition to the images of Jewish prisoners at evening prayer, his visual memories use Christian iconography, alluding to Christ on the cross and the Deposition from the Cross.

Primo Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved that: ‘Except for cases of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate […] because silence, the absence of signals, is in its turn a signal, but it is ambiguous, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can.’ Through his continual playback of words and images, Daghani attempted to provide not a definitive work but rather an acknowledgement that words and images can only be approximate to experiences. His legacy is a wealth of approximations in words, images, narrative and documentation in a practice that crosses stylistic borders, mixed media, materials and forms of representation. In them is a synthesis of past and present, private and public, history and memory. To those expecting a catalogue of sensationalist violence, Daghani’s art will seem understated, but through visual understatement he is able to transcend atrocity and accentuate the dignity of the prisoners. In portraying the daily routines — from working parties and soup queues to sleeping quarters and evening prayers — he returns to the human subject a sense of meaning and a spiritual dimension beyond the squalor and brutality of the camp.

Deborah Schultz is Research Fellow in the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, Department of History, University of Sussex. She is co-editor with Professor Edward Timms, of Arnold Daghani’s Memories of Mikhailowka:  The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009) and co-author with Edward Timms, of Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani (London: Routledge, 2009) first published as a special issue of Word & Image, vol. 24, no. 3 (July–September 2008).

The Arnold Daghani Collection is housed at the University of Sussex. To visit contact library.specialcoll@sussex.ac.uk or phone 01273 678157.

