Talk of the Table | A Persian-Flavored Purim
This year for Purim, which begins on the evening of February 25, why not celebrate with a dish that evokes the setting of the Megillah (the story of Queen Esther) in ancient Persia?
Art Moments
With so many museums and galleries closed or open only for reduced hours this winter, here are a few opportunities to experience art.
Visual Moment | Milton Glaser: Master of Design
The world lost a towering figure in the field of design this year. Graphic artist, illustrator, teacher, icon maker, art director and creative thinker Milton Glaser passed away after a long illness on June 26, his 91st birthday.
Methuselah: The Tree That Defied Time
A tree now grows in the arid soil of Kibbutz Ketura in southern Israel. A subspecies extinct for nearly a thousand years, this Judean date palm was resurrected from a tiny 2,000-year-old seed found in an ancient clay jar unearthed in 1963 by archaeologists excavating around Herod the Great’s palace at the ancient fortress of Masada.
Lost Time: Painting through a Pandemic
Confined to her home studio outside Tel Aviv during the COVID-19 lockdown, artist Zoya Cherkassky started producing a painting a day.
The Mystery of the Jewish New Year Valentines
To satisfy the demand of Jewish immigrants for New Year and other greeting cards, innovative American producers started repurposing German-made Valentine’s Day cards.
Talking With God at Auschwitz
A new exhibition marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the former death camp examines how faith helped sustain people during the Holocaust.
Visual Moment | Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich’s Bold Vision
Rudolph “Rudi” Gernreich was one of the most prominent fashion designers of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. His revolutionary designs and avant-garde collections embodied his vision of fashion as a liberating force that defied conventional ideas of beauty, identity and gender. “Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich,” on view through September 1 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, is the first exhibition to focus on the social and cultural impact of the influential designer’s body of work.
Visual Moment | Lost & Found: Solving a Holocaust Mystery
Lost and Found exhibit at Yeshiva University’s museum traces the story of a photo album smuggled out of Lithuania’s Kovno Ghetto, from its original disappearance through the investigation that found the owner’s descendants teaching Yiddish in the United States.
Visual Moment | The Beguiling Language of Dress
Ribbed moiré silk from Greece, tulle and silver-tinsel embroidery from Egypt, silk satin from Ottoman Palestine, indigo-dyed goat hair from Iraqi Kurdistan, brocaded silk ikat...
An Artist’s Secret, Now Fully Revealed
When Charlotte (called Lotte by her family) was eight years old, her mother died. At the time she was told the cause was influenza—the truth was kept a carefully guarded secret.
A Jewish Artist in Post-Dreyfus Paris
When the 22-year-old Italian Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, his health was already compromised. He had suffered childhood bouts of pleurisy, had nearly died of typhoid fever at age 11 and had been diagnosed with tuberculosis at 16. In his first years in the City of Light, which was rife with anti-Semitism in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair…