Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Antisemitism, Assimilation, Affirmation

Gavriel Rosenfeld is a contributing author, “Postwar Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust”, pp.285-302.

Book description: A fascinating look at key aspects of visual culture in modern Jewish history In modern western history, the cultural and social developments of modernism have long been associated with Jews. Usually this has been a negative association: the perceived breakdown of traditional norms was blamed on Jewish influence in politics, society, and the arts. Throughout Europe, Jews were viewed as carriers of industrialized and cosmopolitan developments that threatened to undermine a cherished way of life. This anthology speaks to this issue through the lens of modernist visual production including paintings, posters, sculpture, and architecture. Essays by scholars from the U.S. and Israel confront the contradictory impulses that modernism’s interaction with Jewish culture provoked. Discussing how religion, class, race, and political alignments were used to provide attacks on modern art, the scholars also comment on visual responses to anti-semitism and the mainstream success of artists in the U.S. and Israel since World War II.