Storeroom (Project 2) by David Breuer-Weil, oil on canvas, 200 x 400cm

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. It has often been noted that Jews are among the most dominant collectors of art and antiques in the world today. Jacques Barzun wrote of nineteenth- century art becoming ‘the gateway to the realm of spirit for all those over whom the old religions have lost their hold’.Collecting is a way to amass portable assets, something that has always been attractive to Jews. I believe that collecting can, as an activity, represent diametrically opposing tendencies. Among these is the desire to belong, on the one hand, and the need to be radical — to embrace one’s outsider status — on the other. The question is whether it is nobler to be different or to conform. This age-old question defines Jewishness and is played out in six figure sums in the field of art collecting.
In the decades after Emancipation in nineteenth-century Europe, Jews were attracted to the art scene in different ways. Some of the wealthy went to the Parisian salons and bought Bougereaus, Makarts and other artists in fashion. Others decorated their homes with art by the lesser names of the salon. But the Jewish patrons and collectors of that period who helped shape the art revolution from 1870–1955 were more interested in what was going on outside the bright lights of the salon. They frequented the alternative exhibitions, like the un-juried Salons des Independents or break-away, ‘secessionist’ displays in the German-speaking world to purchase works that others ignored, derided or found ugly and unacceptable. The great early patrons of Picasso and Matisse, Leo and Gertrude Stein, bought Matisse’s now seminal ‘Fauve’ portrait of a woman (now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), enthralled by what they considered to be a ‘hideous daub’, while steadily acquiring many of Picasso’s most difficult early works including that modern Mona Lisa, the ‘Portrait of Gertrude Stein’.
Jews were among the first to have the courage to embrace the spiritual and political revolutionary aspects of much of the great pre-war German and Austrian art (which is why several of the most prominent Holocaust restitution cases revolve around works by Klimt, Schiele and Kirchner). And in most cases the patrons of this kind of work considered it to be as sacred a mission as the artists themselves. Jewish dealers such as Herwarth Walden were passionate adherents of the values of the art they encouraged, from Kandinsky to early Chagall and Kirchner.
It is true that what is Bohemian and radical one year becomes mainstream the next. Picasso, Matisse and Chagall became the darlings of the aristocracy in later years. But the crucial difference between then and now is that for the genuine avant-garde artists and patrons alike, no conformist activity was ever built into their project from the outset. Although Picasso owned massive houses in later years he still lived like a gypsy in them, and he remained an armchair communist to his dying day. Virtually every significant artist of the pre-war and immediately post-war period was some form of socialist or idealist. Wealth and popularity were a bonus. But these artists feared it could damage the integrity of their art. The great post-war avant-garde painters such as Pollock, Newmann and Rothko were all idealists who believed in the spiritual possibilities of art; for them money was a necessary nuisance. Indeed it seems clear that both Pollock and Rothko were damaged by their celebrity: Pollock died in a drink-induced car crash and Rothko took his own life. For both men paramount was the freedom to express their inner life. The unconscious was everything, their belief in the discoveries of Freud and Jung a quasi-religion. Art was a sacred duty. They were latter-day Van Goghs. The idea of painting to feed a market was anathema to them.
The earlier avant-garde was deadly serious precisely because it represented a biting critique of mainstream culture. It was what Lionel Trilling described in Sincerity and Authenticity as ‘serious art, by which we mean such art as stands, overtly or by implication, in an adversary relationship to the dominant culture’. This is perhaps why the avant-garde attracted so many Jewish collectors in its authentic phase.
With the passing of the generation of the great Abstract Expressionists the art world was shaken up like never before. The new thing was Pop Art. Pop Art celebrated the materialistic mass consumerism of America. It was all about shallow appearances, products, celebrities, stars, and, within a few years when the works started to sell well, all about money. This was the crucial break. Whereas earlier avant-garde art was typically critical of bourgeois culture, Warhol was the king of the banal world of the market place. In his work and in his statements he denied the importance of artistic or spiritual depth; as he famously said, his art was ‘all on the surface’.
Warhol called himself a business artist and stated that ‘good business is the best art’. Despite his graphic brilliance, it is in this aspect of his work that he has proven to be by far the most influential artist of the late twentieth-century. Since Warhol, the brand has mattered more than anything else. Rather than relish the outsider status of his artistic forebears, he actually started a fashionable celebrity magazine.
This art of high capitalism, stripped bare of idealism or spirituality, elicited a new breed of collector: the collector-investor. Many began to see the art world as an extension of the business world rather than as a platform for experimentation and alternative choices. Warhol famously stated that art is ‘what you can get away with’, encouraging short cuts in the making of art, less emphasis on formal training in art schools, and a widespread belief that the making of art is an easy, often throwaway undertaking. This drift away from the traditional skills of art-making cannot, of course, be attributed to Warhol alone, but if a machine can produce among the most successful art of its time, why struggle with the skills of painting and drawing? The result, over the coming generations, was the gradual shift away from the idea of painting as a private activity that explored the unconscious and personal to something less personal and more product-driven. As before Jewish dealers and collectors were at the forefront of supporting this kind of art: from the Mugrabis (a holding numbering as many as eight hundred Warhols), to the support of Murakami by the Lindemanns in America, to Eli Broad in Los Angeles (a massive collector of Warhol, Koons and Hirst) and many others. Without the support of Jewish collectors and dealers the market for this kind of mass-produced consumer art would be considerably weakened.
I would argue that support for this kind of art is fuelled by completely different objectives which reflect the different position that Jews have enjoyed since World War II, both in America and England, the main centres of the collecting world. Part of the change is due to the war itself, which devastated the educated, often profoundly expert Jewish collecting classes of Western and Central Europe, who were among the first to buy German and Austrian Expressionist works (interestingly Ronald Lauder has sought to recreate this vanished world in both the style and contents of his remarkable Neue Galerie in Vienna which houses his collection of works by Klimt, Schiele and their contemporaries). The milieu that valued cultural expression in this way was annihilated by the war. Some of the dealers regrouped in New York afterwards, but the cultural world of pre-war Paris and Berlin never recovered. The centre of the art world moved from Europe to New York.
