Most of the works that appear in the exhibit Idol Anxiety, at the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, feature Christian and pagan content. But exhibit curator Aaron Tugendhaft credits the “heightened awareness” he developed from studying the Talmud as a child with helping him discover “valuable distinctions not seen by others” in the process of how objects avoid becoming idols.

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Here’s the lede:

What do you get when you mix a Jesuit publishing company, a Reform Jewish scholar, an Orthodox Jewish painter, and a thesis on human-divine encounters?

In Panim el Panim: Facing Genesis, Visual Midrash, the product is a surprisingly coherent collaboration of image and text, which not only examines the book of Genesis, but also seeks to uncover real-world lessons and advice from the biblical passages that are accessible to all sorts of readers.

“Kosher Art” will apply the Jewish traditional dietary laws of Kashrut to the creation of art. Each step of the process including the tools and materials will follow these rules. In so doing, the project will find a new solution to the challenge that is inherent in all Jewish Art, namely the prohibition against graven images.

I am interested in hearing more about the project, but the last line is not encouraging in the least. There is no challenge “inherent in Jewish art,” and to simplify the second commandment in this way reflects a poor grasp of Jewish history. Further, aside from symbolic discussions about the building of the Temple and the Tabernacle, Jewish artists have readily created works that used non-kosher animals. If Schachter wants to break new ground in this regard that is very exciting, but one wonders also how this will offer a “solution” to the alleged challenge.

In the recent series, “Seriously?!” Southland’s former senior minister Mike Breaux pinch-hit for Weece on the topic of “some of the more unusual phrases in the Bible,” particularly, Jesus’ instruction to “Eat My flesh.” (E.g. here, verse 54.)

Breaux’s talk was compelling, and one of my favorite parts of his sermon was when he talked about the Etch A Sketch he keeps in his office (next to a Tupperware ball) to remind him of how he hands the scribbles of his life to God, who returns a clean slate. What a great religious art metaphor! (You can read more about the toy in his book Identity Theft on Google Books here, page 159.)

But Breaux also said something about Jews, particularly rabbis, that is simply not true, and I think it’s important to point this out.

You know how some parents think their children are simply perfect, and though you want to tell them their kids are great, but not that great, you think it’s really sweet that they take such pride in their kids? Religious people should feel that sense of pride about their God (or Gods); it’s what you are supposed to feel if you are a person of faith. But when that pride comes at the cost of putting down others, it’s important to step back and wipe off the boundary between propaganda and religion.

Breaux turns to John chapter four to discuss Jesus’ unique ministry to a “a woman of Samaria” at a well in Sychar. Breaux praises Jesus for addressing the “really broken” woman, “even though Jewish rabbis were not supposed to speak to Samaritans, they were not supposed to speak to Samaritan women, or women in general in public.” Yet, Jesus talked to this one, “because he knew she was broken … he was always breaking rules, in fact they weren’t really rules, they were just barriers people had put up.”

Perhaps Breaux knew of the passage from Ethics of the Fathers that states, “One who speaks excessively with a woman brings evil upon himself, neglects the words of the Torah, and will go to hell.” (See here, number 5.) But frankly, I’m not so sure he knew the reference, and if he did he’d know to dig a bit deeper. The Talmud is packed with references to rabbis counseling women, and intelligent readers would know not to confuse the sense of modesty in Jewish scripture with any kind of censorship of coed conversations. There is just no reason for this cheap shot at Jews in an otherwise great sermon (save another reference to Jews as “spiritually blind”) and the audience deserved better.

My review of Four Seasons Lodge, a documentary about Holocaust survivors who vacation at the same bungalow colony in the Catskills, appears in this week’s issue of The Jewish Press.

Here’s a selection:

“Four Seasons Lodge” is not your typical Holocaust documentary. On the one hand, there is the plot of the people who survived the death camps now struggling to save their summer camp, which they call “our paradise in the mountains.” Meanwhile, these individuals are straight out of the “Twilight Zone”: a quickly fading demographic clinging to a summer lifestyle that seems to have outlived its usefulness. Though bungalow communities initially offered New Yorkers a way to flee the city’s hot summers, today’s air conditioning and more globalized travel ambitions have left bungalows to become ghost towns. But ghost towns apparently are very welcoming to people haunted by ghosts.

Adi Nes’ version of Leonardo, from the Israel Museum’s (Jerusalem) “comprehensive survey of contemporary Israeli creativity from the past ten years,” called “Real Time: Art in Israel 1998-2008.”

Our education system is bankrupt at all levels. Our universities do not prepare our young minds to see anything bad about Islam. Here in Nashville at Vanderbilt University you can get a degree in Islamic Studies and never read the life of Mohammed—and never read the entire Koran. You study Sufi poetry, Islamic art and Islamic history viewed as a glorious triumph. No kafirs suffer in this program and there is no history of Jew, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist suffering under Islamic rule for the past 1,400 years. A graduate from this program then goes out into the world professionally trained to be an apologist for Islam, a dhimmi. And this program is standard at all schools, not just Vanderbilt.

In the churches, the artifacts are alive … Putting them behind glass would take them out of their environment. It would be like putting them in a museum.

Terra cotta warriors in an image accompanying Holland Cotter’s NY Times review of Chinese art.