When Tablet Magazine recently visited Isaac Pollak’s Manhattan apartment to look at his collection of Jewish funerary objects, the collector was in an unusually good position to talk about them. A longstanding member of his synagogue’s burial society, or chevra kadisha, he had been involved in the ritual purification of a body just hours before. ...

Central to the Days of Awe in modern times is the experience of walking into the synagogue to find tall stacks of High Holiday prayer books, or mahzorim.
Things were not always thus. For centuries, Jewish prayer was an oral tradition, said from memory. Even as authoritative liturgies were codified, most didn’t have access to texts. ...

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.

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.”

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 ...

A Kashan Pictorial Silk Rug, 1850s, depicting King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba
Jews may be “the people of the book,” but their relationship to textiles predates the book itself. In Exodus, God provides detailed instructions for the creation of a rug-like partition to be woven of turquoise, purple, and scarlet wool and linen; embellished ...