For approximately ten years (1945–1955) the prominent artists and dealers in New York publicly maintained the values of their European predecessors, in part encouraged by the presence of many important émigré painters such as Beckmann, Chagall, Ernst and many others. But as we have seen, by the 1950s the quintessential American art form, Pop Art, prevailed, corresponding with the massive rise in the advertising industry and the gradual dominance of high capitalism over ideologically-powered activities. Whereas Jewish collectors and dealers were drawn to the idealistic, radical, socially-motivated outsider art of the period 1870–1955, the relative security and comfort of Jewish life in America may have encouraged more mainstream tastes. Furthermore, it left Jews feeling no identification with outsiders or radical elements and certainly no need to employ art as an ongoing critique of modern society. The shortcomings of much current mainstream art are increasingly noted by leading critics such as Robert Hughes, Julian Stallabrass, Anthony Julius, Donald Kuspit and others, but their voices are generally ignored by the art world. Kuspit argues that a great deal of fashionable art, plagued by over-commercialisation and advertising, has a tendency to be mass-produced and banal and should be termed ‘post-art’. He has dubbed the new generation of mostly little-known artists ‘The New Old Masters’. In addition, he has noted that while it is a commonly held view among modern dealers and collectors that everything significant has already been discovered, they have not even attempted to search out significant pictorial talents; the current collectors are largely unaware of the art being made in the studios away from the bright lights. So far, few prominent collectors have identified the new outsider art as a distinct genre. But this could well become a new development as the financial world begins to lose its appearance of invincibility, and the blatant materialism of recent years gives way to greater introspection. The sheer number of critics and artists who are now reacting against the system could be termed a silent revolution.
Exceptional collectors in the post-war period include Charles Saatchi who has bought art in such quantities over the years that several masters have emerged from his stable. Anita Zabludowicz does not collect in order to resell and seems willing to take genuine aesthetic risks. But in these and other cases their level of influence is too often based on wealth rather than expertise, and the impact on new directions can be as negative as they are positive, especially when the art selected for inclusion in prominent exhibitions is lacking in true power or quality, as is often the case.
If Jewish collectors in the post-war years were not such connoisseurs as their pre-war precursors, the Jewish painters of this period are beginning to look increasingly exceptional compared to much of the more temporal art produced in the same period. While the art world typically eschewed traditional image making in the form of depictive or symbolic paintings, Jews came to be among the greatest practitioners in this area, despite the constant changes in fashion, for example, Freud, Arikha, Kossoff, Auerbach and Kitaj. This suggests that the truly meaningful influence of Jews in the post-war period may well be as artists rather than as collectors of new art, especially considering the influence and legacy of the abstract but intensely spiritually-driven artists Rothko and Newman as well. For both artists, Jewish philosophy and religion were major inspirations, as much as in the more anecdotal art of Kitaj. Apart from these great Jewish abstract painters, some of the finest figurative painters today (many trained by Hirschberg) come out of Israel. In England, School of London painters and some of the artists of my generation now seek to produce art of real depth and intensity. Is it possible that what was once traditional has now come full circle? Is it more radical to paint a picture than to put another ready-made on a plinth? For most of the last part of the twentieth-century such artists were respected but definitely considered old fashioned. There is evidence now that things have changed and that certain new collectors are more interested in depth than breadth. It is my view now that genuine innovation is to be found by digging deeper, not by running longer to find the latest novelty. The recent success of relatively traditional painters such as Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans certainly suggests that the art world  has a greater interest in traditional genres and serious subject matter, while it is also true that it is easier to collect and display a canvas than an installation or video.
At a time of global terrorism and economic meltdown, banal art may no longer express the age. The brilliance and panache of Warhol, Koons, Murakami and Hirst should not be denied, but it is now hard to be satisfied with art that is not serious. We have lost what is surely the most valuable thing about art: its ability to transcend business, its making sense of pain and suffering, its ability to record the passing of time and generations, in short its humanity. And a work of art is most human when it is most personal.
The global business had a stock exchange in the form of high-profile auctions that could determine the financial value of the products quite accurately and regularly (in the past collectors would hold their art for at least a generation; now two years seems like a long time). Quite naturally collectors became excited that something they had bought recently had gone up in value exponentially, and in recent years this has become typical rather than atypical. Art is more often bought for investment than for love, and there are a lot of investors, which means a demand for more works by each artist, more art fairs, more people buying with their ears and not their eyes. As the brand names get bigger, the artists behind them need to produce more work, usually with the help of teams of assistants.
Now, the vast majority of artists have virtually no patronage while the stars at the top are over-patronised, often to the detriment of their output. This is partly a product of globalization. Whereas in the past local artists would have supplied art for local collectors (giving birth to different national schools of art, each with its own indigenous flavour), now collectors from all over the world want to buy into the same products created by the officially approved artists. Apart from impoverishing local talent and the very idea of cultural global differences, this tends to create a blander, less partisan type of art.  There was great excitement about the raw, politically and emotionally charged new art from China and Korea. But the whole scene rapidly degenerated into a replay of the Western contemporary art game: buy cheap, promote and sell off at auction. Few artists get the chance to develop once the brand product has been defined and marketed. And missing from much of the recent Chinese art is a sense that this is indigenous art, rather than a Chinese version of Western artistic stereotypes.
I know several collectors who buy works that they have never seen. Collectors often want to know only the brand and the size of a painting, which will be sold as soon as the price is right. As Donald Kuspit put it: ‘The void left by the absence of faith in art is filled by the presence of money.’
In the art world you can become a superstar if two or three wealthy collectors buy your work publicly, even if it means nothing to critics, academics or the public. This makes the art world feudal rather than democratic. A new moneyed collector who started collecting a year ago is a thousand times more influential in the art world than a seasoned, sixty-year-old expert art historian with dozens of respected books on the subject to his name or, for that matter, the opinion of any leading senior artist.
While private collectors were once the very tool that allowed alternative artists to continue working, now they often represent the new academy, an academy even more opaque in its workings than the very salons against which the old European avant-garde railed.     I do not think that you can turn the clock back. There are many interesting and relevant qualities in much recent mainstream art, even if true masterpieces are in short supply. But the art world as a system, because it often prioritises investment, power and decoration above profundity and social function, has stripped modern art of its meaning within culture as a whole. This is reflected in the fact that for every article on the aesthetic or spiritual merits of a new exhibition, there may be twenty that analyse the current values at auction. Art needs to re-emerge as a spiritual and psychological force rather than as a financial instrument.
The early Jewish collectors who bought Van Gogh, Matisse, Munch or Picasso saw something spiritually significant in these works. They felt (and still feel) intense and prophetic. More importantly they achieved what Judaism itself has always set out to achieve:they elevated the material matter of paint into something higher, transforming the physical into something timeless. Genuinely avant-garde art usually has this quality of uncertainty, of being ill at ease with the world as it is handed to us, of not accepting easy solutions. Van Gogh, the greatest of all the artist-prophets (and an artist especially championed by Jewish gallerists and experts from 1900 onwards such as Paul Cassirer), literally turned each brush stroke into a note of prayer celebrating the beauty of nature.

