The Encyclopedia of Jewish Symbols

The Encyclopedia of Jewish Symbols PDF

Author: Ellen Frankel

Publisher: Jason Aronson, Incorporated

Published: 1995-11-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1461631254

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Jewish symbols reflect the interaction of word and image within Jewish culture. Jews have always studied, interpreted, and revered sacred texts; they have also adorned the settings and occasions of sacred acts. Calligraphy and ornamentation have transformed Hebrew letters into art; quotation, interpretation, legend, and wordplay have made ceremonial objects into narrative. This book represents just such a collaboration between art and language. Ellen Frankel and Betsy Platkin Teutsch, writer and artist, have brought their extensive knowledge and talents together to create The Encyclopedia of Jewish Symbols, the first reference guide of its kind, designed for use by educators, artists, rabbis, folklorists, feminists, Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, and lay readers.

Jewish Icons

Jewish Icons PDF

Author: Richard I. Cohen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780520917910

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With the help of over one hundred illustrations spanning three centuries, Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. In these images and objects that reflect, refract, and also shape daily experience, he finds new and illuminating insights into Jewish life in the modern period. Pointing to recent scholarship that overturns the stereotype of Jews as people of the text, unconcerned with the visual, Cohen shows how the coming of the modern period expanded the relationship of Jews to the visual realm far beyond the religious context. In one such manifestation, orthodox Jewry made icons of popular tabbis, creating images that helped to bridge the sacred and the secular. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the study and collecting of Jewish art became a legitimate and even passionate pursuit, and signaled the entry of Jews into the art world as painters, collectors, and dealers. Cohen's exploration of early Jewish exhibitions, museums, and museology opens a new window on the relationship of art to Jewish culture and society.

Holocaust Icons

Holocaust Icons PDF

Author: Oren Baruch Stier

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-11-01

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 0813574048

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The Holocaust has bequeathed to contemporary society a cultural lexicon of intensely powerful symbols, a vocabulary of remembrance that we draw on to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible horror of the Shoah. Engagingly written and illustrated with more than forty black-and-white images, Holocaust Icons probes the history and memory of four of these symbolic relics left in the Holocaust’s wake. Jewish studies scholar Oren Stier offers in this volume new insight into symbols and the symbol-making process, as he traces the lives and afterlives of certain remnants of the Holocaust and their ongoing impact. Stier focuses in particular on four icons: the railway cars that carried Jews to their deaths, symbolizing the mechanics of murder; the Arbeit Macht Frei (“work makes you free”) sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, pointing to the insidious logic of the camp system; the number six million that represents an approximation of the number of Jews killed as well as mass murder more generally; and the persona of Anne Frank, associated with victimization. Stier shows how and why these icons—an object, a phrase, a number, and a person—have come to stand in for the Holocaust: where they came from and how they have been used and reproduced; how they are presently at risk from a variety of threats such as commodification; and what the future holds for the memory of the Shoah. In illuminating these icons of the Holocaust, Stier offers valuable new perspective on one of the defining events of the twentieth century. He helps readers understand not only the Holocaust but also the profound nature of historical memory itself.

Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank

Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank PDF

Author: Batya Brutin

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-04-06

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 3110656914

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The photographs of the unknown Warsaw Ghetto little boy and the well-known Anne Frank became famous documents worldwide, representing the Holocaust. Many artists adopted them as a source of inspiration to express their feelings and ideas about Holocaust events in general and to deal with the fate of these two victims in particular. Moreover, the artists emphasized the uniqueness of both children, but at the same time used their image to convey social and political messages. By using images of these children, the artists both evoke our attention and sympathy and our anger against the Nazis’ crime of killing one and a half million Jewish children in the Holocaust. Because they represent different sexes, and different aspects - Western and Eastern Jewry - of Holocaust experience, artists used them in many contexts. This book will complete the lack of comprehensive research referring to the visual representations of these children in artworks.

Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash

Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash PDF

Author: Rivka Ulmer

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 3110223929

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Rabbinic midrash of late antiquity and the early medieval period visualized Egypt and presented Egyptian religious concepts and icons. Midrash is analyzed in a cross-cultural perspective utilizing insights from the discipline of Egyptology. Topics: the Greco-Roman Nile god, Isis, Serapis and other gods, festivals, mummy portraits, funeral customs, the Egyptian language, Pharaohs, Cleopatra, Alexandria, the divine eye. The hermeneutical role of Egyptian cultural icons in midrash is explored.