You’ve seen him in many guises: the Frankenstein monster, the Incredible Hulk, even as the heart-breaking protagonist of Diane Arbus’ photograph, Jewish Giant with his Parents in the Bronx. But even in his original guise, his dramatic, but very soulless persona, he just can’t be kept down. He is the Golem, whose name and brief and violent existence in the Prague ghetto continues to resonate in novels by authors including Elie Wiesel and I.B. Singer, poetry, plays, comics, operas, ballet and an early film classic whose imagery inspired several generations of those seeking to capture the monster’s persona. 
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Legends vary regarding the larger than life male creature, but one of the most prevalent attributes its creation to the 16th century by Rabbi Loew of Prague, a mystic who in at least one version of the folktale had the power to enervate inanimate clay by means of cabalistic rituals and prayers. Controlled by combinations of Hebrew letters imbued with magical powers, the super strong Golem could destroy any enemy and would be ready to do so in times of trouble. Incapable of thought, the Golem could only obey orders, that is, until it didn’t.  

Now wonderfully restored with color added, the early German expressionist cinematic feature, The Golem (1920), directed by and starring Paul Wegener in the title role (which can now be viewed on YouTube) depicts Loew as a medieval sorcerer who not only violates God’s law by creating life, but does so by calling on the devil for his help. When he loses control over the Golem, the monster violently turns against the Jewish community, wreaking havoc. Characteristic of German films of this era, the use of stylized two-dimensional sets – the endless stairs and crumbling architecture of the nearly animate ancient ghetto – is what sets this movie apart.

An actor who worked for the great Jewish theater director Max Reinhardt, Wegener had become obsessed with the Golem legend in 1913 and had based several of his films on the story.

While thousands of graphic art aficionados are familiar with the many guises of the comic book Golem, his giant form packs the greatest wallop when it can be experienced in three dimensions. California-based artist Joshua Abarbanel created his first small-scale Golem in 2013 for a Los Angeles gallery show centered around sacred texts. The multi-media artist remembered that “I spent a lot of time thinking about the subject and experimenting with Hebrew letters for both their aesthetic forms and various word associations. Eventually the Golem story came to my mind, especially the version in which the Golem is ‘activated’ and ‘deactivated’ through the power of Hebrew letters.” In this work, Abarbanel fuses the Golem’s physical and metaphysical natures; his sculpture is constructed from a dense wooden latticework of calligraphy referencing its magical birth and unique mission.
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The artist’s monumental, Golem-size version commissioned by Berlin’s Jewish Museum for its 2016 show devoted to the mythic creature will soon be on view again in the city of Worms, where it will be on display at Rashi House for SchUM on the Rhine – from Medieval Era Into Modernity, a city-wide celebration of the region’s Jewish heritage.

​Woman in Gold
Honored for her starring role in Woman in Gold, a 2015 film about American émigré Maria Altmann’s ultimately successful legal efforts to reclaim a painting – stolen decades earlier from her family by the Nazis –  from the Austrian government, Dame Helen Mirren has continued to speak out on behalf of Holocaust restitution. It was her involvement with the movie that raised her consciousness and helped to catalyze her empathy for this cause.
 
Testifying before the U.S. Congress in support of expanded legislation in June 2016, Mirren noted that “what was so extraordinary specifically about Maria Altmann's world, the Viennese world… this glorious time in Vienna that was so full of culture and art….  And being in Vienna and shooting the film and seeing those beautiful houses that were built by the Jewish community, I realized it was a Jewish culture. It was – [the perception that] this beautiful memory of Vienna and the music and its painting was actually created by the Jewish people.”
 
#AnneFrank.Parallel Stories
Intended to appeal to the social media generation, the 2019 Italian documentary #AnneFrank. Parallel Stories now being screened at Jewish film festivals and movie theaters in the U.S.,  brings Dame Helen into the spotlight again. Filmed in a setting resembling the Frank family’s hiding place in Amsterdam, Mirren provides historical background, reads excerpts from Anne’s diary, and introduces filmgoers to the stories of other young women who experienced persecution during those terrible times. A modern retelling of Anne’s story, the movie celebrates her legacy during her 90th birthday year in what is described as “profound new ways.” 
 
