I read the July 27 article titled “Church Official and Wife Beaten, Robbed in Gaza” with interest. The entire story is worth reading (and is short, though quite disturbing), but I think the final paragraph is worth noting in full:
Christians in the Gaza live in a kind of no-zone between two worlds, often caught in the cross-fire between Palestinians and Israelis. Neither side openly interacts with the small number of Christians in the area.
From Yeshiva World News (my translations in square brackets for folks who don’t understand Hebrew):
Maran [Aramaic for “our master”/Wikipedia] Rav Ovadia Yosef Shlita [acronym for “may he live a long, good life”] in his motzei shabbos [Saturday night] drasha [lecture] came out against U.S. President Barak [sic] Hussein Obama and other world leaders who feel they can dictate policy in Eretz Yisrael [Israel].
The Rav [rabbi] stated “they tell us not to build here and not to build there….as if we are their slaves”. The Rav concluded that Moshiach [Messiah] will come and they will all be gone.
Rav Ovadia added that in the place of the Beis HaMikdosh [Temple] today there are Arabs and all these wicked people will be ousted when Moshiach arrives. He is waiting for us more than we await his arrival explained the Gadol HaDor [term for the greatest sage of the generation]. “Only learning Torah will expedite his arrival. Nothing else will help, not bagrut (matriculation) or safrut (literature)”.
Invoking Pres. Obama’s middle name was an intentional move, I’m sure, and the rest of the story doesn’t require much comment, though it’s probably worth noting that the title on YWN is “Rav Ovadia Shlita Slams President Obama & Other World Leaders.”
Here. Bonus: learn what the term ‘mazal’ means as in ‘mazal tov.’
My review of Theater J’s The Seagull on 16th Street, link.
Though Theophany can carry very positive implications for prophets, it is also liable to destroy their families, friends, and communities.
Such is the premise of Zoe Murdock’s new novel, Torn by God: A Family’s Struggle with Polygamy (first 4 chapters available here).
Set in a small town in Utah in 1959, Torn tells of Michael Sterling, who becomes increasingly alienated from his family and community, who reject a vision he claims to have privately experienced.
Sterling stubbornly clings to his epiphany, yet the disbelief of his wife, Sharon, and his children, Beth and Mikey, makes him vulnerable to a rogue FLDS-like polygamist society, run by one Brother Reuben, who claims to believe in Sterling’s vision.
As Sterling becomes friendlier with Reuben and the polygamists, Sharon, Beth, and Mikey immediately recognize his new friend as a fraud and try to warn him to stay away. The local bishop does the same and is forced to set an excommunication plan in motion so that Sterling does not lead the church astray.
But Reuben’s declared faith in Sterling’s vision empowers Sterling where his church has denounced his special epiphany. Sterling sets down a destructive path of increasing dependence (religious, psychological, and ultimately financial) on a charismatic who is using him.
According to her website, Murdock’s “most basic desire is to know how people come to believe what they believe and how those beliefs lead them to act in specific ways,” which she finds “as exciting and stimulating as exploring a foreign country.”
Indeed the book, which reminds me of the magic and confusion of Ole Edvart Rolvaag’s masterful Giants in the Earth, takes the psychological temperature of not just the prophet, but also of the entire community.
Particularly of interest to non-Mormons (and to some Mormons too no doubt) will be the ways the LDS doctrines of personal revelation and the Law of Consecration collide with modernity.
I won’t ruin the story, which I highly recommend (and Murdock is well worth following on Twitter), but I will say that Murdock presents a very fair and honest look at a Mormon community, in which all the characters grapple with real world problems.
I learned a lot about Mormonism from the book, but I also think that the issues that Murdock presents are larger questions about sacred vs. secular, religion and spousal and parental relationships, and personal vs. public worship.
The title page declares that the narrative “is inspired by real events and is set in the landscape of the author’s youth,” and for that I hope that the more tragic parts of the narrative were literary license and did not actually plague the author. But whatever Murdock endured, readers stand to learn a lot from her experiences and insights.
I just saw that I am mentioned in a footnote in Blaine Brownell’s (University of Minnesota) article “Assembling Light: PET Wall Installation” in the Journal of Architectural Education.
The note (#5) cites my article “Scavenger Par Excellence, Wandering Jewess” on Louise Nevelson at MyJewishLearning.com.
I’ve reached out to Brownell for more information and will certainly post it here if I hear back. The article is available here (but many of you might not be able to see it if you don’t have access to the journal).
