Chagall lovingly portrayed shtetl life, of course, and, by his own account, his childhood home was “the soil that nourished the roots of [his] art.” But he turned away from formal religion after his bar mitzvah, left Russia for good in 1922, and became a vital member of the École de Paris. While his work never fully escaped charges that it was provincial, the dream-like depictions of floating brides and animals for which he is best known mostly universalized his enduring spirituality.

All this makes the three relatively straightforward paintings of synagogue interiors being auctioned by Sotheby’s tomorrow somewhat remarkable. Rare documentary representations from trips Chagall made to Palestine and Vilna in the 1930s, the paintings are among only six known examples of the kind. The others are in the collections of the Israel Museum and Amsterdam’s Stedlijk and on long-term loan to the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris.

Perhaps because the works are atypical, the estimates for their sale prices, in the $300,000 to $600,000 range, are modest for Chagall. (Prime examples bring several million dollars, and his auction record is $14.8 million.) But the realism in the paintings is striking, given how strongly Chagall is associated with the fantastic, and was also a factor that helped Sotheby’s identify the sites. “This was one of his modes of painting,” Hebrew University scholar Ziva Amishai-Maisels told me. Chagall painted several churches around that time, though notably those are all exteriors.

Sotheby’s consignments come to the market from heirs of the collector who acquired them in 1945 at the inaugural exhibition of the short-lived Gallery of Jewish Art in New York. It was a low point in Chagall’s life, when he was still mourning the premature death of his beloved wife, Bella, and coming to terms with the recent destruction of European Jewry. Letters sent by Chagall and on his behalf to the buyer’s son two decades later suggest he cared deeply about these pictures and was interested in getting them back, a request that was evaded. Beyond their sheer radiance, which doesn’t come through in reproductions, the details surrounding the creation of these pictures shed light on why they were so personally significant.

In a presentation at Sotheby’s earlier this month, the artist’s granddaughter Bella Meyer said Chagall always wanted to visit the Jewish ancestral homeland. His opportunity ostensibly came when Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned him to make a book of prints illustrating the Bible. In fact, it has been established that Vollard had no intention of sending him to Palestine for the project but, fortuitously, Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, invited Chagall around that time to partake in the founding of that city’s art museum. Sailing aboard the Champollion from Marseilles to Alexandria in the spring of 1931, Chagall encountered Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, an old friend, and met the French Jewish philosopher Edmund Fleg. His own Zionism was emboldened by visits to sites like the Wailing Wall and Rachel’s Tomb, which he also depicted.

According to Meyer, Chagall “was very moved to be in the place where the prophets had been,” and, in a sense, the Holy Land replaced Vitebsk as his spiritual home. The experience seems to have reshaped his sense of Jewish destiny. As he put it upon his installation of stained-glass windows representing the 12 tribes in the synagogue at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Medical Center in 1962: “How is it that the air and earth of Vitebsk, my birthplace, and of thousands of years of exile, find themselves mingled in the air and earth of Jerusalem?” (He also noted that such thoughts first occurred to him on the 1931 trip, the first of eight visits.)

Curiously, of all the synagogues in Jerusalem, the one Chagall rendered was the inconspicuous Hagoral (meaning “lottery” and referring to a late-19th-century housing solution for poor Yemenite immigrants), on the second floor of a nondescript building in the Mishkenot Yisrael neighborhood. With the help of Reuven Gafni, the preeminent expert on Jerusalem’s synagogues, Sotheby’s Israeli art specialist Jennifer Roth tracked the site down and, upon discovering the accuracy and detail with which it had been captured, was awed to find herself “literally in the footsteps of Chagall.”

Despite it being Sephardic and very modest, Roth surmises that Hagoral would have appealed to Chagall, with its tripartite ark most likely carved by Galician artisans and the surrounding streets—narrow, windy, and impenetrable by cars—reminiscent of his Eastern European shtetl. Meyer echoed this, noting her grandfather’s passion for rich textiles, which she imagines was stirred by the synagogue’s Orientalist rugs and the colorful fabrics adorning its parochet, bimah, and benches: “I can’t help but thinking he saw it and said ‘Look how beautiful,’ and that it brought him back to such a deeply folkloric sense of his origins.”

Chagall also traveled to the town of Safed, where he painted two versions of the Sephardic Ha’Ari synagogue and one of the Ashkenazi Ha’Ari. (Both synagogues are dedicated to the 16th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, whose ideas would have been familiar to Chagall from his Hasidic childhood, but the former dates from the 13th century while the latter was built during the Ari’s lifetime.) Here, perhaps playing up the supernatural, Chagall emphasized soaring Gothic-like architecture and imparted an almost unnatural blue hue. In the Ashkenazi example, the only Safed painting at Sotheby’s, Chagall particularly elongated structural columns and lavishly illustrated the ark, with its red parochet and decorations of leaves and grapes in green, gold, and brown.

That vivid sense of color is also evident in the Vilna painting but the mood is more somber, reflecting that when Chagall traveled there in 1935, to help establish a Jewish art museum, he clearly sensed the impending danger. Whereas Chagall’s depictions of Palestine synagogues show them occupied by lingering worshipers, his Vilna sanctuary seems eerily empty. Tellingly, upon his return from Lithuania, Chagall and Bella ardently tried to shore up their French citizenship, though they would ultimately have to spend the war years in New York.

Sotheby’s initially had difficulty pinpointing this synagogue as well, but senior Judaica consultant Sharon Mintz found archival photos that helped identify it as the “kloys,” or private shul and study hall, of the Vilna Gaon. It was destroyed in World War II—a concrete Soviet school building now occupies the space—and Chagall’s rendering is actually the only image of this direct view, with the central ark flanked by three arched stained-glass windows. A testament to its historic value, it will be included in a forthcoming catalog of Lithuanian synagogues. More poignantly, the painting is an elegy for a lost world, also memorialized by Chagall in a Yiddish poem he later wrote about the Great Vilna Synagogue, included in Yale scholar Benjamin Harshav’s monumental 2003 biography, Marc Chagall and His Times:

The old shul, the old street
I painted them just yesteryear.
Now smoke rises there, and ash
And the parokhet is lost.

Where are your Torah scrolls?
The lamps, menorahs, chandeliers?
The air, generations filled with their breath?
It evaporated in the sky.

Trembling, I put the color,
The green color of the Ark of the Covenant.
I bowed in tears,
Alone in the shul—a last witness.

Chagall would go on to do a series of controversial Crucifixions, expressing the horrors of the Holocaust by linking Jesus’ suffering with the cruelties inflicted on his people, and he finally published his complete Bible prints in 1956. Toward the end of his prolific career, he also created seven monumental paintings that formed the core of the collection at the Musée Message Biblique in the South of France, designed mosaics and tapestries encapsulating the destiny of the Jewish people and its connection to the land of Israel for the Knesset, and (some say urged by his second wife, Valentina, a fellow Russian Jew who converted to Christianity) took several commissions for church windows. But there would be no more synagogues in the strict sense, no imagery as direct and intimate.

Whether because of his widow’s leanings or, as Meyer suspects, his love for his nearby home and the fact that he remained very Jewish but was no longer Orthodox, Chagall is buried in the Saint-Paul-de-Vence cemetery, near Nice, France. It is a far cry from his 1917 “Cemetery Gates,” with weathered stones marking centuries of Jewish life in stars of David and Hebrew letters. But this duality mirrors Chagall’s uniquely successful convergence of tradition and modernity, while the synagogue paintings affirm that he never really took off the mantle of the wandering Jew.

Founded in 1906 by Bulgarian émigré Boris Schatz with four teachers and 20 students, Bezalel today, between its Jerusalem headquarters and a satellite branch in Tel Aviv, boasts a faculty of over 400 and a student body of nearly 2,000. (The handful of newer design schools in the country were all founded by Bezalel graduates.) A key milestone in this history was the 1935 influx of refugees from the Bauhaus, who set Bezalel on a modernist course while maintaining its mission of integrating “European artistic and Jewish traditions with the local culture of the Land of Israel.”

This heritage is particularly alive this spring. In April, the school had a major presence at the world’s leading forum for applied design, Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile. And this week, Sotheby’s London is hosting a major show devoted to Bezalel artists.

In Milan, Bezalel was one of 45 groups selected to partake in the Ventura Lambrate, an avant-garde offshoot of the main Milan fair. Bezalel presented “Thinking Hands,” an exhibition of student work highlighting the school’s distinctly experimental laboratory approach. The title reflects an engagement with what Ezri Tarazi, head of Bezalel’s Master of Design program and one of the show’s curators, calls a “postindustrial revolution” characterized by “going back to the materials and finding smart ways to make things unique.”

A prime example is Ori Yekutiel’s LightStone, a bench made with volcanic powder converted to foam that looks hefty but is virtually weightless. Tarazi traced the work’s genesis to a workshop in which students attempted to recreate elements found at the Dead Sea. Similarly inventive is Ophir Zak’s Between the Lines, a mesmerizing orange chair realized after repeated trials with a laser cutter that transformed flat metal sheets into an elaborately twisted, net-like form.

Artifacts of everyday Israeli life find themselves radically transformed. In Ori Sonnenschein’s Solskin Peels, a set of citrus tableware is made with microwave technology; Yael Friedman presented a line of Veggie jewelry. Not surprisingly, politics come into play, most notably in Arthur Brutter’s Protectable, a classroom desk that doubles as shelter from earthquakes and is being outfitted for Israeli towns bordering Gaza. (Israelis can be said to be experts in the field of emergency preparedness; following the Southeast Asian tsunami, Bezalel tailored an entire course around what people need in the wake of a disaster.) The common thread is an improvisational attitude that is at the heart of Israeli culture. “The lack of resources and fixed traditions translates as a need to build something new, and we make things from what we have,” Tarazi said.

This sensibility was on full view in Milan, where Bezalel graduates were also featured in a show organized by Israel’s foreign ministry and in other, smaller venues and galleries. It wasn’t the first time Bezalel was at the fair, but this year, Tarazi said, there was “a lot of buzz; people kept saying what’s going on? Bezalel is everywhere.” Top-tier peer institutions approached Bezalel about potential collaborations.

The buzz will, no doubt, continue as independent curator Janice Blackburn showcases students and graduates of the academy in an exhibition at Sotheby’s London on view through May 11. The seed for the show, “Bezalel:  Legacy, Innovation, Inspiration,” was planted last May when Blackburn visited Israel to see her friend Ron Arad’s new Design Museum in Holon. While there, she explored Israel’s design scene and toured Bezalel, where she was struck by the quality and ingenuity of the work and intrigued by the institution’s rich history.

“Their products have a very independent spirit and freshness which I found very appealing,” Blackburn said, adding that Israeli designers are particularly conscious of recycling and sustainability. A case in point is David Amar’s Raymond Table, made of aluminum legs and reclaimed wood planks jointed to allow for various configurations. A similar sensibility informed the whole of the Sotheby’s show, which Blackburn hired Amar to install. Using two long displays made of secondhand industrial shelving, Amar juxtaposed examples from students and graduates (many of them now professors) to emphasize Bezalel’s informal, radically collegial atmosphere.

An eye-level platform will hold smaller, more delicate objects, among them Arad’s brand new stainless steel Pirouette cutlery, 50 sets of which have been donated by the manufacturer, and an experimental shoe project featuring funky and thought-provoking—if  not entirely wearable—footwear. Another long unit with lower plinths will present larger furniture like Tal Gur’s Sturdy Chair, which is made of plastic drinking straws, and a set of drawers made into bookshelves conceived by Raw Edges, the duo behind Stella McCartney’s retail stores. Both embody the whimsy that is also a hallmark of Bezalel designs.

Other works are overtly political, though even these can be quite witty. Edit Yemini’s readymade porcelain ware is adorned with small plastic toy soldiers and rifles. Less explicit but just as sharp are two tables by Tarazi: the first a prototype for his New Baghdad, which features a maze-like aluminum surface mirroring a map of the city, and the wood and Plexiglas Thermal Earth, which evokes a photo taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle and in which warmer areas appear darker. (The latter was included in a show of his work titled “Kalab”—Israeli army slang for karov labayit or “close to home”—at Paradigma Gallery in Tel Aviv this past winter, for which he created an entire home environment using military materials and metaphors.) As Blackburn sees it, the nation’s mandatory military service is a key factor in enriching the experience of its art students.

