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Reviewed by:
  • The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times
  • Saskia Coenen Snyder (bio)
The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times. Edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. xii + 449 pp.

What makes a work of art Jewish? Should a painting, a piece of music, or a documentary film created by an artist with merely peripheral Jewish associations be considered Jewish art? Is there anything particularly Jewish about the American entertainment industry or about the urban layout and atmosphere of Tel Aviv, which was nicknamed “the first Hebrew city” by proud Zionists in the early twentieth century? Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp’s edited volume The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times does not offer one straightforward answer to these questions, and deliberately so. For them, and for the sixteen additional authors contributing to the volume, the aim is not to find a solution to the “Jewish art question” but, rather, to historicize and contextualize the problem. By relating cultural texts—architecture, film, dance, painting, music, sculpture, exhibitions, and vaudeville—to their local and historical specificity, the editors employ the aesthetic as a central conceptual category in the study of modern Jewish history. What makes a work of art Jewish is, from this perspective, less important than the question of what aesthetics can tell us about the modern Jewish experience.

The volume is organized thematically and divided into six sections, each of which includes a short and useful introduction. In “Culture, Commerce, and Class,” Nina Warnke, Judith Thissen, and Jonathan Karp explore the role of the New York art and music businesses and Yiddish theater in shaping Jewish artistic agendas. The second section, “Siting the Jewish Tomorrow,” delves into the political domain by observing music, architecture, and exhibition practices in the context of communist and Zionist ideologies, while “Lost in Space” engages the question of a [End Page 356] diasporic aesthetic. In “Portraits of the Artist as Jew” and “In Search of a Usable Aesthetic,” the fourth and fifth sections respectively, the essayists tackle the question of Jewish art and music in a variety of national contexts, including Germany (Walter Cahn and Zachary Braiterman), Russia (Olga Litvak), and the United States (Diana Linden, Mark Kligman, and Hankus Netsky). The sixth and last section, “Hotel Terminus,” engages the correlation between aesthetics and ethics in extremis and includes essays on the recovery of Nazi art loot (Charles Dellheim), on the Nazification of dance (Marion Kant), and on the production of memory in documentary film.

While this collection of essays is well-organized and coherent, the lingering question remains: Is there such a thing as a Jewish aesthetic and, if so, what then constitutes it as such? If we are going to use a Jewish aesthetic as a tool to understand Jewish history—the primary aim of the volume—then we need some parameters as to what qualifies it as Jewish. To the editors Jewishness is “contingent and contextual rather than definitive and presumptive,” which renders it a frustratingly vague concept (3). For instance, Carol Zemel’s essay “Diasporic Values in Contemporary Art: Kitaj, Katchor, Frenkel” defines modern Jewish art as “a flexible cultural weave, combining Jewish elements with the cultural features of the national context or international matrix” (179). To Zemel, what makes a work of art Jewish is the diasporist “double consciousness,” i.e., themes of “journeying, travel and fantasized adventure, but also—and especially when seen through a Jewish lens—with upheaval and uncertainty” (177). Many contemporary Gentile painters, however, deal with similar themes while Jewish immigrant artists other than R. B. Kitaj, Ben Katchor, and Vera Frenkel deal with none of these themes at all. Zemel, as she herself states, looks at her subjects through a Jewish lens, thereby infusing it with meaning that is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Could it perhaps be that our desire for ethnic and cultural distinctiveness makes us want to see Jewish art, while its contours and characteristics are so kaleidoscopic that it is virtually impossible to define?

Walter Cahn’s thoughtful essay on Max Liebermann and the Amsterdam Jewish neighborhood raises similar concerns. Cahn argues convincingly that Liebermann, who produced...

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