CULTURE AND CONTINUITY: THE JEWISH JOURNEY

This vibrant, two-floor exhibition examines the Jewish experience as it has evolved from antiquity to the present over 4,000 years. Visitors to the 4th floor see the Ancient World galleries, featuring archaeological objects representing Jewish life in Israel and the Mediterranean region from 1200 BCE to 640 CE, and a dazzling installation of selections from the Museum’s renowned collection of Hanukkah lamps.

On the 3rd floor alone close to 400 works from the 16th century to the present are now on view in this dramatic and evocative experience. Highlights include: a pair of silver Torah finials from Breslau, Germany (1792-93) reunited at The Jewish Museum after sixty years of separation; paintings by such artists as Max Weber, Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Isidor Kaufmann, Morris Louis, and Ken Aptekar; prints by Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky; and sculpture by Elie Nadelman. A display of 38 Torah ornaments allows the viewer to compare artistic styles from different parts of the world. It features lavishly decorated Torah crowns, pointers, finials and shields from Afghanistan, Algeria, Austria, England, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Ottoman Empire (Greece and Turkey), Georgia (of the former Soviet Union), Morocco, Israel, Italy, early 20th century Palestine, Persia, Poland, Russia, Tunisia, the United States, and Yemen. Leonard Baskin’s 1977 sculpture, The Altar (based on the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac), considered the artist’s greatest carving, is on view for the first time since 1986.

Television excerpts from the Museum’s National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting are also included. The entire exhibition is comprised of close to 800 works and is accompanied by a series of thematic, random access audio guides using CD-Rom technology, including a family audio guide and a Director’s Highlights Tour with The Jewish Museum’s Director Joan Rosenbaum and WNYC Radio’s Brian Lehrer. Ritual Repetition, a new mini-exhibition of 14 works in the contemporary gallery of Culture and Continuity, presents an outstanding group of works from The Jewish Museum’s collection in which artists use formal strategies of repetition to explore the nature of Jewish law, ritual, and identity. The show features works by Dov Abramson, Lynne Avadenka, Harriette Estel Berman, Wallace Berman, Deborah Kass, Arianne Littman-Cohen, Nona Orbach, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Zelig Segal, Harley Swedler, Allan Wexler, and Hannah Wilke. George Segal’s 1982 work, The Holocaust, is also on view.


The portraits of the Levy-Franks family, attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck and dating from the 1720s to 1735, are the most extensive surviving group of Colonial American portraiture. The Jewish Museum will be exhibiting six of them consecutively in pairs through June 2009 in Culture and Continuity. The first two will be on view through December 31, 2007, the second pair from January through September, 2008, and the third pair from October 2008 through June 2009. These six paintings are from the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, a new museum scheduled to open in 2009. Spanning three generations, the works depict the German-born patriarch Moses Raphael Levy, his wife Grace Mears Levy, his daughter Abigaill Franks and her husband Jacob Franks, and five of their children. These paintings also hold a noteworthy place in American art as one of the oldest surviving family portrait series.


A recently acquired suite of classic post-World War II works originally designed by renowned architect Philip Johnson and the prominent Abstract Expressionist sculptor Ibram Lassaw for Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, New York, is also on view in Culture and Continuity. Included are sections of a large wall sculpture/bimah screen, the eternal lamp, the Torah ark, and two of the four bimah chairs.