Resistance
Playwright/actor Jesse Eisenberg portrays legendary mime Marcel Marceau in the new movie, Resistance. Born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, he was the son of a kosher butcher, who turned to the stage in his adolescence and joined the French resistance in Paris during the Nazi occupation at age 16 in 1939. He was tasked with assisting other Jews to hide or  escape the country. In an interview about Resistance, Eisenberg said that “[Marcel Marceau] was asked to save these kids who his cousin was saving. He is reluctant at first, but then realizes that the way to save their lives is to use his art [to entertain and keep the children quiet].” The film, which premieres on March 27, will be shown in theaters as well as On Demand.
 
Shared Legacies
On its opening night this month, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival screened the world premiere of Shared Legacies, Shari Rogers’ documentary about the civil rights movement in the 1960s, in which she focuses on how the bond between Jews and African Americans was shaped by Old Testament narratives and texts, often quoted by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and a mutual history of oppression. After a visit to Detroit’s Charles Wright Museum of African American History, Rogers asked  King’s attorney and speechwriter, Clarence B. Jones, to talk about Jewish participation in the fight against prejudice in the south and what he told her inspired the movie, which seems especially informative to people under the age of 40, who Rogers says knew nothing about this relationship.

Revealed through though archival materials and interviews with celebrities who lived through those times, including Louis Gossett, Jr. and Harry Belafonte, as well as historians and scholars like Hebrew Union College-Cincinnati historian Gary Zola, Jews –  civil rights workers, attorneys, rabbis, and other Jewish people from all walks of life –  were fully committed to, and sometimes lost their lives for the cause of racial justice. 

The film also includes a segment on the first public, integrated dinner in Atlanta honoring King after he had received the Nobel Peace Prize, hosted by activists Rabbi Jacob Rothschild and his wife, Janice, who married David Blumberg, B’nai B’rith’s president from 1971-78, after she was widowed.

Even after nearly a decade, the still-surprising success and readers’ continuing adulation of the award-winning 2010 memoir The Hare with the Amber Eyes (historian and ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s reflections on a long-past world, and his search for his own Jewish family, the Ephrussis, wealthy aesthetes and art patrons steeped in the literary and visual culture of late 19th c. Paris and Vienna) is at least partly responsible for his high visibility in the art world.

This is a very good thing for those who know at first glance that de Waal’s reputation is well-deserved. Through his groupings of pottery, housed in beautiful vitrines of his own design, as well as site-specific installations intended to interact with the environment or its purpose as a library, chapel, concert hall or gallery, multi-leveled layers of meaning emerge. In these, the pottery whose dimpled imperfections, subdued monochrome color and minimal shapes—referencing his grasp of Oriental decorative arts and philosophy – are transformed, becoming vessels of suggestion, that impress and move. 

A great-grandson of the Ephrussi patriarch, the banker and financier Viktor, grandchild of English novelist Elizabeth Ephrussi, and the son of an Anglican clergyman, de Waal has inherited his ancestors’ rarefied taste and passion for Japanese art and crafts—embodied by the exquisite little carved hare in the now famous family collection of 264 netsuke, ivory and wood figures that adorn the kimono sash or obi.

Despite tremendous wealth, assimilation and erudition, the Ephrussis could not escape from the continually escalating cloud of anti-Semitism which enveloped Europe from the turn of the 19th century.  In 1938, its Viennese home, the Ephrussi Palace, with its books, furniture and art, was seized by the Nazis, while the family scattered to all continents, losing awareness of its past.  It was “The Hare with the Amber Eyes” that brought them together again. 

And what of the netsukes?  Hidden by a servant, the collection survived intact through the war.  As a student in Japan, the young De Wall saw them displayed in the home of his uncle Iggie, who had settled in Tokyo, and who would bequeath them to the young man.

