In the irrational exuberance of 1928, everything seemed possible. Boards of directors could plan enormous synagogues in glistening white stone to rival the Parthenon. Academic dreamers could design a great Jewish university with towers, courtyards, and gardens to challenge the magnificence of Princeton or Oxford. No ambition was too large, no plan too expensive. One had only to hire an architect, draw an elegant façade, and watch the building fund fill. Then, in October, 1929, the great building boom ended with a crash, leaving magnificent synagogues on architects’ drawing boards, forever unbuilt. It all feels very 2008. What follows is a glimpse at some of the more ambitious plans and what, ultimately, became of them.

The irreverent design superstar Ron Arad has eludes easy categorization. Trained as an architect in London after studying at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, he is internationally recognized primarily for innovative objects, whether limited-edition sculptural furniture or industrial mass productions. Even his nationality doesn’t lend itself to neat classification. Though born in Tel Aviv in 1951, he has lived in England since the mid-1970s and is usually identified as “British, born Israel.” Apart from some trademarks—an affinity for curves, optical illusions, and rich textures—Arad’s only constant is his endless experimentation with materials, techniques, and forms.

Lisa Anne Auerbach, 41, works in a unique medium: sweaters. They’re sweaters with messages knitted in, either through words (she has an “addiction to language”) or through images of icons like Barack Obama and Sandy Koufax. The Chicago-bred artist earned her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1994, and she’s lived in California ever since. Many of her works are on display now through October at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. She’s also at work on a series of sweaters for a festival in Nottingham, England, inspired by Robin Hood and the Luddite rebellion which began there in 1811, in which, she says, she’ll be “recasting the merry men as this group of anarcho-feminists.” She explained six of her works to Tablet.

With a spacecraft-like building alongside of the National Mall, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is one of the country’s most visible venues for the display of modern and contemporary art. But its physical prominence is at odds with the mostly unknown story of its namesake: Joseph Hirshhorn, a Latvian immigrant, the 12th of 13 children, who once described himself as “a little Jewish boy brought up in the gutters of Brooklyn.”

In the first half of the 19th century, Washington, D.C. was a sleepy town. Though largely mapped out, it was still more or less unpopulated. Then came the Civil War, and both the federal government and the city’s population exploded. The sudden growth translated into a host of new opportunities for business—and for Jews.
This oft-overlooked ...

Harvey Kurtzman was one of the most important comic-book artists of all time. R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and the creators of Saturday Night Live and Monty Python are all in his debt. In a new gloriously comics-filled biography called The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, authors Paul Buhle and Denis Kitchen go deep inside Kurtzman’s life and art. Paul Buhle spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Kurtzman’s secular Jewish upbringing in the Bronx, his success at MAD, and his failures later in life.

Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz may have asserted that the numerous drawings in which he worked through his sculptural variations were never made “as independent works of art,” he, nonetheless, demonstrated tremendous skill as a draftsman and a lifelong fascination with the medium. An exhibition at London’s Ben Uri Gallery, the first British survey of Lipchitz’s work in over 20 years, traces the development of his central ideas in 152 works on paper. In the process, it offers fresh insight into his more famous, three-dimensional creations.

Király Street, the main shopping street in on of Budapest’s largest Jewish neighborhoods, in 1929. Photo by Imre Kinszky.
Historical facts are inherently prone to distortion, whether through competing perspectives, unreliable memories, or incomplete documentation. This notion of an inchoate past underpins the work of 59-year-old Hungarian media artist Péter Forgács, best known for haunting films ...

Our designers are Prem Krishnamurthy of Project Projects and Rob Giampietro.

Diasporist painting, which I just made up, is enacted under peculiar historical and personal freedoms, stresses, dislocation, structure, and momentum. The Diasporist lives and paints in two or more societies at once. Diasporism . . . is as old as the hills (or caves) but new enough to react today’s newspaper or last week’s aesthetic musing or tomorrow’s ...