By Menachem Wecker
Tu B’Shvat seems to be a holiday in transition. Once a celebration of all things Israeli, its modern incarnation is as an eco-conscious ‘green’ Jewish holiday.
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By Menachem Wecker
The Dutch master intentionally stayed away from blond and northern European depictions of Jesus. Instead, he used Jewish models to create a more historically correct image.
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By Menachem Wecker
When the Nazis tried to deport Bulgarian Jews, the country resisted. With Balkan folk songs and a soaring oratorio, a new music festival tells the heroic story.
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By Menachem Wecker
David Levine, who drew idiosyncratic portraits of thousands of celebrities, politicians, artists, and other newsmakers, died on Dec. 29. The Brooklyn-born artist’s caricatures and watercolors appeared in Esquire, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Nation, The New Yorker, Time and the New York Review of Books, where he started drawing in 1963.
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By Menachem Wecker
Two of William Blake’s greatest patrons were clergymen in the Church of England, under whose rites he was christened, married and buried. But the British poet and artist did not attend church for the last 40 years of his life, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and he and his wife, Catherine, were registered as sympathizers at the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church. To further complicate Blake’s faith, “Thou shalt not” is “writ over the door” of the chapel in his 1794 poem “The Garden of Love,” which suggests that he identified faith with censorship.
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