The only purely fine art entry at Sotheby’s, a photography project illustrating the port city of Ashdod, will hang on one gallery wall, while masks by Ami Drach and Dov Granchow made of repurposed headlights will grace another. Another centerpiece is an illustrated timeline of Bezalel’s history made up of informational pads from which visitors can tear off sheets.

In the months to come, there are plans for a show of jewelry and shoes at the Parisian boutique Cecile et Jeanne this summer; inclusion in London’s Design Week this fall; and a traveling U.S. exhibition kicking off in February 2012.

Anselm Kiefer, Merkaba, 2010.
Copyright Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Charles Duprat.

If geography is indeed destiny, then the German Neo-Expressionist Anselm Kiefer could be deemed the saying’s poster child. Many accounts of his work begin with the simple facts of his birth: Donauschingen, Germany; March 1945. And it’s perhaps only fitting: Over the past four decades, Kiefer has quite possibly done more than any other artist to confront his native country’s troubled history—and its implications for humanity in the post-Holocaust world.

This unwavering concern, expressed in vigorous, heavily textured mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and installations, comes to a head in a monumental exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea through December 18th—Kiefer’s first in New York since 2002. It is a stunning presentation on many levels, not least sheer scale. As the gallery’s Georges Armaos notes, “It’s very rare that we break down the walls,” referring to the 12,000-square foot space cleared to accommodate a 100-ton installation, 15 massive landscapes, and 25 glass-and-steel vitrines, some more than 20 feet high, encasing sculptures that allude to the Bible, Kabbalah, alchemy, literature, and Greek mythology.

Also unusual is the sight of the concluding words from the Passover Seder—“Next Year in Jerusalem”/“Le-shanah ha-ba-a b’yerushalayim”— Kiefer’s title for the show—scrawled at the entrance to one of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries. Despite a longstanding fascination with Jewish mysticism and an interest in the Hebrew Bible that dates back to a 1984 trip to Israel for a solo exhibition there, Kiefer’s thoroughgoing and direct treatment of Jewish themes (expounded in an eight-page glossary the gallery created to help visitors navigate the labyrinth) commands attention in this setting. It seems that his non-Jewish status and approach—hardly subtle yet never literal and always a touch ironic—enables him to bypass claims of sensationalism and kitsch that often afflict religious and Holocaust art.

Yet Kiefer’s engagement with history is highly personal and hardly without controversy, as becomes clear in the exhibition’s imposing centerpiece, Occupations, which reconstitutes the series of photographs from 1969 in which he performed the Nazi salute in front of significant European sites. Here, 76 new prints are blown up, mounted on lead and then burlap and hung in crammed rows within a partially enclosed steel container that the New York Times’s Roberta Smith astutely compared with “box cars, crematoria, barracks or meat lockers.”

But it isn’t so straightforward. It’s more like an enormous time capsule that the mature artist has unearthed, one that suggests a fragile book or archive of blurred images, only glimpses of which are revealed through slightly open doors. Greeting visitors as they enter, the only head-on image of Kiefer in his provocative pose is framed by heavy doors that seem to be closing. The artist is boldly inviting us to visit, drawing us in to examine these faded pages, while obstructing our view and in fact denying entry, reminding us that, 40 years later, we can barely make things out, though we cannot escape or ignore the past.

The brooding paintings that hang on the walls may, by comparison, initially appear to be alluring landscapes, but they too embroil viewers in a complex dialectic. Caked with paint and incorporating collaged photographs as well as organic elements like ash, lead, and thorn bushes, these overgrown vistas bring their tangled imagery—like the history and memory they represent—to the surface, revealing a tension between nature and art, devastation and regeneration. “Ruins for me are the beginning,” Kiefer said during an event at the Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y earlier this month.

Anselm Kiefer, Die Shechina, 2010.
Copyright Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Charles Duprat.

Particularly dense and encased in steel-and-glass frames that bring them even more into the third dimension are a set of six multipanel canvases depicting the forest—a central motif in Kiefer’s oeuvre that captures both the milieu of his childhood and its iconic, often ominous, status in German nationalism, Romanticism, and folklore, not to mention the woods where Nazi victims hid, revolted, and were massacred. Along with somewhat more traditional canvases depicting biblical and mythological sites and spirits, these landscapes—reflected in the glass boxes of the fully three-dimensional sculptures scattered throughout the gallery—create a sort of forest, enveloping visitors in the philosopher-artist’s maze of ideas. The vitrines share the paintings’ intense materiality—manifest in cracked floors, shards of glass and clay, weathered metals, and heaps of ink-stained sackcloth—and continue Kiefer’s exploration of the cyclical nature of destruction and renewal.

Some do this by taking on inherently dichotomous subjects. For example, Ararat, featuring nine lead boats suspended on wire, refers to the mountain on the Turkish-Armenian border where Noah’s ark is thought to have docked following the flood meant to obliterate humanity. Similarly Das rote Meer (The Red Sea), a small zinc basin filled with rusty water, at once alludes to the Israelites who miraculously crossed to freedom and the Egyptians who were swallowed by the water.

Other works approach the central theme from a metaphysical standpoint, incorporating kabbalistic principles like the 10 sefirot, or attributes of God, represented by numbered glass discs intricately arranged on wire upon a base of three burnt books, and Merkaba, in which airplane fuselage assumes the role of the godly chariot that operates between heaven and earth. Mortal encounters with God are also prevalent, as in two versions of Jacob’s dream, visualizing the ladder angels ascended as the patriarch rested upon a stone for the night, and a depiction of the burning bush that wasn’t consumed, named for the words God spoke when he summoned Moses there, “I am that I am.”

To some critics, it is all a bit manipulative and heavy-handed, the esoteric nature of the works undermined by the artist’s inscription of his titles on the glass cases and the gallery’s detailed glossary. There is some truth to this, and a few works come across as simplistic, but the overall effect is quite powerful. Where appropriation of almost sacred imagery might be of questionable taste—for example the stained, battered clothing in Lilith and Liliths Tochter (Lilith’s Daughter) reminiscent of garments stripped from and worn by concentration camp victims—Kiefer’s treatment of these symbols is more mournful than exploitative.

