March 3, 2022
Chaim Brovender sees in Rembrandt’s art a message for our humanity: Rembrandt telegraphs to us that each person’s individual identity cannot be suppressed. Each one’s face is unique and meaningful. Each figure is not quite like anyone else, and recalls to our minds the midrashic observation: “Just as no two people resemble one another, so no two people think alike. Rather, each person has an opinion of his own.”
February 24, 2022
Dalya Koller writes on Joni Mitchell’s “Blue”: Being pulled in multiple directions and towards multiple homelands — what it feels like to have one leg in multiple countries at once — this theme of a dual homeland is an integral and historical aspect of the experience of a diaspora Jew. “Blue” teaches that this feeling of duality isn’t exclusive to Jews.
February 17, 2022
Moshe Kurtz writes on Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” – “Regardless of the promise of a life waiting on the other side, the pain of bereavement is real and sometimes overpowering. One can know that Rabbinic Judaism unequivocally believes in the immortality of the soul, but it is something else to fully internalize it into one’s psyche. Johnny Cash’s struggle to balance his faith commitments with his despondent emotional state is what makes this work of art both poignant and relatable for all people of faith.”
February 10, 2022
Israeli illustrator Shay Charka explains how Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” liberated Jewish culture by appropriating anti-Semitic stereotypes: “Spiegelman’s most significant contribution to the rehabilitation of the Jewish spirit after millennia of persecution culminating in the Holocaust is specifically through his depictions of Jews as mice.”