If you’ve opened a magazine in the past couple of decades, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen the work of Harry Borden. The British portrait photographer has caught hundreds of mostly-famous people on film, from Hilary Duff to the Duchess of Devonshire, for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Time, and, well, “every magazine in the ...

From afar, the sculpture outside Milwaukee’s Jewish Museum looks suspiciously like Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick. Actually it’s a chimney. Meant to symbolize crematoria in the camps, the truncated tapered column is part of a Holocaust memorial created by artist Claire Lieberman. This 1983 monument’s array of literal and symbolic citations would put R. B. Kitaj to ...

A thin string stretching down and across city streets, high above the traffic, jumping from telephone pole to lamppost to fence, an eruv always has the air of an art installation. Paradoxically one of the most obscure and one of the most visible Jewish religious objects, the eruv allows observant Jews to carry their possessions ...

Self portrait in Striped Shirt, 2001, pastel on velvet paper, 12 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches.
CREDIT: Copyright The Estate of Avigdor Arikha, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York

There are certain people whose life force is so invincible, gainsaying our usual notions about the flagging of energy that comes with age, that they appear to be immortal ...

A new exhibition on Jewish ritual baths at the Jewish Museum in the Austrian town of Hohenems plays with issues of purity in a country where anti-immigrant rhetoric is part of the political debate and the “cleansing” of Jews once meant more than going to the mikvah.
Provocatively titled Ganz Rein! (the phrase means both “quite ...

Girl in plaid dress, Mukacevo, ca. 1935–38. Unpublished.
CREDIT: Roman Vishniac. © Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy the International Center of Photography

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, I profile the work of a young curator named Maya Benton, who has made an extraordinary discovery in the collection of legendary photographer Roman Vishniac, the man credited with ...

With his graphic-novel trilogy James Sturm’s America, comic-book artist James Sturm gained a devoted following for his skillful storytelling, sharp eye, and deft hand. The books examined 18th- and 19th-century America through the lens of religious revivalists, desperate gold miners, and a scrappy team of Jewish (and presumed to be Jewish) baseball players. Now, in ...