If anything, Kiefer challenges Germany’s response to the atrocities, though his refusal to negate national heritage in the name of collective guilt has also brought him detractors. As he said in a 2008 speech reprinted in the exhibition catalog, “The wounds were not bandaged; they were shamefully hidden instead.” Contrasting that with the Hasidic legend that every child in its mother’s womb is taught the entire Torah only to be tapped by an angel before it is born so that it forgets everything and enters the world “as what appears to be an empty vessel able to fill itself anew,” Kiefer concludes that Germany’s Stunde Null (the so-called Zero Hour when the Nazi government capitulated) was an infinitely inferior state of renewal.

In both cases, he suggests with his words and work, “the lower layers of the palimpsest become visible once again,” the difference being human agency in filling that space, building upon the debris. Indeed, however hopeful, the title of Kiefer’s latest show reflects an ongoing struggle; the very utterance of this prayer acknowledges that while our ancestors experienced the exodus, we find ourselves in exile again, yearning once more for redemption.

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. Rather, manuscripts—by definition handwritten and unique—were created for communal use, with myriad variations according to local rites. Some of the wealthiest may have had smaller, private copies, but, for the most part, congregations either chanted prayers from memory or repeated after a cantor. Not until Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the early 1450s did books become accessible to a broader public, and for some time they remained a luxury.

But even within the unique realm of early prayer books, the Nuremberg Mahzor, which has just gone on public view for the first time in 52 years at the Israel Museum after a nearly year-long restoration, is exceptional. Completed in 1331 for the Jewish community of Nuremberg, the sumptuously decorated work is not only one of the most comprehensive illuminated Hebrew prayer books ever created, it is also among the largest medieval codices in the world.

Weighing more than 57 pounds, it is made up of 521 double-sided leaves. It includes holiday prayers for the entire Jewish calendar; the five books of the Bible known as the megillot, or scrolls; special prayers for lifecycle events like weddings and circumcisions; extensive commentaries; and—its main feature, accounting for roughly 90 percent of the text—over 700 piyutim, or liturgical poems. Moreover, the quality of the scribal work and elegantly embellished panels qualify the text as one of the region’s outstanding manuscripts. While communal mahzorim were also created in Spain, Italy, and other Jewish centers at that time, this monumental format was a phenomenon particular to the Franco-German Ashkenazi region.

Equally impressive is the work’s provenance. The colophon at the back indicates that it was commissioned by a Joshua the son of Isaac and completed on the fourth of Elul in the Hebrew year 5091. It remained in Nuremberg after the Jews were expelled from the city in 1499 and was preserved intact at the municipal library until the early 19th century, at which point, it is assumed, the Napoleonic army excised 11 of its original 528 leaves. More than a century later, the renowned publisher and Hebraica collector Salman Schocken embarked on a quest to reassemble the Nuremberg Mahzor and bring it to Israel. He recovered four of the missing leaves in the 1930s after fleeing Nazi Germany and acquired the rest in 1951 as restitution for assets that had been confiscated from him during the Holocaust. Descendants put it up for auction at Sotheby’s Tel Aviv in 2002, where it carried a $2-3 million estimate but failed to sell. At some point afterward, it was acquired privately by the Zurich-based collectors David and Jemima Jeselsohn, who have given it to the Israel Museum on extended loan. Through February 2010, it will be the centerpiece in the Shrine of the Book, home of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The restoration, conducted by Michael Maggen, head of the museum’s paper conservation laboratory, focused on rebinding the manuscript and incorporating the four recovered leaves. Overall, the mahzor was in excellent condition. “The decoration and writing looked like they were practically done yesterday,” according to assistant Judaica curator Anna Nizza, who adds that the colors and gold leaf “were amazingly preserved.” The highly skilled scribes who worked on the main text and commentary—identified as Mattanyah and Yaakov, respectively—made almost no errors despite the work’s considerable size. They also masterfully executed simple but sophisticated flourishes while leaving precise blanks around key words for, it is assumed, a Christian artist to subsequently decorate. (Jews were closed out of guilds at that time.)

Rather than iconographic subjects, human figures or narrative scenes that populate other significant 13th- and 14th-century mahzorim, the Nuremberg features 22 illuminated panels highlighting introductory words. These frames are adorned with gold and silver leaf and precious pigments, notably in rich hues of blue and red, and decorated with geometric patterns, as well as foliate motifs and exotic animals, typical of Gothic imagery. The scribes also alternated the size, type and color of the script—between black and red throughout. There is only a single text illustration, of a shofar, next to a line in a Rosh Hashana piyut about the sounding of the ram’s horn. “Unlike their contemporaries,” Nizza explains, “they chose ornamental and non-illustrative depictions, giving the manuscript an aesthetically pleasing and elegant look emphasizing its content while helping the chazan find appropriate prayers during the service.”

This intrepid sensibility is celebrated in the current retrospective of Arad’s work (and alluded to in the catchy title, No Discipline), at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The centerpiece, Cage sans Frontières (Cage without Borders), is a massive Corten steel structure lined with stainless steel shelves that Arad created to display most of the pieces in the show. Draped with gray gauze and looped like a twisted rubber band so that the translucent side is at points external and at others internal, the installation is an awesome work in its own right, encapsulating Arad’s predilection for manipulating space and perception. But as critics have noted, MoMA’s placement of numerous objects on high shelves and against surrounding walls, coupled with dim atmospheric lighting, doesn’t make for optimum viewing. (At the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where the show debuted last fall, works were sublimely sprawled across a life-size reproduction of the foyer of the Tel Aviv Opera, Arad’s first commission, and along a spiraling white wall illuminated with phosphorescent, bulbous shadows.)

Still, there’s no denying the sheer punch of Arad’s output. Bravura pieces that launched his career, like the 1981 Rover Chair, made by fusing a leather car seat found in a junkyard with a tubular steel base, may amuse more than amaze. But the same can’t be said for ingenious creations like the 1986 Well Tempered Chair, modeled after four sheets of paper simply looped and attached. The clunky wing nuts and cheeky name remind us that if the bolts were removed, the elastic, tempered steel would spring right back to its original shape, and while the sleek mirrored surface seems forbidding, this re-imagined, bouncy club chair is in fact extremely comfortable. In almost every piece, Arad dances between these two competing, apparently equally valid, notions: on the one hand, what you see is what you get; on the other, perceptions can be misleading.