Complimenting the 2019 museum installations of de Waal’s own work in Madrid, Venice, New York, Berlin and Dresden—all touching on the themes of exile and immigration—will be the display of 157 of the netsukes themselves, as part of the exhibition called “The Ephrussis: Travel in Time” at Vienna’s Jewish Museum through March 8, 2020, opened last month by Austria’s president, Alexander Van der Bellen, and attended by 41 Ephrussi family members. The show’s contents focus on selections from the donation made to the museum last year by Mr. de Waal and includes archival documents, photos and souvenirs. 
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Another highly desirable acquisition has just been made in America, by the University of Texas at Austin’s amazing Ransom Center, whose holdings now include the complete archive of 20th century master, playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005), author of such classics as “Death of a Salesman,” “All My Sons” and “The Crucible,” works that changed the course of the American theater. Despite their settings, either in the post-World War II era or in a time that calls up the pressing issues of the 1940s and 50s, younger audiences can still identify with their themes of generational conflict, and the moral imperative that must be adhered to—even by the most ordinary of people.

Along with prior gifts from Miller himself, this now-unified 300 box collection of his personal and professional papers is considered the primary record for research and study into his life and work, from his earliest writing as a son of poor immigrants at the University of Michigan to the drafts and scripts for his last theater works, including materials which have not been previously known or examined. Its dovetailing with the subject matter of dozens of other Ransom archival collections enhances the university’s reputation as one of the foremost institutions for the study of theater history in general, and 20th century American drama in particular.

Sacred texts, prayer books, centuries old archival documents and even a defunct electric bill have provided the inspiration for theater, film and museum exhibits in 2019, a veritable collective celebration of the written and printed word. While many examples might be added to this compendium, here are just a few highlights of innovative artworks, all of which take a fresh approach to the way Jewish culture and social life has impacted history and civilization. 

Long-deceased members of a prominent Jewish family come to life onstage in Angela J. Davis’ award-winning new play, “The Spanish Prayer Book,” which premiered in September in California by North Hollywood’s Road Theatre. The time-traveling contemporary drama focuses on a cache of long-hidden religious manuscripts and deals with topics including the changing narrative of Jewish-Muslim relations through the centuries, the commodification of the spiritual—in this case, a collection of valuable prayer books—and our obligation to preserve and protect that which is most precious.

Lilach Dekel-Avneri, a participant in the Washington, D.C.-based Israel Institute Visiting Artist Program, gave an improvisatory, free-form take to her direction of Maya Arad Yasur’s “Amsterdam,” whose script encompasses both the Holocaust and today’s immigration issues, all catalyzed by an unpaid electric bill, mailed to its recipient in 1944 and discovered by the work’s protagonist, a violinist based in the Dutch city of the title. It premiered on Oct. 10 with a three-person cast of students from the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles, where Dekel-Avneri was based this fall. The director, who characterizes the work as a theater piece, rather than a work with a linear narrative, has noted that “It has no hesitation in combining storytelling, using personal facts about the artist, with the aid of imaginary images, and soundscape, in order to enable us to rise anarchistic and funny performative energies from the pseudo-documentary text.”

The Cairo Geniza—inscribed whole and fragmented pages and artifacts whose content, meaning and function include everything from account ledgers and religious tracts to love letters and music scores, never discarded, but preserved for hundreds of years in the storeroom (geniza) of an Egyptian synagogue and now dispersed among 70 institutions worldwide—takes center stage in “From Cairo to the Cloud,” Michelle Paymar’s award-winning documentary which has been screened at numerous Jewish film festivals this year. Translated into multiple languages and reconstituted as one linear entity through the “miracle” of the internet, the collection opens new insights into a myriad of topics, including the ways that Jews, Muslims and Christians interacted in the region. Those who see the film will be impressed by its superb cinematography, underscoring the stunning visual beauty of the documents. It’s now being shown at film festivals in Europe.
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And finally, Washington’s Museum of the Bible, an institution which has hosted some terrific displays of rare Jewish books from Holland and elsewhere, unveiled on Nov. 7 the Washington Pentateuch, a torah dating to the 10th century and described as one of the oldest, intact Hebrew bible manuscripts in the United States. In addition to the torah itself, the exhibition features an introduction by Harvard professor David Stern and images of seven other Hebrew Bible manuscripts, with explanations of how they impact modern editions and translations. 

