Orphée by Marc Chagall

Visual Moment // Chagall’s Orphée

“Marc loved the small-town feeling of Georgetown,” Evelyn wrote. “He liked being able to greet our neighbors and walking to Woolworths to buy postcards and an art-supply store to buy more brushes.” One day he told her that he wanted to “do something for the house,” but later, he said, “No, the house is perfect; I’ll make a mosaic for the garden.”

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A Visual Moment / A Medieval Manuscript

By Diane M. Bolz Maimonides Illuminated  One of the finest and most elaborate illuminated Hebrew manuscripts in existence is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  The extremely rare 15th-century handwritten and illustrated copy of medieval philosopher Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah was jointly acquired by the Met and Jerusalem’s Israel Museum in April 2013.  Now displayed for the first time since that acquisition, the manuscript, previously in the collection of Judy and Michael Steinhardt of New York, will be exhibited at the two museums on a rotating basis. Assembled between 1170 and 1180 by the esteemed rabbi, physician and scholar Mosheh (Moses) ben Maimon—known to English speakers as Maimonides (1135-1204)—the Mishneh Torah was the first systematic consolidation of Jewish law into a comprehensive anthology. The publication of this 14-volume compendium established Maimonides as...

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Will the Real Shrek Please Stand Up?

Children love Shrek, the sweet green ogre and beloved cartoon character who starred, thanks to DreamWorks, in “his” first flick in 2001. What most don’t know—nor do their parents—is that the word shrek is Yiddish for terror or fear. Why would they? The word isn’t to be found in Leo Rosten’s 1971 classic, Joys of Yiddish, or any of its sequels and is rarely mentioned in other Yiddish-English compendiums. Still, it’s common Yiddish, entering the language from German. In Yiddish it is most frequently used as an adjective, shreklekh, as in shreklekh zach (a terrible thing) or shreklekh imgick (something horrible). Shrek foygl is a scarecrow. The chasm between the word’s actual meaning and today’s charming ogre can be traced to a 1990 children’s book, titled Shrek! by William Steig. Steig, who died in 2003, had...

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Symposium: The Origins of Jewish Creativity

Moment talks with artists, scientists and scholars to illuminate the source of human creativity Interviews by Sarah Breger, Nadine Epstein, Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil, Sala Levin and Amy E. Schwartz   David Brooks The dominant theory about creativity is that it is the result of the blending of two different idea networks. The classic example is Picasso, who took the idea network of the Western artistic tradition and the idea network of African masks—not just their physical look but the spirituality implied by them—and jammed them together like two galaxies crashing. That’s how it works: Two networks crash, and out of the ensuing clashes, conflicts, congruences, you spin off new things. So creativity is very rarely inventing something new out of whole cloth; it’s using two or more old things to create new combinations. The theory of why Jews are...

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