The MoMA show is also eye-opening in its eclectic juxtapositions, enabling viewers to see, as Arad puts it, “objects that have never met before, like siblings separated at birth.” The inclusion of architecture is particularly welcome, although the small white models (even with accompanying videos) don’t vividly convey the dynamism of these projects. For while Arad has expressed ambivalence about his first profession, with its reliance on clients, budgetary constraints, and long lag times, his firm, Ron Arad Associates, recently spawned a branch focusing on architecture, and his essential ideas play out on a grand scale in these more complex creations.

Notably, four of the nine projects represented with dioramas at MoMA are in Arad’s native country: the sinuous, dramatic interior of the Tel Aviv Opera, opened in 1994; the National Design Museum in Holon, one of Arad’s first two entirely new buildings (the other being a mall in Belgium), both nearing completion; the stalled but formidable public sculpture for Zion Square in Jerusalem; and a luxury apartment building on Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Street scheduled to break ground this January. (The firm is also in negotiation on a 1200-seat concert hall in Israel, though it couldn’t share details at press time.) Combined, these plans not only showcase Arad’s masterful blending of function and form, technology and intuition, but also signal a bright spot for Israeli architecture.

The Holon museum, part of a cultural renewal program for the central coastal city, ambitiously aims to position Israel as a global center for design. (Off to a good start, the building graces the cover of a recent tome on Arad’s architecture.) Originally scheduled to open last summer and then this past spring, the relatively small but intricate structure is now slated for an inaugural exhibition, “Only Now,” in February. The show will present more than 100 objects that “collectively tell the story of the practice, consumption and cultural impact of contemporary product design,” according to the institution’s CEO Alon Sapan, noting that Arad’s “iconic building itself stands as the museum’s first design object.”

As with the Cage at MoMA, a multifaceted curve is the defining feature—here taking the form of a sinuous shell of Corten steel in weathering shades of rust, evoking local topography (Holon has at its root the Hebrew word for sand), that meanders in, out and around the museum’s core. Asa Bruno, the chief architect on the project, recalls that the firm modified its original, voluminous design to “create a signature building” on an “economy of means.” This was accomplished by fusing five relatively efficient sectional bands in gradated browns and reds that maintain fluidity while giving the façade a coherent look. Beyond supporting rectangular internal spaces that have no structural beams (to provide optimal exhibition space)—and, in the process, exploiting the tension between the rigid inner and curvaceous outer components to great effect—this frame provides visitors an experiential route through the museum and nominal shading as it splays apart midair and reunites at both ends.

Although Arad had greater artistic freedom, context is even more consequential in the Zion Square sculpture—really a large-scale installation—commissioned in 2006 as part of a redevelopment of Jerusalem’s main east-west artery, Jaffa Road. Approved by the municipality and fully funded, it was shelved by former Mayor Uri Lupolianski, though there is still faint hope it may be revived under the new administration of Nir Barkat. The canopy-like structure, suggestive of an imposing dinosaur skeleton, is made of the same coppery Corten as the Holon museum but crowned with a honeycomb of 400-odd hollow cubes lined with mirror-polished stainless steel. As the sun passes above and seasons change, shifting shadows play against the ground below. So while, viewed from the outside, it is, according to Bruno, “intentionally angular and slightly aggressive,” when you stand underneath it, you experience a kaleidoscope of airy sky and ricocheted surroundings. The “duality of threatening and optimistic,” as Bruno describes it, acknowledges the turbulent history of the plaza, the site of numerous suicide bombings and demonstrations, as well as its significance as a social gathering place in the heart of the modern city.

The Tel Aviv luxury apartment building may not be nearly as evocative, but it is the latest sign that advances in Israeli architecture are on the horizon. Although the country has a strong international reputation for design, it hasn’t produced much significant modern architecture. A wave of activity is slowly changing that: Santiago Calatrava’s bridges in Jerusalem (2008) and Petach Tikva (2005); I.M. Pei’s Bank Leumi headquarters in Tel Aviv; planned residential towers by Richard Meier and Daniel Libeskind and a Center for Peace by Massimiliano and Dorina Fuksas in Tel Aviv; and Frank Gehry’s proposal for a Jerusalem branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But Arad is the only native son working at this elite level. His Holon Design Museum will put Israel firmly on the map while his continuing experiments on the global stage will likely bring further prestige to the country, even if Arad, ever difficult to pin down, would never classify himself as strictly “Israeli.”

Hirshhorn’s roots may have been humble, but his rise was steep. To help support his widowed mother, Hirshhorn, born in 1899, started selling newspapers at 10 and became a Wall Street office boy at 14. At 17, he became a broker and by the age of 30 he held a portfolio worth $4 million. In a prescient move, he divested two months before the 1929 crash. In later years, his business interests shifted toward mining. By 1960, he had made more than $100 million from uranium. Along the way, he became an almost compulsive buyer of art—a passion first sparked by promotional calendars illustrated with French Barbizon paintings, which came with Prudential insurance policies his mother bought after two of his sisters narrowly escaped death in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. As his wealth grew, Hirshhorn’s tastes evolved, and in 1974, he helped the United States government fulfill a languishing 1938 congressional mandate to create a national contemporary art museum by donating over 6,000 works.

Joseph H. Hirshhorn, in front of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, on the grounds of his Greenwich, Connecticut, home.

The mogul art collector’s story was told in Hirshhorn: Medici From Brooklyn (1979)—but the museum’s founding director, Abram Lerner, deemed it inaccurate and it has gone out of print. Now Hirshhorn’s daughter, Gene Hirshhorn LePere, is making another attempt, with her newly self-published Little Man in a Big Hurry: The Life of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, Uranium King and Art Collector. But despite the fascinating raw material, this book, too, is not without flaw.

Though successful in painting a rich portrait of the collector, LePere introduces new problems. For one, the book suffers from too light an edit. It is rife with spelling and grammatical errors, and employs inconsistent footnotes. Even more troubling, though, is the way in which LePere blurs the boundary between a biography of her father and a memoir of her own. The book will often toggle between researched reconstructions of Hirshhorn’s career and wounded reminiscences of his frequent absences. While LePere, 82, insists she worked out any conflicted feelings toward her father years ago, she may have been better served by hiring a biographer or penning a straightforward memoir.

