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  • Editors' Note

While it extends the row of Ars Judaica volumes on the shelves of our devoted readers, the new issue is also a milestone in terms of the journal's activities. Ars Judaica has reached its thirteenth year–in Jewish tradition, the time of coming of age–a proper occasion for reflecting on what has been done and for pondering perspectives.

We also take this opportunity to express our deep gratitude and debt to the recently retired Prof. Emerita Bracha Yaniv, founder, editor, and soul of Ars Judaica, and to Mr. Yohai Goell, maven of language and style editing, copy editor extraordinaire, and devoted friend. They have stepped down after many years of dedicated work and, though no longer formal members of the team, continue to offer their kind assistance and helpful advice. We would also like to express our deep appreciation for the superb work of Mr. Ludo Craddock, Chief Executive Officer of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, who has distributed the journal worldwide for many years. We extend our thanks to all of them and wish them long years of health and continuing intellectual activity.

Dozens of articles published in the journal since 2005 showcase the range of approaches and recent developments in its field. The shifts in the history and understanding of Jewish art in scholarship as well as in the creation of art, curatorship, and connoisseurship were discussed at a September 2015 conference entitled Constructing and Deconstructing Jewish Art. The conference itself, the research workshop, and the round table discussion were all held under the auspices of the Department of Jewish Art at Bar-Ilan University and supported by the Israel Science Foundation and Ars Judaica.

The international forum shared the intellectual appeal of the conference organizers for a re-examination of traditionalist approaches to the history and interpretation of what is referred to as "Jewish" art. Responding to developments in the humanities, communication studies, social studies, and psychology, contemporary art history commonly embraces investigations of any image or object created for the sake of communicating meanings or emotions, and thus often replaces the term "art" with the semantically broader term "visual culture." Contemporary scholarly research and the academic teaching of ars judaica–like postmodern Jewish history and historiography–are increasingly distancing themselves from the search for any single comprehensive definition of the adjective "Jewish" as applied to art and culture. Instead, they tend to focus on the range and flexibility of both individual and collective Jewish self-identification throughout the ages. Scholarly discourse is moving steadily away from the oft-repeated generalizing questions "Does Jewish art exist?" and "What is Jewish art?" toward the narrower inquiry "What do Jewish contexts tell us about plastic arts in each given circumstance?" Today, more often than before, researchers investigate Jewish visual culture, its messages and receptions in their multiple intracultural settings and interactions with their surroundings.

The current volume opens with the Symposium "Constructing and Deconstructing Jewish Art," which includes the minutes of the round table discussion, and selected papers that were presented at the conference, and a thematically related article by Kathrin Pieren. Steven Fine questions the role of ideologies and the limits of semantic analysis of visual signs in the contemporary readings of ancient Jewish art. Exploring the impact of contemporary ideologies on the interpretation of a recently unearthed synagogue artifact in his "From Synagogue Furnishing to Media Event: The Magdala Ashlar," he deconstructs the [End Page 5] reception of Roman antiquity in the Land of Israel by Western and Israeli archeologists, art historians, and the general public. Sergey Kravtsov traces the meandrous transmission of legends about the Jewish past through cultures and artistic practices. His "Polish-Jewish Discourse in Art History: Standpoints, Objectives, Methodologies" deals with adoptions of the biblical archetype of divinely inspired architecture through Polish and Jewish thought in the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. In "Jewish Art and Modernity," Larry Silver proposes that in modern societies, all artists (and authors) of Jewish origin are marked by their Jewishness and develop a minority self-consciousness. He uses works by artists Maurycy Gottlieb, Marc Chagall, Ben Shahn, and Mark Rothko to support his argument. Scholar and artist Ben...

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