Tag Archives: USA

Dandy and Cowboy

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Man with mustache and scarf

R.B. Kitaj, Portrait of Aby Warburg, 1958–1962 © R.B. Kitaj Estate

R.B. Kitaj is known for his expressive, strongly-colored paintings and the retrospective at the Jewish Museum does these qualities full justice. Though for me personally, one of the most appealing works was at first unprepossessing. It is very small, barely 15 x 13 cm, in shades of grey – more a study than a painting. The Portrait of Aby Warburg (1958) depicts the pioneer of methodical iconography, who lived from 1866 to 1929. The son of a Hamburg banker, who passed on a career in the family business in order to become an artist and art historian, Warburg was an important inspiration for the painter Kitaj. Warburg studied the afterlife of ancient motifs in Renaissance art, an interest Kitaj shared insofar as he systematically quoted artworks from past eras in his own paintings. Continue reading →

New Customs for the New Year

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Girl releasing a paper ship into the waterA few years ago, a guest lecturer from New York visited the Berlin synagogue at Fraenkelufer and showed our congregation a new way of practicing an old Rosh ha-Shanah custom, that of tashlikh.

Usually Jews gather for the New Year holiday at the bank of a river and scatter breadcrumbs in the water as a symbolic way of shedding their misdeeds of the last year. The American professor did not strew breadcrumbs in the canal across from the synagogue however; rather, she placed a little homemade paper boat into the water, in which she’d tucked a letter to God. In the letter, she begged for forgiveness for her offences and affirmed her resolutions. The letter also contained thanks for the good experiences of the last year and her wishes for the coming one. Continue reading →

Music in the Mountains

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The Aspen Music Festival, 8000 feet above sea level and high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, is in full swing. musicians in the mountainsFor 8 weeks 600 students from all over the world are making music literally around the clock: in concert halls, music tents, churches, a brass quintet has set up on a street corner just in front of the ice cream parlor usually in the afternoon between scheduled performances and the very handsome, very young Eylon Ben-Yaakov is regaling us with Chopin’s polonaise in A-flat, followed by Prokofiev’s piano sonata No, 3 at the Aspen Chapel, a faux 12th century construct.  Continue reading →