Jewish Identities In American Feminist Art

Featuring sixty-seven illustrations, and providing an important reckoning and visualization of the previously hidden Jewish 'ghosts' within US art, Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art addresses the veiled role of Jewishness in the understanding of feminist art in the United States. From New York city to Southern California, Lisa E. Bloom situates the art practices of Jewish feminist artists from the 1970s to the present in relation to wider cultural and historical issues. Key themes are examined in depth through the work of contemporary Jewish artists including: Eleanor Antin Judy Chicago Deborah Kass Rhonda Lieberman Martha Rosler and many others. Crucial in any study of art, visual studies, women's studies and cultural studies, this is a new and lively exploration into a vital component of US art.

Unlike earlier generations, Jewish American artists born between the 1930s and the early 1960s were among the first to overtly embrace and challenge religious themes in their work. These Jewish artists felt comfortable as assimilated Americans yet developed an overwhelming desire to explore their cultural and religious heritage. They became the first generation willing to take risks with their material and to discover new ways to create art with Jewish religious content. In his most recent book, Baigell explores the art and influences of eleven artists who enlarged the parameters of Jewish American art through their varied approaches to subject matter, to feminist concerns, and to finding contemporary relevance in the ancient texts. Along with detailed essays on each artist, the book includes nearly one hundred stunning illustrations that testify to the beauty, depth, and importance of the paintings and sculptures produced by this groundbreaking generation of artists.

Finalist, 2019 PROSE Award in Biography, given by the Association of American Publishers Fifty years after the start of the women’s liberation movement, a book that at last illuminates the profound impact Jewishness and second-wave feminism had on each other Jewish women were undeniably instrumental in shaping the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Yet historians and participants themselves have overlooked their contributions as Jews. This has left many vital questions unasked and unanswered—until now. Delving into archival sources and conducting extensive interviews with these fierce pioneers, Joyce Antler has at last broken the silence about the confluence of feminism and Jewish identity. Antler’s exhilarating new book features dozens of compelling biographical narratives that reveal the struggles and achievements of Jewish radical feminists in Chicago, New York and Boston, as well as those who participated in the later, self-consciously identified Jewish feminist movement that fought gender inequities in Jewish religious and secular life. Disproportionately represented in the movement, Jewish women’s liberationists helped to provide theories and models for radical action that were used throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led to new initiatives in academia, politics, and grassroots organizing. Other Jewish-identified feminists brought the women’s movement to the Jewish mainstream and Jewish feminism to the Left. For many of these women, feminism in fact served as a “portal” into Judaism. Recovering this deeply hidden history, Jewish Radical Feminism places Jewish women’s activism at the center of feminist and Jewish narratives. The stories of over forty women’s liberationists and identified Jewish feminists—from Shulamith Firestone and Susan Brownmiller to Rabbis Laura Geller and Rebecca Alpert—illustrate how women’s liberation and Jewish feminism unfolded over the course of the lives of an extraordinary cohort of women, profoundly influencing the social, political, and religious revolutions of our era.

The contributors are highly productive and respected Jewish-American scholars, critics, and teachers from departments of English, history, American studies, Romance literature, Slavic studies, art, women's studies, comparative literature, anthropology, Judaic studies, and philosophy.

In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles--both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners. Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women's lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women's studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives. The Art of the Jewish Family was the winner of three 2020 National Jewish Book Awards: the Celebrate 350 Award for American Jewish Studies, the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award for History, and the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women's Studies.

This volume focuses on Jewish American identity within the context of Pop art in New York City during the sixties to reveal the multivalent identities and selves often ignored in Pop scholarship. Melissa L. Mednicov establishes her study within the context of prominent Jewish artists, dealers, institutions, and collectors in New York City in the Pop sixties. Mednicov incorporates the historiography of Jewish identity in Pop art—the ways by which identity is named or silenced—to better understand how Pop art made, or marked, different modes of identity in the sixties. By looking at a nexus of the art world in this period and the ways in which Jewish identity was registered or negated, Mednicov is able to further consider questions about the ways mass culture influenced Pop art and its participants—and, to a larger extent, formed further modes of identity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Jewish studies, and American studies.

The book asks all the right questions about society, culture, religion and art.

Explores the works of five major American Jewish artists: Jack Levine, George Segal, Audrey Flack, Larry Rivers, and R. B. Kitaj. Focuses on the use of imagery influenced by the Bible.

‘[A] richly evocative, captivating, and reflective memoir” of a feminist artist who broke free of the limits placed on her by family, Judaism and society (Publishers Weekly). Growing up an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, Helene Aylon spent her Friday nights in a sea of extended family as the Sabbath candles flickered. Passionate about art, she dreamt of escaping the strict, secular world of her youth, but instead married a rabbi and became a mother of two. Then, her world was split apart when her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and Aylon found herself widowed at thirty. Free to explore both her own soul and the changing world around her, Aylon sought a home in the burgeoning environmental art scene of the 1970s—creating transgressive works that explore identity, women’s bodies, the environment, disarmament, and the notion of God. Finally, she dares to asks of Judaism: Where are the women? With many examples of her work included within, Whatever is Contained ”is an arresting tale of uncommon courage, intelligence, and wit” following Aylon’s search for truth in art, and the links between feminism and Judaism (Gail Levin, author of Lee Krasner: A Biography and Becoming Judy Chicago).

Unlike earlier generations, Jewish American artists born between the 1930s and the early 1960s were among the first to overtly embrace and challenge religious themes in their work. These Jewish artists felt comfortable as assimilated Americans yet developed an overwhelming desire to explore their cultural and religious heritage. They became the first generation willing to take risks with their material and to discover new ways to create art with Jewish religious content. In his most recent book, Baigell explores the art and influences of eleven artists who enlarged the parameters of Jewish American art through their varied approaches to subject matter, to feminist concerns, and to finding contemporary relevance in the ancient texts. Along with detailed essays on each artist, the book includes nearly one hundred stunning illustrations that testify to the beauty, depth, and importance of the paintings and sculptures produced by this groundbreaking generation of artists.