Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History

Continuing its distinguished tradition of focusing on central political, sociological, and cultural issues of Jewish life in the last century, Volume XXVI of the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry examines the visual revolution that has overtaken Jewish cultural life in the twentieth century onwards, with special attention given to the evolution of Jewish museums. Bringing together leading curators and scholars,Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and Historytreats various forms of Jewish representation in museums in Europe and the United States before the Second World War and inquires into the nature and proliferation of Jewish museums following the Holocaust and the fall of Communism in Western and Eastern Europe. In addition, a pair of essays dedicated to six exhibitions that took place in Israel in 2008 to mark six decades of Israeli art raises significant issues on the relationship between art and gender, and art and politics. An introductory essay highlights the dramatic transformation in the appreciation of the visual in Jewish culture. The scope of the symposium offers one of the first scholarly attempts to treat this theme in several countries. Also featured in this volume are a provocative essay on the nature of antisemitism in twentieth-century English society; review essays on Jewish fundamentalism and recent works on the subject of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territories; and reviews of new titles in Jewish Studies..

Richard I. Cohen is Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in French Jewry Studies and head of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His works include The Burden of Conscience: French-Jewish Leadership during the Holocaust, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, and From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power, 1600-1800. The current editors of Studies in Contemporary Jewry are Richard I. Cohen, Anat Helman, Eli Lederhendler, and Uzi Rebhun, all of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Symposium: Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History

The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life -- An Overview, Richard I. Cohen

Displaying Judaica in 18th-Century Central Europe: A Non-Jewish Curiosity, Michael Korey

Collecting Community: The Berlin Jewish Museum as Narrator between Past and Present, 1906-1939, Tobias Metzler

Jewish Museums in the Federal Republic of Germany, Inka Bertz

Post-trauma "Precious Legacies": Jewish Museums in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust and before the Fall of Communism, Ruth Ellen Gruber

From Wandering Jew to Immigrant Ethnic: Musealizing Jewish Immigration, Robin Ostow

Six Exhibitions, Six Decades: Toward the Recanonization of Contemporary Israeli Art, Ruth Direktor

In Between Past and Future: Time and Relatedness in the Six Decades Exhibitions, Osnat Zukerman Rechter

A Matrix of Matrilineal Memory in the Museum: Charlotte Salomon and Chantal Akerman in Berlin, Lisa Saltzman

Between Two Worlds: Ghost Stories under Glass in Vienna and Chicago, Abigail Glogower and Margaret Olin

Thoughts on the Role of a European Jewish Museum in the 21st Century, Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

Essay
"The Forces of Darkness": Leonard Woolf, Isaiah Berlin, and English Antisemitism, Elliott Horowitz

Review Essays
It's Not All Religious Fundamentalism, Chaim I. Waxman
One Step before the Abyss: Recent Scholarship on the Jews in Occupied Soviet Territories during the Second World War, Kiril Feferman

Book Reviews