Search the collections at the Center for Jewish History
Out of the Box: Paint, Pray, Love
Known for her paintings of erotic female nudes, Lene Schneider-Kainer divorced her husband in 1926 and set off on an artistic odyssey across Asia. Retracing Marco Polo’s journey, the intrepid artist travelled from opium dens in Isfahan to Buddhist temples in the Himalayas and from brothels in Agra to the Peking Opera. When she died, Schneider-Kainer left her travel diary, photographs, scrapbooks, and over 100 watercolors and sketches to the Leo Baeck Institute. On September 19, 2019 at the Center for Jewish History, Archivist Michael Simonson took these rarely seen treasures Out of the Box and revealed the enchanting art and surprising story of a German-Jewish artist who defied the male art world and broke the boundaries set for women in her time.
About the Series: At the Center for Jewish History, there are tens of thousands of boxes in our partners’ archival collections. Boxes filled with photographs, journals, letters, and documents. Boxes filled with stories. We take these treasures Out of the Box in our new series. Join us!
Out of the Box: Snapshots of a Life - David Bloch
David Ludwig Bloch was a deaf Jewish artist from Bavaria who found refuge in Shanghai following his flight from Nazi Europe in 1940. There he joined a population of 20,000 other German and Austrian Jewish refugees, who found themselves living in relative safety in a place they had only imagined. A painter, illustrator, and lithographer, Bloch captured the daily life of Shanghai in the 1940s, a thriving metropolis of rich and poor, city natives, European exiles, and a vast population of Chinese refugees fleeing the Japanese invasion and chronic civil war. Through Bloch’s work, we meet the everyday people of Shanghai—the rickshaw drivers, small business owners, the homeless, and the street beggars—as well as an artist who made a new life for himself in China and then, finally, in the United States.
Michael Simonson, archivist at the Leo Baeck Institute, will be joined by Nancy Berliner, Wu Tung Senior Curator of Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, who will provide an analysis of the work in the context of Chinese art history, including Chinese art contemporary to Bloch's time in Shanghai.
About the Series At the Center for Jewish History, there are tens of thousands of boxes in our partners' archival collections. Boxes filled with photographs, journals, letters, and documents. We take these treasures Out of the Box in our series. This program took place on July 12, 2021.
Ina Golub Archives Week 2016
Yeshiva University Museum’s Collections Curator Bonni-Dara Michaels describes the Museum and highlights one of the Museum’s collections donated by the late fiber artist Ina Golub. Some of Golub’s works were included in the exhibit “Uncommon Threads: Clothing & Textiles from the YU Museum Collection” (September 28, 2016-April 29, 2017). Yeshiva University Museum, which opened in 1973, has a collection of artifacts dating from the Bronze Age (circa 3150 BCE) to the present.
Man Ray: The Artist and His Shadows: A Conversation with Author Arthur Lubow
Man Ray (1890–1976), a founding father of Dada and a key player in French Surrealism, is one of the central artists of the 20th century. He is also one of the most elusive. In this new biography in the Jewish Lives series at Yale University Press, journalist and critic Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray’s Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art. How did this son of Russian Jewish immigrants become one of the most radically original maverick artists of his time? The author was in conversation with Lauren Gilbert, Senior Manager for Public Services at the Center for Jewish History. This program was funded, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
This event took place on September 23, 2021.
This Portal allows users to search museum objects, including works of Jewish art of all types.
This Portal of the Leo Baeck Institute represents a curated selection of items from the Institute’s Art and Objects Collection, its Archives, and its Library. The selected works range from engravings that depict Jewish life in German lands in the 16th century to abstract works by German-Jewish émigrés in the 20th century, as well as paintings and photographs of countless individuals. The Portal also features objects ranging from Torah scrolls and ceremonial lamps used in German-Jewish communities to personal items that German-Jewish emigrants took with them out of Europe. Taken together, this body of materials offers a visual record of German-Jewish history.
The following are subjects that are related to art and art history, but warrant their own subject guides for our collections:
Archival and library highlights found at the Center relating to architecture, fashion, and other related design fields.
Archival and library highlights found at the Center relating to Jewish comic books and comic book creators.
Archival and library highlights found at the Center relating to dance, music, opera, and theater materials.
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Judaism (Works of Art), The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City
Works in the The Met's collection related to or about Judaism; this includes works of Judaica
Jewish Art: A Brief History, My Jewish Learning
An overview of Jewish art history, from traditional ceremonial objects/Judaica to the modern Abstract Expressionism of Mark Rothko.
Jewish Women's Archive: Art, Jewish Women's Archive
The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women features thousands of biographic and thematic essays on Jewish women around the world. This is their selection of works pertaining to art.
The Jewish Museum
The Jewish Museum is an art museum and repository of cultural artifacts, housed at 1109 Fifth Avenue. The first Jewish museum in the United States, as well as the oldest existing Jewish museum in the world, it contains the largest collection of art and Jewish culture excluding Israeli museums, more than 30,000 objects. It focuses both on artifacts of Jewish history and on modern and contemporary art.
John L. Loeb, Jr. Database of Early American Jewish Portraits
The Loeb Portrait Database of American Jewish Portraits gathers over 500 known portraits of Jews in America prior to 1865. Each portrait contains (where information is available), the subject’s name, birth and death dates, the artist and artist dates, the date of the portrait, the medium, dimensions, and the repository that holds the image. Of additional value are the biographies that accompany each portrait, a full listing of all repositories from which the images originate, and a rich array of related reading for additional research.
The Player, Enrico Glicenstein, Brooklyn Museum
A scultpture by Jewish artist Enrico Glicenstein, on display at The Brooklyn Museum. Glicenstein's personal papers are in the YIVO archives and available for viewing at The Center for Jewish History.