Tackling the myriad issues raised by Sander Gilman's provocative opening salvo – "Are Jews Musical?" – this volume's distinguished contributors present a series of essays that trace the intersections of Jewish history and music from the late nineteen...

Cartographers have known for decades that maps are far from objective representations of the world; rather, every map reflects the agendas and intentions of its creators. Yet that understanding has had almost no effect on the way maps are viewed and...

Katharina Grosse's painting practice is a phoenix from the ashes of late Modernism, appending themselves to the Greenbergian cul de sac in an uncanny manner. Since 1998 Grosse has been using a compressed-air spray gun to apply garish swaths and splas...

What is it about etching that renders it – according to both the poet-critic Charles Baudelaire and the visionary artist Samuel Palmer – a medium of writing? And, moreover, what makes etching equally adaptable to the expression of both memory and mod...

Just in time for the 2008 election, WhiteWalls presents a comprehensive collection of Silvia Kolbowski's wry and searching responses to the questionable actions of the American government, as well as recent national shifts in legal, corporate, and cu...

The dictionary. The ubiquitous high-gloss fashion ad. The fraught relationship between artist and critic".Sleeping Beauty" ties these disparate strands of our everyday lives together only to strip away everything we thought we knew about each of them...

In 1933 eminent philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) fled Nazi Germany for the United States. His fame in Europe having already been established through a public debate with Martin Heidegger in 1929, Cassirer would go on to become a noteworthy infl...

Much has changed for Jewish women since the first edition of Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality appeared in 1992. Associations of Jewish women – academic, religious, secular – have proliferated, making the women's voices heard. In collecti...

In eighteenth-century France, the ability to lose oneself in a character or scene marked both great artists and ideal spectators. Yet it was thought this same passionate enthusiasm, if taken to unreasonable extremes, could also lead to sexual devianc...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point,...