But none of this takes away from the subject’s vividness, and LePere successfully paints a relatively balanced portrait of a complicated, contradictory man, who could be passionate and generous but also ruthless and aloof. The author also deserves credit for piecing together the broad arc of Hirshhorn’s life, from birth in a comfortable if cramped home that also served as the synagogue for the shtetl of Djukst to his sudden death the night he saw Annie and hummed “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” in his Rolls Royce on the ride back to his Washington, D.C. home.

We glean from Little Man in a Big Hurry (the title is a reference to art critic Aline Saarinen’s description of his physical stature and rapid-fire demeanor) how Hirshhorn’s ambition did not always take a backseat to the rules. Laced through the story of his tenacious rise are accounts of shady business deals and government investigations. More colorful still are descriptions of Hirshhorn storming into galleries and snapping up artworks, and of his walking around with a wad of $100 bills that he doled out to needy relatives and artists. Hirshhorn embraced his role as patron and paterfamilias even as he remained incapable of staying faithful to his wives or doting on his children.

Like his temperament, Hirshhorn’s relationship to Judaism doesn’t lend itself to simple characterization. Rejecting his mother Amelia’s strict religious observance of kashrut and the Sabbath, he was nevertheless proud of and unapologetic about his roots. He was instrumental in establishing Temple Beth-El, a Reform synagogue in Great Neck, New York. More significantly, he was a trailblazer against anti-Semitism even as he sometimes reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes.

After establishing a Toronto office in 1933, when park benches still bore signs that read “no dogs and Jews allowed,” he placed a full-page ad in a local paper luring investors with the headline: “My Name Is Opportunity and I Am Paging Canada.” The conservative establishment may not have taken to the way he “worked like a robot” and “chattered like a Brooklyn peddler,” as LePere puts it, but, ultimately, a residential street in Ontario was named after him. To his own wonderment, he later sold a large stake in one of his mining interests to the Earl of Bessborough, onetime governor-general of Canada and chairman of the Rio Tinto mining company.

He was even more incredulous about the coup that would be his crowning achievement. His art collection was personally courted by President and Lady Bird Johnson. LePere relays the vigorous debate that surrounded its donation and the naming of the museum, citing an anonymous congressional statement that “the fear among politicians of the anti-Semitic label was Mr. Hirshhorn’s most important protector.” There were some legitimate critiques of the collection as being uneven, owing to the haphazard way in which it was assembled, but without Hirshhorn’s holdings it would have been virtually impossible for the government to catch up with peer institutions. In any case, the outcome prompted the Jewish immigrant from Latvia to marvel, “Just think of me, little Joe Hirshhorn, my name is going to be on a building on the Mall in Washington, D.C.—in perpetuity.”

As Lipchitz scholar Catherine Putz notes in the introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue, the Lithuanian émigré, born in 1891, spent his formative years among a circle of École de Paris artists whose “fascination with natural geometries had its intangible mystical aspect as well as its precise analytical dimension.” On the one hand, she argues, Lipchitz “was thinking spatially and from multiple viewpoints,” but she reminds viewers that he industriously studied anatomy in the city’s academies upon his arrival in 1909 and later pronounced that “even in my most abstract phase, I was always drawing after nature.” Beyond this duality in approach, his style evolved markedly over the course of a prolific career. While reductive, angular forms made between 1913 and 1924 established Lipchitz’s enduring reputation as perhaps the first and most significant cubist sculptor, he gradually moved away from this formal language, embracing a more personal, expressionistic idiom.

Much as Lipchitz’s sensibility shaped his dynamic oeuvre, the circumstances of his life shaped his sensibilities. The eldest of six children born to well-to-do Jewish parents, Lipchitz moved to Paris at the age of 18, quickly joining an avant-garde that included Picasso, Juan Gris, Brancusi, Modigliani, and Max Jacob. The 1940 Nazi occupation forced him to flee to Toulouse and, the following year, to seek asylum in the United States, where he found success in the New York art world. Even before this tumult, pure cubist experiments gave way to complex “transparents”—pierced forms accentuating negative space against sculptural mass—and increasingly fluid, organic figuration. However, World War II and the direct threat it posed for Lipchitz did precipitate forays into more somber, emotionally charged imagery, while his 1948 marriage to Yulla Halberstadt and the birth of their daughter Loyla sparked renewed interest in his religious heritage and explorations of the precarious, but ultimately triumphant, human spirit. He became particularly preoccupied with biblical and mythological subjects, infusing his figures with dramatic depth that he attributed, in part, to “the disruption of my entire life,” and celebrating love as “a kind of hope.”

All this is documented in the drawings, which elucidate what Putz calls Lipchitz’s “protracted meditation on one idea or motif over many years,” as well as his determination to effectively transplant his deeply emotional musings into the three-dimensional, often monumental, realm. Perhaps as significantly, this body of work, shaped by Lipchitz’s personal experiences, offers what museum co-chairman David Glasser calls “intelligent and complex investigations into some of the most challenging pivotal moments of twentieth century European experience.”

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 re-orchestrating amateur movies from the Private Photo & Film Archives Foundation he established in 1983. His 2002 “The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River,” now on view in New York as part of the yearlong Extremely Hungary arts and culture festival, exposes the prospect of historical manipulation perhaps more brazenly than anything else he has done, dissecting, splicing and augmenting raw footage while also immersing viewers in the unfolding narrative.

This large-scale, interactive installation, at the Jewish Museum through August 2, draws on Forgács’s 1998 film “The Danube Exodus,” which he adapted from Captain Nándor Andrásovits’s documentation of twin voyages made in 1939 and 1940, the former transporting Eastern European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution for Palestine, and the latter evacuating German farmers in the opposite direction, from their adopted homeland of Bessarabia following Soviet annexation. Made in collaboration with the California-based art collective The Labyrinth Project, this ambitious work envelops visitors in a darkened room with five imposing screens and a central touch-computer that invites them to select from 18 segments in the interwoven accounts of the Jewish and Bessarabian journeys, along with treatments on Captain Andrásovits and the river itself. Their complex presentation and potential variations make it impossible to take it all in. Instructions and introductory wall text lay the foundation, but some attendees never even realize that input is required or stay long enough to make sense of what they see, though that is largely the point.

