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 from Uzbekistan. This intriguing and opulent array of historic garments and textiles is currently on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The exhibition, Veiled Meanings: Fashioning Jewish Dress, from the Collection of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, features some 100 items spanning the 18th to 20th centuries from four continents and more than 20 countries. On view through January 6, 2019, it is the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition drawn from The Israel Museum’s world-famous collection of Jewish costumes. The garments displayed demonstrate the diversity of Jewish communities across centuries and continents and reflect the wide-ranging migrations of Jewish populations in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Americas....

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ringelblum archive

Visual Moment | The Ringelblum Archive

Even before the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1943) knew of the “Final Solution,” they understood that their story needed to be preserved. Under the leadership of Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, a clandestine organization of about 60 researchers with the code name Oyneg Shabes (“the joy of Shabbat”) compiled and documented the experiences of the Jews of Warsaw under Nazi occupation. “It was an extraordinary act of civil resistance,” says historian Samuel Kassow, author of Who Will Write Our History: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto. “The Jews knew that the Germans wanted to control and determine how they would be remembered. They were determined to write their own history.” Their goals evolved over time. When the project began in 1940, the researchers—a group that included historians, writers, artists, rabbis and social workers—simply...

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Visual Moment | A Forgotten Ottoman Way Station

The Ottomans ruled what is now Israel for 400 years, and during that time they made some iconic contributions to the man-made landscape. Sultan Suleiman I (a.k.a. Suleiman the Magnificent) completed the current walls of Jerusalem’s Old City in 1541. The Jaffa Clocktower, finished in 1903, was built to celebrate the silver jubilee of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Over time, innumerable Ottoman buildings have been lost, replaced by those of British or Israeli design, just as they in turn had replaced those of the Crusaders, Mamluks, Byzantines, Romans, Hasmoneans, Greeks, ancient Israelites, Babylonians, Assyrians and Philistines.

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Reframing Roman Vishniac’s Legacy

Maya Benton was a high school senior living in Los Angeles when the Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac’s first posthumous book, To Give Them Light, came out in 1993. Renowned for his iconic images of Eastern European Jews taken between the two World Wars, Vishniac had died three years earlier at age 92.

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