David Breuer-Weil was a director of Sotheby’s for several years before leaving the commercial art world to concentrate on his work as an artist. With his series of ground-breaking exhibitions of monumental paintings The Projects he has emerged as one of Britain’s most powerful and innovative contemporary painters. He lives and works in London with studios in Willesden and Hampstead.

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.

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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

In her 2004 comedy, Tomorrow We Move, Belgian-born filmmaker, Chantal Akerman created what has been termed a ‘Marx Brothers film made by Erich Rohmer’: Charlotte, a writer of erotic fiction, finds herself constantly interrupted by her newly widowed mother, who has come to live with her. Realising that they need a bigger place they are forced to open their cluttered, private space to a flow of potential new tenants. During the course of this invasion a diary belonging to Charlotte’s grandmother is discovered in a cupboard. Mother and daughter read its contents and are put in direct touch with the generation destroyed in the Shoah. In a moment of tenderness the mother turns and kisses her daughter.

The transmission of trauma in this case the Shoah, is a dominant theme in Akerman’s work. Trauma is passed via ‘the sacrificed generation’ (who, having survived, then had to sacrifice their own dreams to ensure the continuity of often desperate daily life) on to the second/third generation who, like Akerman herself, often became creative people haunted by the presence of a past not their own. These third generation creatives inherit stories with holes which they must fill with invented memory. Intergenerational transmission of trauma was recognised in the 1970s and was explored through art, literature and film in the 1990s: Gila Almagor’s The Summer of Avia, David Grossman’s See Under Love, the paintings of Bracha Ettinger in Israel, and in Britain Judith Tucker, Barbara Loftus and Lily Markiewicz are just a few artists we can name working with what second generation theorist, Marianne Hirsch¹ has named ‘post-memory’.

Tomorrow We Move relates intimately to the video at the heart of the installation To Walk Beside One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge², also created in 2004 and shown this summer at the Camden Arts Centre. The viewer approaches by walking through a double spiral structure of transparent tulle on which projected words stream too fast to read but leave suggestive traces of the artist’s thoughts. Passing through this curving, broken space into the next room, a transparent tulle scrim hangs across it on which is projected a portrait of a young woman of the 1920s. A page of handwritten Polish text wanders across the scrim, through which can be seen a double-screen, out of focus, video projection. At the heart, literally, of the installation, is this video of Chantal Akerman’s personal story. In it, the viewer actually sees her bringing the notebook/diary to her mother and asking her to read it. As her mother translates from the Polish, she realizes that it is the writing of her own mother as a teenager, a mother who was murdered in her thirties in 1942 in Auschwitz.

Having struggled with the poignant text that begins ‘I am woman!’ and tells the diary that she is, therefore, alone with the book as her only confidant, the mother falls silent and reads. At this stage the viewer cannot know what she is reading. Its effect is, however, to make her turn, weeping slightly, caress her daughter’s cheek and kiss it.

What Nelly Akerman has read is her own inscription in 1945 to her lost mother when, barely alive herself, she received the diary as the only relic of her. But the diary was then found by each of her own daughters, who themselves added their compassionate, childish inscriptions to their bereaved, motherless mother.

When I first saw this work, in Berlin in October 2007, I was entirely undone by this moment of the video, this wordless, pathos-laden gesture that Akerman would introduce into her fiction film, the invented story. It felt to me as if an entire cinematic journey had been undertaken by Akerman, and her viewers, to arrive at that moment with her mother in front of the camera’s discovering gaze. Somehow this work made it necessary to review Akerman’s entire oeuvre within the context of this moment. In a long and now truly appreciated career as one of Europe’s leading filmmakers, Akerman has explored marginality and displacement but only in this video has she finally found a means to confront the unspoken history of one death — the death that is her and her mother’s own personal heritage of historical rupture as private loss.

This is not a sentimental resolution. The spontaneous gesture — the kiss — does not repair the rupture or erase the past. It is the moment that the past becomes memory by allowing a movement into narrative that fills the holes. The mother later acknowledges the momentousness of this event: ‘I am glad that I lived to see this day.’ The filming gives access to that impossible space of mourning and compassion for the parent, the painful relief of sharing an unspoken history. The physicality of her hitherto unshed tears and her touch allows the living-surviving body to speak, enabling the narrative that releases silence into common memory. Afterwards, mother and daughter begin to talk. They discuss her mother’s story, experiences in the camp, making a new life afterwards, and the process which allowed Chantal Akerman to become the artist neither grandmother nor mother had been allowed to become. They talk about her father’s resistance to what he saw as a vulnerable career in film-making for a young woman. They mention the first screening of Saute Ma Ville on television when her father was alive. (A young girl sings, dances, cooks and gasses herself, blowing up her whole town Such invisible and illogical violence was not critically received at the time as an inscription of trauma, and certainly not related back to the burden of family history. I would contend, however, that the film registers  a strongly traumatic inflection in this gesture of absolute destruction, as if Akerman had succumbed to a sense of inherited destruction which she felt compelled to act out). She avows that she never again managed this perfect combination of tragedy and the comic that she relentlessly sought, a combination that, she suggests, is itself symptomatic of survivorship.

Was it conceivable in 1968, when she made Saute Ma Ville — an eleven-minute homage to Chaplin and Keaton inspired by Jean Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) — that Chantal Akerman would become one of the most creative, consistent and important artists to reflect on the legacy of silences borne by survivors of the Shoah? As Bracha Ettinger³ writes in her Notes on Painting: Matrix Halal (a) Lapsus in 1992:

My parents are proud of their silence. It is their way of sparing others and their children from suffering. But in this silence, all is transmitted except the narrative. In silence, nothing can be changed in the narrative which hides itself.

To Walk Beside One’s Shoelaces directly brings us face to face with the artist’s mother, the deepest referent of all her films. It is here that the acclaim Akerman received as a feminist filmmaker, exploring the mother-daughter relationship and domestic life, melds with her films about dislocation and otherness. The key to everything lay in the pages of her grandmother’s fragmentary diary, which alone persisted in the chasm across which her own mother’s post-Auschwitz life was strung. Chantal Akerman tells us: ‘I have talked so much about my mother in these films. Have I really worked so many years around her, about her? … I even went to film her one Sunday with Renaud Gonzalez … it was Renaud who filmed her, filmed us, my mother and me. It was during the filming of Tomorrow We Move and it was the first time that she and I were together in front of a camera, even if it was just a little digital camera.’

Griselda Pollock is an art historian and cultural analyst at the University of Leeds where she directs the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History.

1Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames; Photography, Narrative and Post-Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)

2In French, the phrase means ‘to be out of it’, but Akerman also suggests that it refers to her own habit of walking with shoelaces undone. The empty fridge refers to her mother’s anxieties about lack of food which pressured Akerman to overeat as a child.

3Bracha Ettinger, (Matrix Halal (a) Lapsus: Notes on Painting, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p.85.

All citations of Chantal Akerman are from written materials by the artist kindly provided by Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris.

All images from Women From Antwerp in November (Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre), 2007 Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris

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.

Did I find Fishbone’s piece funny? Well, no. In fact, nothing in this exhibition of laughter made me laugh. There could be several reasons for this. Perhaps the show set up too high an expectation for emotional outburst, a factor that comedians at comedy clubs learn to manipulate. There certainly is funny visual art but perhaps the art exhibited was meant to contemplate humour instead of actually make people laugh. Maybe the context was difficult; people don’t tend to laugh when standing-up, especially if they are shlepping heavy bags through a gallery. If the leading question of the show was: Can humour transcend culture? Can things be funny in different contexts? The answer was clear: not really.

Questions of cultural specificity mixed in with loud rabbi-based one-liners got me thinking. What is the relationship between Jewish humour and visual art? There has been no dearth of writing and talking about Jewish humour in the performance and literary worlds, if not in Britain than certainly in North America. But does this Jewish humour extend to creatives who express themselves in the visual realm? Does Jewish humour translate to the fine arts and, if so, how? Is there a mode of Jewish humour created specifically by the fine arts, and what Jewish concerns might it reflect and address?

This question was tricky for two reasons. The first complication is defining Jewish fine art, a dilemma considered by several scholars who have contemplated the ambiguous role of Jewish identity in image production. Is this art made by Jewish artists, art that explicitly addresses Jewish concerns (according to the artist’s intention), art that critics have taken to express Jewish concerns, or even art that has a ‘Jewish sensibility’? There is no established Jewish artistic canon and there was no clear point from where to begin my study. But, as someone who has spent a decade working in the visual arts, I have been struck by certain motifs and comedic stylings.

The second complication is defining Jewish humour. From Freud to Avner Ziv and Ruth Wisse, those who have pontificated on the topic have, while focussing mainly on verbal humour, identified several different strategies at work within Jewish humour. For instance, most agree that it frequently includes self-deprecation. This disparagement might function in order to downplay Jews’ achievements and help them ‘fit in’ — if Jews make themselves look inferior, or even take-on stereotypes, perhaps they will be less intimidating and more accepted by others. Famous examples of this self-denigration include the following:

‘I’m very proud of my gold pocketwatch. My grandfather, on his death bed, sold it to me’ (Woody Allen)

My one regret in life is that I’m not someone else’ (Woody Allen)

‘Rapists tap me on the shoulder and ask, “have you seen any girls?”’ (Joan Rivers).

Perversely, Jewish self-flagellation might be a way to come to terms with or control the fear of anti-Semitism by adopting and expressing it:

In 1938, a German Jew asks another why he’s reading der Shturmer? His friend answers, ‘Everywhere else it says Jews are in trouble, Jews are terrible. But look at the headlines here — ‘Jews are rich’, ‘Jews control the government’, ‘Jews run the media’. At least in der Shturmer, it sounds like we’re doing well!’

Adopting anti-Semitic opinions might also be a way to debunk anti-Semitism:

‘A lot of people say to me, “Why did you kill Christ?” I dunno, it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know’ (Lenny Bruce)

‘Alright, I’ll clear the air once and for all, and confess:Yes, we did it. I did it, my family. I found a note in my basement. It said: “We killed him, signed, Morty.”’ (Lenny Bruce)

‘I hope the Jews did kill Christ. I’d do it again. I’d fucking do it again — in a second’ (Sarah Silverman)

Self-deprecation can also be a strategy for offering palatable social critique, by making one’s self the object of criticism, as well as for acknowledging and coming to terms with one’s imperfections.

Aside from self-deprecation, writers have agreed that Jewish humour might emerge from a self-conscious anxiety about potential danger and a resulting sensitivity to the surrounds; it can be very observational, obsessing over minutiae:

‘The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Pretty impressive. Also pretty lucky for them. Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with? Not much of a weapon there. Corkscrews. Bottle openers. “Come on, buddy, let’s go. You get past me, the guy in back of me, he’s got a spoon. Back off. I’ve got the toe clippers right here.”’ (Jerry Seinfeld).

Sometimes, this might even appear to be faux Talmudic-style reasoning — logical, but then paralogical, twisting situations and parameters. Jewish humour, claim some, is part of a coping mechanism for dealing with trauma and making dangerous situations seem less frightening:

An old Jewish man was hit by a car. He was lying on the ground, and the paramedic asked, ‘Are you comfortable?’ The man thought for a moment and answered, ‘I make a living’.

Humour might be used by Jews as a way to manage hypersensitivity and mollify the experience of emotions, to mitigate extreme emotions of anger and love, as well as to reduce inter-personal conflict. Humour can also function as a non-violent means of attack, retaliation, or expression of the negative (see Bruce and Silverman above).

There is an argument that Jewish humour is avoidant, allowing us to veil negative emotions and avoid conflict. On the whole, it is granted the function of social catharsis, offering group solidarity and belonging, by showing that, as Jews, we share a particular world experience:

‘Why don’t Jews drink? It interferes with our suffering’ (Henny Youngman.)

Others credit humour as being a much needed and potentially fruitful mechayeh — jokes can give you sideways perspectives and open up possibilities for creative thinking:

‘Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends’ (Woody Allen.)

Keeping all these functions and characteristics in mind, I wondered if visual Jewish humour had similar functions? In this short essay, at the risk of generalizations or cultural and academic faux-pas, I will briefly explore this question with reference to artworks that I find funny, and Jewish (or at least Jew-ish).

Much visual humour is achieved through the distortion of boundaries and extreme juxtaposition. London-based artist Oreet Ashery created an alter-ego for herself in Marcus Fisher, a Chassidic Jewish man. In her Self

Oreet Ashery: Self-Portrait as Marcus Fisher I

Portrait as Marcus Fisher Ashery portrays herself as Marcus, with a large breast peeking through his Chassidic garb. This is certainly a funny piece of work — I would say, laugh-out-loud — the humour located in the visual immediacy and content juxtaposition. She is both man and woman, bending gender and questioning the most basic assumptions.Brilliantly, the image connotes yeshiva and bra-burning at the same time, challenging strict rules with extreme liberation. Her character examines the breast lovingly as if it is both strange and familiar, conflating self and other, mother and son, lover and loved, self-portrait and the recording of a dramatic performance.   Ashery isn’t new to a line of feminist Jewish artists who consider the body and present it as a site of alternates and contradictions in a humorous way. The 1970s American feminist art movement was in large part driven by Jewish women making funny art about their pulkes and pupiks. In 1972, American artist Eleanor Antin created Carving: A Traditional Sculpture — a photographic documentation of her 36-day attempt to lose weight and mould her Jewish body into a more ‘ideal feminine form’. She photographed her naked self first thing in the morning, presenting the photos as a type of scientific table, with uncomfortable echoes of eugenic and racial representations. The jarring of the feminine body with the square diagram and her ambivalent desire to conform poke fun at accepted ‘ideals’ about the female body.

In these works the female body, objectified in traditions of Western art as sacred and sensual, becomes the subject. No longer sacred or sensual it becomes a site of contradiction and subversion in a humorous way — the late American artist Hannah Wilke memorably chewed up wads of bubble gum and stuck them on her naked body to look like a proliferation of female genitals. The humour stems from the witty reframing of female body elements which are disguised, and de-contextualized, juxtaposing light and serious, adornment and core.

But how is the humour used? It seems that the humour functions in several ways: to confront taboo and discomfort; to make strong statements palatable to a wider audience; and to offer playful alternatives to traditional binaries. Challenging tradition and authority, this is also a humour of the underdog. These self-portraits critique others, but use the self as the site of the attack. A comment on patriarchy involves them sarcastically recreating and thus owning it on the female body. This parody enables control and assuages anxiety.

The taboo-busting subversion of Jewish feminist visual humour is explicit and largely content driven. But a different form of visual humour can be found in more ‘domestic’ art, depicting homes and families, in which content is juxtaposed with form. Here the everyday is stretched to importance by being rendered through the deliberate and slow activity of painting, showing both a serious and a less serious side at the same time, a stance for comedy. This is a Jewish humour that ‘lightens’; a humour that serves to tackle the intensity of family links and of communal obligation and to embrace the paradox of feeling both strangled and nurtured. Scenes of family life may not be inherently comic but there can be great inventive humour in the play of form and content. Cartoonish representations of family members, the home, and sometimes the self, depict these subjects in an almost parodic light, emphasising and often poking fun at dysfunctions within relations. One can see this characterization in the images of Anita Klein, Julie Held, Mark Gertler, Tim Hyman, and even Marc Chagall, in which mothers and daughters, depicted in heavy paint, watch trashy television together, and exquisitely dressed women are on the verge of floating away from their darkly-clad lovers.

Hyman’s depiction of his mother at the centre of the canvas, and as an un-focused and crass character (in Yiddish, she seems to be more of a ‘grepser’ than a ‘grebber’) appears to be a caricature of the Jewish mother; however, by placing himself in the picture as well, as the painter who is both in the room yet removed from the pose, he acknowledges his role in the relationship. The visual representation, where a scene is played out in one frame, might suggest more subtle questions about mother-son dynamics. The sharply character-based humour of these ‘domestic’ paintings is hardly surprising given that Yiddish, the original language of Jewish comic attitudes, is replete with words that describe nuances of personality, and in which a person might be characterised as a schlemiel or a schlimazel based on the particular brand of bad luck that they experience. (A schlemiel falls out the window; a schlimazel is the guy he falls on…)

Finally, humour of self-reference and context: Doug Fishbone, whose playful Joke Master Jr subverts expectations and associations by placing corny Jewish jokes in a rarefied gallery setting. This is certainly humour of context through juxtaposition, in which the artist playfully questions not just the roles and meanings of Jewish jokes but also Jewish cultural tradition. A large part of Fishbone’s oeuvre deals with comedy of context. Fishbone collects gags and one-liners from the internet and takes them out of context in order to highlight insecurities and prejudice. He replaced the original gags of a Joke Master Jr (a commercially available toy) with old Jewish jokes, told with the clichéd inflections of the classic Jewish joke teller. Through Fishbone’s ironic construction (literally, in plastic), the artist shows a kind of hyper-awareness of the shlock he presents.