Despite the element of choice, the artist’s hand is evident in carefully edited images, veering from history to ethnography to travelogue. We see life on board for the Jewish passengers, sunbathing, dancing, praying, and even conducting a traditional wedding, but also rationing food and water and sleeping in cramped quarters. We glimpse the Bessarabian voyage, framed by pastiches of a provincial prewar life rooted in agriculture and religion and their subsequent displacement. Rounding these out are scenic shots of the landscape and turbulent sea, highlights of the captain’s nautical career, and contemporaneous footage of Nazism sweeping through the Third Reich. Superimposed upon this visual tapestry are 18th-century drawings of the Danube region, voiceovers of diary entries, and a mesmerizing audio track by Tibor Szemzö, encompassing ambient sounds of the river, mechanical engine noises, the refugees’ folksongs and prayers, classical and jazz music, and his own minimalist compositions.

The dizzying array of images are flipped, morphed, shown up close and from a distance, splashed across the screen or set to linger on time delay. In concert with this nonlinear mode of storytelling, a Bessarabian image often pops up on the far right screen in the middle of a Jewish segment, while the reverse happens on the far left. It is as if these distinct but overlapping dramas are vying for control of the space and, in turn, our attention.

The conflation of these ethnic experiences and suggestion that both groups were swept up in the same maelstrom—what Forgács calls “the incomparable duet of the German-Jewish exodus”—may put some people off, but the exhibition doesn’t deny history, greeting visitors with a timeline and terminals offering eyewitness and news accounts. (Ironically, though their fate was more precarious, the Jews appear more gleeful, perhaps because their destination was the Promised Land.) Rather, Forgács’s concern is the idea of history-writing itself, highlighting the ways in which selections, juxtapositions, and omissions make up our memory.

The Danube Exodus – The Rippling Currents of the River – Installation by Peter Forgacs – Part One from Peter Forgacs on Vimeo.

This sensibility informs even his more traditionally structured work, like “Hunky Blues: The American Dream,” a documentary on Hungarian immigration from 1890-1921 that premiered at MoMA in May and will be screened at the Yale Center for British Art on June 24. Commissioned by the Hungarian Cultural Center for Extremely Hungary, it displays Forgács’s trademark artistry, weaving together clips from early American cinema, found footage, photos, interviews, music and text. So too, at the 53rd Venice Biennale, through November 22, where Forgács is representing Hungary, data of racial profiling from the archive of a Nazi-era anthropologist are taken out of their crudely scientific context—presented in multiple sizes, formats and speeds, and accompanied by cast masks—to make more sweeping points about “looking as a means of power” and present-day xenophobia. As László Jakab Orsós, director of the Hungarian Cultural Center, puts it, Forgács’s work reminds us that “as much as history informs us, we inform history too.”

Orthodox Jews making a living moving logs in the Carpathian region of northeastern Hungary in 1936. Photo by Roman Vishniac.

A more straightforward historical exhibition, also part of Extremely Hungary, is on view at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y through July 2, but here as well, documentary material is pieced together to share a distinct point of view. “How They Lived: The Daily Lives of Hungarian Jews in Photographs, 1867-1940,” offers highlights of a forthcoming, 300-image publication by Vince Books that illustrates the rich diversity of Hungary’s prewar Jewish community and the vital role it played in the country’s modernization. This is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject, according to curator/author András Koerner, whose 2004 A Taste of the Past: The Daily Life and Cooking of a Nineteenth-century Hungarian-Jewish Homemaker took on a more microscopic focus. Culling through more than 50 sources over three years, his goal here was to present a panorama overlooked in Holocaust literature.

Explaining this void, Koerner points to the scant surviving material and also notes that Russian photographer Roman Vishniac was the only person to systemically capture Hungary’s Jews, mostly in remote regions, while preeminent Hungarian photographers André Kertész, Martin Munkácsi, and Robert Capa were assimilated Jews who avoided ethnic subjects. Moreover, he argues, Hungary’s Jewish population was more complex than in Russia or Poland, where Orthodoxy was dominant, or Western Europe, where most were assimilated, making it difficult to construct a neat picture.

Broken down into anthropological categories—What They Looked Like, Where They Lived, Where They Worked—the photos and accompanying wall text bring to life a thriving, well-integrated population, at least until Hungary’s defeat in World War I. This cataclysm brought about the loss of two-thirds of the country’s territory, economic hardship, and, in 1920, state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. But until that point, Jews were a pivotal force in the transformation from feudal to modern life, leasing rights from Christian middle-class citizens who enthusiastically delegated management responsibilities, and delighting the Hapsburgs, who bestowed noble titles on almost 350 Jewish families. The dynamism of Hungary’s Jewish population is evident in these captivating photos and telling anecdotes: Jews founded Hungary’s first commercial bank in 1841, were disproportionately represented in all commercial enterprises, and embraced avant-garde art forms like film and cabaret.

Koerner may have made a conscious decision to end his presentation before the Holocaust, but he does not ignore it. A pamphlet accompanying the show notes that, “From no other country were so many people deported and murdered in such a short time”—approximately 450,000 in less than one year—and that Jewish life outside Budapest has virtually vanished. More poignantly, an epilogue is dedicated to Koerner’s uncle who was murdered at Auschwitz and includes a personal note of mourning for “the brutal destruction of Hungarian Jewry.”

While Koerner concedes that Forgács’s installation at the Jewish Museum “is more poetic,” glancing towards the images hanging at the Y, he suggested that “in a way, the dry facts have their own poetry.” Beyond this, Forgács’s dynamic artwork and Koerner’s lovingly-performed research share a critical view of history as being shaped by fragmentary information and a broader approach to the Jewish experience that sees it as inextricably linked to larger forces. As Koerner insists, “It is understandable that Jews considered the Holocaust their tragedy but it is not theirs alone. Hungary lost an integral part of its nation.”

Jeannie Rosenfeld is Tablet Magazine’s art critic. Her writing has appeared in ARTnews, Interior Design, and the Forward.

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 with cherubs; and hung in the portable sanctuary that accompanied the Israelites as they wandered through the desert. Wherever they settled and dispersed, Jews never lost their knack for textile production.

