Wing For Jewish Art and Life
The Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Wing for Jewish Art and Life presents the material culture of Jewish communities worldwide, from the Middle Ages to the present day, and is conceived to provide a view of Jewish life that integrates both its sacred and its secular dimensions. Showcasing the aesthetic value of objects as well as their social and historical significance, the comparative display unfolds in five themes that highlight the individual and the communal, the sacred and the mundane, and the heritage of the past, and the creative innovations of the present. The reconfigured wing includes a new Synagogue Route, unique to the Israel Museum, containing four synagogue interiors from the continents of Europe, Asia, and the Americas; a dramatic introductory display focusing on the Jewish life cycle that features singular treasures from the collections relating to the ritual ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death; a new gallery space to showcase the Museum’s holdings of rare illuminated manuscripts; and the integration of works of contemporary art and Judaica.
Highlights on view include: Maimonides’ Mishne Torah (15th century), Zedek-ve-Shalom Synagogue (18th century), the newly restored Fishach sukkah (19th century), Burial society (hevra kadisha) carriage from Hungary (19th century), Ogadéro necklace and bracelets from Izmir, Turkey (late 19th century), a Man’s hooded cape (akhnif) from the Atlas Mountains (late 19th–early 20th centuries).
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“He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it—and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.”
—Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)
“No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)