Artist Adam Rolston uses Jewish-pop images in order to question the ‘branding’ of Jewish identity in America. In his 1993 Matzo Box Series Rolston recreates the familiar Passover object through reference to Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup can prints. The interrogation of Jewish cultural tokens is explored further in the paintings of Deborah Kass, whose oeuvre also includes Warhol parodies. In Enough Already (2006) and Hard to be a Jew (2003),  Kass expresses Yiddishisms using bright colours that reference pop culture and post-modern art. Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner (2006) refers to none other than Baby from Dirty Dancing. Kass quotes from and refers to popular Jewish characters in such a way as to question the authenticity and simplicity of these Jewish cultural claims. What do they actually mean and what value do they have?

In all, a couple of things emerged from this short investigation. For one, it appears that, in many of the works discussed, the artists were immigrants, creating practices in countries in which they are foreigners. As expressed in Laughing in a Foreign Language, being a foreigner implies being in a constant position of distance, and humour becomes a coping mechanism for the attendant feelings of alienation. Perhaps also it might be harder to take life seriously when one has known alternate value systems. This might reflect the eternal position of the wandering Jew — the constant humour of the tenant, of the outsider. Indeed, many would claim that the reason Jewish humour is so well received in America, is precisely because it is a country comprised entirely of outsiders. Secondly, it seems as if Jewish humour in visual art shares several characteristics with its verbal expression: both share a similar self-consciousness, both offer ways to mediate intense emotion and both invite an  alternate way of thinking. Based observational acuity Jewish humour in visual art works through increased imagery characteristics particularly exaggeration, transformation, appropriation, association, and juxtaposition. Perhaps, as the old joke goes, ultimately, there are really only a few kinds of jokes:

A Jewish family was sitting around table. The father said, 32. Everyone laughed. The mother said 28, everyone laughed. A guest asked what was going on? The daughter explained: there are only a limited number of jokes, and we know them all, so we just need to say the number. Wonderful, the guest thought, and decided to give it a try. 24, he said, but everyone was stone faced silent. He was confused as to why no one was laughing, and asked why. ‘It’s the way you told it.’

Judy Batalion is a Canadian writer, comedian and art historian based in London. She is currently compiling a collection of writing about comedy audiences to be published in 2009.

‘Retreating with disgust is not the same as apathy’. So says one of the peripheral characters in Richard Linklater’s 1991 film, Slacker. This statement rings true for several of the artists involved in Take The Bassa With Sababa, an exhibition of Israeli comics and graphic novels, and for me as a curator it certainly hits the nail on the head.

Overcoming simplistic, news-driven notions about what Israeli art might look like and deal with, or what it should deal with, and how, is a constant struggle. The challenge is to defend a space of artistic freedom, not only from restriction, but also from expectation. In a reality where the problems and even the solutions can seem black and white, it is often artistic and cultural activity that is the most nuanced, delving deepest into the reasons as to why Israel has struggled to solve the conflicts plaguing it since its formation. Art and the cultural discourse can often be the field in which the seeds for a solution are sown or buried, but all too often people lack the vision to notice, too engaged with the superficially immediate.

In the early 90s, I was an angry anarchist 20-something, living in Tel-Aviv. Taking my first steps away from full-on political activism, I was headed in the direction of expressing radical ideas through art. At the same time, Israel was entering an era of hope, with Rabin’s government engaged in peace negotiations with the PLO. The three-year period, which ended with Rabin’s assassination in 1995 and the subsequent change of administration in the 1996 elections, provided a relatively emergency-free window of cultural opportunities. Out of this was born a fascinating cultural scene, within which independent comic and graphic novel artists now operate.

There are plenty of material changes that account for these developments, all of which took root in the new hopeful political horizon. Most revolve around Israel’s increasing openness to global capitalist dynamics. The country’s first commercial television channel began broadcasting in 1992 (there had been only a single, state-sanctioned station until then), and cable television, mobile phones and internet were embraced in the following years. This technological revolution opened Israel up to the world and gave young Israelis a wider cultural context in which to work. The impact was felt almost immediately across all fields of intellectual activity — television, cinema, literature, music, and indeed art, including the comics which had been operating at its fringes. For better and for worse, the Jewish Israeli social glue — the utopian ethos of Zionism — was gradually disintegrating. (Many believe this began with the near-failure of the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and intensified through the Lebanon war of 1982, the first that was deemed unjust and unnecessary by many Israelis).  For better, because the disintegration allowed the different ethnic, social and cultural minorities within Israel to assert their identities. For worse because nothing had yet arrived to bind society in its place, resulting in a rampant, brutal and often corrupt market logic, as well as a growing attitude of decadence, which filled the huge gap.

The Vietnam-like atmosphere of the Lebanon war drove many youngsters to look outside Israel’s cultural boundaries, towards English punk and new wave. A club scene emerged that exerted a profound influence over urban culture — not just musically, but also in terms of journalism and art. The period of peace talks in the 90s, along with the changes it brought, added a new, cosmopolitan culture to the existing mix.

Back then, during the first Palestinian Intifada, as dozens of protest groups against the occupation appeared on the Israeli side, I was trying to apply revolutionary politics to the artistic field. However my baiting of ‘apathetic’ art ceased after seeing Slacker, when I finally realised that the blossoming of artistic practice in all shapes and forms, not just the politically mobilised ones I personally appreciated, was vital for the normalisation of Israel as a culture and a society. Those scenes, no matter how universal they appeared, either described Israel or added extra layers of contemplation and understanding — of its history, its politics, its culture, and most importantly, its people.