As early as the first century A.D., Baruch Albalia, a prince of Judea and expert silk weaver, was sent by Titus, the Roman general who conquered Jerusalem, to develop the textile industry in Spain. When the Jews were expelled from there in 1492, many of them found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, where for centuries the dyers, weavers, and traders among them built a reputation for creating the most extraordinary carpets in the world. Anecdotal evidence of Jewish textile expertise abounds: from ledgers revealing that in the Hungarian town of Nagykoros, most of the carpets purchased between 1630 and 1682 came from Jewish sellers, to records of the Pope granting a patent for silk manufacturing to the Italian Jew Meir Magino around the same time. Across cultures, it seems, Jews were famous craftsman before they established their reputation as merchants, and while fabricating designs for their gentile neighbors, they also created some fascinating pieces for themselves.

Yet rugs and carpets (a distinction purely of size) are hardly the first things that come to mind when considering Judaica. This may reflect their scarcity, compared with more common and easily portable objects like Kiddush cups and menorahs. Or it may reflect their relatively folksy character, sometimes bordering on kitsch—an aesthetic linked to the limitations of a medium defined by stitches rather than brushstrokes, and alternately hung like tapestries or walked upon. But it also stems from the misconception that Judaic examples were anomalies among Oriental and European carpets.

Anton Felton, a British collector-turned-scholar, challenged that misconception with his 1997 book Jewish Carpets. “Everyone thought I was mad, but I spent 50 years proving my point,” says Felton, who acquired his first piece while moonlighting as a bookkeeper for London carpet dealers in the 1960s. That piece—a silk rug from Kashan (circa 1850s) depicting King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba surrounded by symbols of the 12 tribes and episodes from Jewish history—so intrigued Felton that he convinced his employer to let him work it off rather than sell it to either of the parties vying for it: then-chief Rabbi Israel Brodie and philanthropist Sir Isaac Wilson.

He went on to scour the world in search of Jewish carpets, accumulating some 60 for his personal trove and researching more than 200 in public and private holdings. The one that started it all—and, Felton says, brought him “back to Judaism”—was the star among 18 lots of rugs and carpets from his collection featured in Sotheby’s December 17th Judaica sale; it fetched $23,750. (This annual Judaica auction usually features only one or two, if any, rugs and carpets, so despite the fact that only six of the 18 lots sold, it was a major event.)

Who would have thought a rug could be an object of Jewish faith? Felton makes a strong case for Jewish carpets as a distinctive category, rather than—as he recalls being suggested to him during his years of research—“abominations that cropped up by chance at the interface of two cultures.” Much was no doubt lost over time, but those examples that can be tracked down offer tremendous insight into Jewish history and iconography. “I don’t just look at a Jewish carpet, I try to look through it,” Felton explains. “I ask, what was the culture that produced it? What did it mean to the people who owned it and looked at it?” But all this very serious research raises the question: what really makes a carpet Jewish?

The Song of Songs, A Marbadiah Wool Rug, Jerusalem, 1920–1921, centered with a stylized palm tree against a blue filed inhabited by flora and fauna, the border enclosing peacocks flanking fountains alternating with grape clusters

Taking a broad view, the field encompasses secular pieces by Jewish artisans, along with works by non-Jews used in Jewish settings (like a purely decorative carpet used to adorn a synagogue). Getting more specific, they feature inherently Jewish motifs: stars of David, menorahs, torah crowns, biblical scenes, views of Jerusalem, and Hebrew writing. There also seems to be a spiritual aspect to these decorative works, most obviously in devotional textiles such as the sheviti (a textual reminder of the divine presence) and mizrach (to indicate the Eastern direction for prayer), mounted at home and in synagogues. Workshops established in the 20th century, meanwhile, found carpet design a surprisingly suitable medium for promoting social change.

The Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, founded by Boris Schatz in Jerusalem in 1906, and its offshoot, Marbadiah (in existence from 1920 to 1931), were influential in melding Oriental and European carpet traditions with imagery that tied Jewish identity to the budding homeland. The resulting works account for the vast majority of existing Jewish carpets—and also the bulk of the group in Sotheby’s sale. In some pieces, the Judaic elements are subtle, while others that feature biblical passages or images of Jerusalem put forward the possibility of a modern Jewish nation in an ancient land.

Around the same time, charitable institutions like the Alliance Israelite Universelle (founded by French Jews in 1860 to foster social mobility and combat anti-Semitism) and the socialist-minded Organization for Rehabilitation Through Training (founded two decades later in St. Petersburg with the goal of alleviating poverty) employed and trained Jewish carpet-makers throughout the world. Sotheby’s auction included a series of chenille rugs made by the Alliance featuring portraits of Zionist figures like Theodore Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Lord Balfour, and Sir Herbert Samuel—the first practicing Jew to become a British cabinet minister and later High Commissioner under the British Mandate of Palestine. These idealized depictions feature richly hued red and gold tones and elaborate Oriental borders, but primarily serve as wonderful historical documents—almost like commemorative postage stamps—which may explain why they failed to sell.

While these later examples aren’t the pinnacle of carpet-making, they hold their own against most contemporaneous examples. Similarly, more luxurious—but much rarer—earlier Jewish carpets from Persia and Turkey are indistinguishable from their Islamic counterparts in style, if not in substance. In the West as early as the 10th century, the rise of the church led to the creation of the guild system, shutting Jews out of creative professions. But in the major carpet production regions of the East, they were sought out for their trade secrets and skill. This explains the striking similarities between Jewish and Islamic carpets; experts presume that they were largely commissioned and made by the same workshops and individuals. Case in point: a circa-1920 Kashan silk rug featuring an elaborate depiction of the binding of Isaac was offered in Sotheby’s general carpet auction this past June. The non-Jewish consignor had acquired it purely for its aesthetic appeal and relevance to his broader Persian carpet collection, but it sparked aggressive bidding and surpassed its conservative $5,000–$7,000 estimate to fetch $20,000 from a Jewish buyer. Perhaps it also helps answer the more basic if less central question of why so many carpet dealers in New York, Los Angeles, London, and other international cities are Jews of Persian and Turkish descent. Craftsmanship apparently paved the way for trade.

“I looked at all the major places where carpets were woven in the Mediterranean and all the major Jewish settlements, and blow me down if 99 percent of the time they aren’t the same,” Anton Felton remarks. Even as the definition of home has proved impermanent, carpets have remained an integral form of Jewish artistic and religious expression—not to mention a quintessentially Jewish livelihood.

Jeannie Rosenfeld, a former editor at Art + Auction magazine, is a New York writer specializing in fine and decorative art. Her work has appeared in ARTnews, Interior Design, and the Forward.