Here’s the abstract:
While the trajectories of minimalist light art and assemblage art have been historically distinct, these movements seek to produce similarly charged atmospheres that transcend common material associations. A marriage of these traditions employing programmable light nets and reused beverage containers seeks to capitalize on this similarity, shifting deeply embedded cultural readings of a ubiquitous consumer product via integrated illumination that alters the material’s inherent banality.
The full citation is: Volume 62, Issue 2, Pages 30-36. Published Online: 20 Oct 2008.
In honor of John Calvin’s 500th birthday (this Friday), here is a reference to idolatry (the real kind, not the metaphorical).
All too often, it seems to me that the only kind of idolatry that pastors talk about is the metaphorical kind (greed, materialism, etc.), rather than the literal second commandment. (Aaron Dailey, one of the elders of lifeconnectionchurch.net, agrees with me.)
But it turns out that Calvin requested to be buried in an unmarked grave in a common cemetery in Geneva to avoid idolatry. (Though this open letter to Calvin claims he held greed to be a chief form of idolatry.)
For not showcasing enough women artists, and what it means for art in America. (Spoiler alert: He think it’s bad. I agree completely.)
I’m about 350 pages (of 490, with 749 footnotes) into Piri Halasz’s (of “From the Mayor’s Doorstep“) new book ” A Memoir of Creativity: Abstract Painting, Politics & the Media, 1956-2008.”
The book, according to the press release, “unites art theory, politics, journalism, and memoir into a fluid whole,” and departs from other art historical works in its claim, told through the prism of Halasz’s experience, that abstract painting should be viewed as “multireferential” rather than as non-representational.
What Halasz means by “multireferential” is that whereas many people think of an “abstract” painting as one that has no subject, in fact “abstract” paintings have many subjects, or one should say many prospective subjects. A naturalistic painting of a tree — the sort that leads viewers to identify the work as a representation of a tree — refers just to that one tree, while a vertical green brush stroke, Halasz would argue, could refer to a variety of objects, say a pepper, a blade of grass, an unripe banana, the spine of a green book, etc.
Halasz admits this theory sounds intuitive. “When I explain this theory in conversation, people outside the art world often get it immediately — so immediately that they are apt to exclaim, ‘But that’s so obvious!’” Halasz writes (pp. 5), “Then they look at me suspiciously, and ask, ‘Are you sure nobody else has thought of this before?’”
Yet, the theory is anything but obvious. For one thing, Halasz maintains that artists bring their unconscious minds (in the Freudian sense of the term) into their art, and that psychoanalysis ought to play a role in interpreting works. This sort of claim takes a lot of guts given the way Freud’s theories are typically abused by scholars today.
I will get into more specific details of Halasz’s book in later posts, but for now, I would like to make several general points about the book:
- Whether one agrees or disagrees with her politics (and I certainly do not agree with everything she says), Halasz brings a fascinating perspective on the media to the table. In a time where newsrooms appear (tragically) to be going extinct, I found it really exciting to read about Halasz’s experiences as a writer (and the first woman writer to write a cover, “Swinging London“) for Time.
- Where it is fashionable in academia to denounce and renounce Clement Greenberg, Halasz speaks about the great art critic from experience. To be fair, Greenberg has no chance to reply, and all we have to go on is Halasz’s word, but the book provides some very personal and raw accounts of Halasz’s relationship with Greenberg.
- Though she is not a practicing Jew, Halasz does reflect on several occasions upon issues that will be of interest to the readers of this blog who are interested in Jewish culture and identity and anti-Semitism.
Dresden is delisted. The Cleveland Museum of Art has Hindus singing its praises. An original Gutenberg bible goes on display in the Jersey City Heights (and the BL has put the world’s “oldest bible” online). Now that Michael Jackson has passed, there is still Orlan, and here’s a sort-of Catholic angle on her “art.” A profile of Mormon Artist magazine. Artists are trying to save the world (Wilde be damned). Wendy Rosenfield continues to promote Twitter. And Malaysia: the new fashion center of (you guessed) “Islamizing clothes.”
My latest article appears on MyJewishLearning.com. Here’s the lede:
Jewish art tends to be associated with European painters like Chagall, Liebermann, Pissarro, and Soutine. But Bombay-born painter Siona Benjamin, whose art combines Jewish, Indian, and American elements, shatters the misconception that Jewish art is essentially Western.
I have also written about Siona here and here.