Contemporary Israeli comics began with the new journalism of the early 80s. Artists like Dudu Geva drew strips for Tel-Aviv’s influential new weekly newspaper, Ha’ir (The City), which became central to the development of Israeli satire. Yet it was not until the early 90s that a younger generation of artists began producing strips independently, some of whom (Rutu Modan comes to mind) were employed as illustrators in mainstream newspapers. Forming a critical link between Israeli politics and an emerging peripheral milieu of teenage malcontents — indie-minded mallrats, sci-fi nerds, punks and outsiders — was a comics fanzine called Stiyot Shel Pinguinim (Penguins’ Perversions). Its success lay in combining a truly punk grasp of the unruly, the provocative and the downright disgusting with a sharp satirical edge.

Amitai Sandy, one of its founders and publishers, represents the activist wing of the current Israeli comic scene. The sharp, uncompromising black humour of his political strips predated, predicted and influenced a generation of nihilistic kids, who rejected the ideals of the previous decade. Sandy’s latest and perhaps most brilliant campaign began as a reaction to the scandal of the Muslim caricatures published in Denmark; he  instigated a competition for anti-Semitic caricatures, drawn strictly by Jewish artists.

After the folding of Penguins’ Perversions, many of Sandy’s strips were banned by the newspapers who employed him. His treatment of taboo issues like the Holocaust evidenced a desire to break free from formal representations, especially within the Israeli educational system, seemingly reducing a horrific trauma to a banally familiar annual ritual of excorcism, marrying the sad story of the Holocaust with a happy end — Israel itself. In an era of disintegrating values and dissolving consensus, the system looked corrupt and empty, incapable of passing on its own heritage to the next generation, who deemd its storytelling manipulative and cynical. In that sense, Sandy represented a generation that had replaced the dominant narrative with its own propositions — propositions that were not always subversive in a negative way. Many young Israelis, for example, were rediscovering different strands of pre-war European Jewish culture, a culture divorced from the Zionist educational curriculum because it did not suit the identity shift from helpless European Jewish victim to the new strong Israeli that the authorities liked to portray. The regenerating searches for European Jewish roots were often accompanied by applications for EU passports, demonstrating an increasing alienation many youngsters felt towards the country of their birth, as well as a post-Zionist pragmatism that would probably have seemed absurd to the founders of the State. But for a new generation of Jews, Europe or America seemed like a safer place in which to make career plans and raise children.

A few years ago, Sandy formed the Dimona Comics Group, of which another Sababa participant, Meirav Shaul, is a member. Her neurotic and apparently apolitical portraits typify the kind of contemporary art that is key to understanding the Israeli psyche. Although Shaul’s portraits seem escapist, they encapsulate the concept of retreating in disgust, so important to understanding Israel’s youth. At first, Shaul’s CD covers and animated TV commercials seem to celebrate Israel’s rising young capitalist leisure culture. But the dark, fearful tone suggests a threatening environment from which one can only hide, a fearfulness many feel is imposed by the severity and hopelessness of the political situation.

The desire to retreat into a bubble — an enclave of dwelling totally devoid of any relation to daily reality — is often the way secular, hedonistic Tel-Aviv is perceived by other Israelis. However, these bubbles are not merely a privileged, apolitical escape to parties, yoga and quality coffee; rather, they serve as models for normality operating within a praxis of insanity. And with fine art still a relatively elitist domain, and protest art still too simplistic,  it is left to comics and graphic novels to strike the perfect balance between artistic excellence and a clear, comprehensive reflection of a state of mind.

Dula Yavne strikes this balance, reducing militarism to a colourful, innocent surrealism. One image, depicting an eyepatch-wearing child riding a miniature pink tank and performing a Nazi salute, might be seen as provocative. However the colourful presentation and continental elegance of her style hints at a more complex outlook. The image of the tank, along with the taboo-breaking comparison between Israel’s military operations and those of the Nazis are placed outside a political context and rendered playful, redundant and emblematic of Israel’s nihilistic young. Yavne’s approach is not confrontational per se, but transcends the polarity of for and against, replacing it with a sober and tantalising indifference.

Dismissed by some as pure escapism, the comic-book culture is in fact a new form of post-modern, disillusioned maturity. It is significant that while the Israeli political left is very much in decline, the cultural and artistic milieu is thriving. Its subversive insistence on normality, along with its love of complexity, absurdity, and contradiction, makes it perhaps the only source of real hope in a country stuck in horrific political deadlock. In the 80s and 90s it was easy to keep up with every independent manifestation of culture — a fanzine, an exhibition, a CD — whereas nowadays it is simply impossible; there is just too much going on. The younger generation is no longer waiting for saviours — it has become its own, in the face of tremendous hardship and adversity. In that sense, this exhibition, although encompassing a wide range of influential young artists, is by no means a representation of everything that is happening in this particular field. Hopefully it can serve as a satisfying first taste.

Avi Pitchon is an Israeli journalist, artist and curator based in London. He has written for Haaretz, Ha’ir, Maariv, and Yediot Acharonot newspapers and the Israeli art monthly Studio. He also co-curated Wonderyears: New Reflections on the Shoa and Nazism, in Berlin in 2003 and Conflicted: Contemporary Israeli Photography, as part of the Dash Festival, London, 2005.