​In Jesse Eisenberg’s recently opened comedy “Happy Talk,” suburban New Jersey do-gooder Lorraine (Susan Sarandon) tackles a new role—that of matchmaker—in both her life and her art.  Fretting about her recalcitrant daughter and contending with a disabled husband and aged mother, Lorraine certainly needs a respite, and gets it when she is cast as Bloody Mary—the Pacific Islander woman and singer of “Happy Talk” —who brings her lovely daughter together with a romantic American naval lieutenant in her community theater’s production of the World War II musical “South Pacific.”  And then, as if she doesn’t have enough on her plate, her mother’s Serbian health aide, Ljuba, asks Lorraine’s help in finding her a suitable husband. 
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In this play, award-winning dramatist, writer and movie star Eisenberg reveals the myriad attitudes of the affluent, as well as those who are paid to serve their needs, and the lengths the privileged will go to assuage their guilt. The show is being performed by The New Group at its theater on 480 West 42nd Street through June 16th.
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Matchmaking is still alive and well at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art, founded by early 20th century European artists and craftsmen who settled in Israel, is still associated with the stunning Art Nouveau objects created by its faculty and students more than a century ago. Lately, artisans and designers have been reaching out to forge exciting partnerships with international companies, including iconic Danish toymaker LEGO and Ferrero, the Italian maker of Kinder Surprise, a chocolate and cream egg with a bonus, an often- kinetic trinket housed in its center. Taking several years to develop a concept and then to produce protypes and trials, the LEGO collaboration was the inspiration of former Bezalel student Yoel Mazor, a long-time LEGO fan. They yielded some especially successful results, which have not yet made their debut.
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Consumers of Kinder Eggs, typically children younger than 8, need toys with simple parts that do not present a choking hazard. The Bezalel models, constructed by students enrolled in the toy design class of Professor Yaron Loubaton, were tested out on the kids who lived in his kibbutz. Several of them—like the LEGOs, still top-secret — scored a hit, and, it is thought, will also delight the many adults who enjoy eating the candy as well as putting together and playing with the toys, which have become highly collectible items in the years since Kinder Eggs’ “hatching” in 1974.  (Wikipedia states that 30 billion of them have been sold during that time.)

​Speaking of good things to eat, congratulations to Philadelphia’s Zahav (Gold), the recent winner of the James Beard Award for outstanding American restaurant, a prize considered the Oscar of the food world. Opened in 2008 by chef and previous Beard Award recipient Michael Solomonov, Zahav, whose name references Jerusalem as a city of gold, maintains its mission of “bringing the authentic flavors of Israel’s cultural heritage” to patrons. Specializing in grilled meats, small plates and a large list of Israeli wines, the restaurant is especially known for its varieties of hummus, paired with an array of delicious breads baked by Chef Solomonov.  

​Nothing drinkable remains in the creations of Beth Lipman, a maker of impressive, and often haunting, glass and mixed media objects and installations, who is slated for a 2020 retrospective at New York City’s Museum of Art and Design on 59th Street.  Visitors to the Jewish Museum, among numerous other institutions like Florida’s Norton and Ringling Museums where her works are included in their permanent collections, have stopped to spend a good amount of time experiencing the ghostly, dreamlike 2012 commission “Laid Table with Etrog Container and Pastry Molds.” While some critics have channeled the inner raucousness of her art—they write about sharp, fragmented shards of containers and glassware, smashed during an out-of-control party or even a bacchanal—others have been struck by their evocation of sustained silence, and the palpable absence of imagined imbibers, their bodies symbolized by the broken, un-mendable vessels—now forever cut off from drunken exuberance, and from every other pleasure.

As the 48-year-old Pennsylvania-born artist, the daughter of a craftsperson, has written: “The hand-sculpted glass compositions are portraits of individuals and our society through inanimate objects.  Every object created, whether broken, ‘flawed’ or ‘perfect,’ is incorporated into the final composition, literally capturing a moment in time.  The process of creating defines the final composition.”