New York: Starting off the year of the dragon is the New York Jewish Film Festival, which starts Wednesday, screening a wide range of international films throughout the month. Opening day features the world premiere of 400 Miles to Freedom, the untold story of the 1984 exodus of co-director Avishai Mekonen and his secluded Jewish community from the mountains of Northern Ethiopia (Jan. 11, 3:45 p.m., $13). Get pumped up for the festival on Sunday at the Lincoln Center Film Society’s not-to-miss event “An Evening With Albert Brooks.” Yes, Drive will be screened; no, Ryan Gosling won’t be there (Jan. 7, 7 p.m., standby). Four hours by road north of that festival, Museum of Fine Arts Boston is showing klezmer documentary The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival, which seems to run year round (Jan. 11-13, check listings, $11).

Susan Sontag gets the experimental-theater treatment in Sontag: Reborn, a one-performer show based heavily on the content of Sontag’s journals, part of the highly touted Under the Radar festival (through Jan. 15, showtimes, $20). Warm up your jazz hands for the endless stream of dance performances this week, many by Israeli choreographers. Saturday, 92Y features the work of New York-based Israeli choreographers Michal Samama, Lior Shneior, and Netta Yerushalmy as part of the “Out of Israel” series (Jan. 7, 3 p.m., free). Also this weekend, Dance Gotham takes over NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, with Gallim Dance performing Wonderland, Andrea Miller’s androgynous show-within-a-show, Saturday (Jan. 7, 8 p.m., $10). Wrapping up a theatrical weekend, Yemen Blues takes the stage at Webster Hall Sunday as part of GlobalFest 2012, where lead singer Ravid Kalahani will no doubt rock out (or, more likely, chant) in Yemenite Arabic, Hebrew, and even Haitian Creole (Jan. 8, 6 p.m., $16).

Joseph Roth is the topic of conversation at the Leo Baeck Institute Tuesday, as Fran Leibovitz, Willing Davidson, and Anthony Heilbut discuss the newly published book Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters (Jan. 10, 6:30 p.m., $15). Donna Karan joins Fern Mallis at 92Y for a coffee klatch Thursday, where the two fashion industry powerhouses will talk shop–and, of course, shopping (Jan. 12, 8 p.m., $29 and up). On Sunday, the Museum of Jewish Heritage discusses “Jews in Emma Lazarus’ New York,” in conjunction with their New York Times-approved exhibit on the monumental poet (Jan. 8, 2:30 p.m., $10). Uptown at the Jewish Museum, the unexpectedly scandalous exhibit Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex is on view, featuring Israeli artist Adi Nes’ print of a hunky Israeli soldier flexing. Topless. On a beach (through June 30).

Elsewhere: Shalom Auslander heads to Boston, hitting the Brookline Booksmith Thursday for a reading of his debut novel, Hope: A Tragedy (Jan. 12, 7 p.m., free). The Israel Museum unveils Rubens, Venus, and Adonis: Anatomy of a Tragedy Monday, a new exhibit analyzing the work of Flemish baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, whose work The Death of Adonis–around which much of the exhibit revolves–was given to the museum in 2000 (through May 6).

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

Since its founding in 1965, the Israel Museum has grown into the largest cultural institution in Israel, with an encyclopedic (Snyder prefers the word “universal”) collection of over 500,000 objects, including the most extensive holdings of Holy Land archeology in the world. As an independent nonprofit that receives only about 10 percent of its $25 million annual operating budget from the state, the museum is not required to respond to national directives, although it received $17.5 million in government “matching support” for its renovation, to complement the $80 million raised from 20 private donors, most of whom live in New York City. (The museum paid for a small group of U.S. journalists, including me, to visit Jerusalem in mid-July—providing our flights, lodging, and meals—so that we might help get the word out.) The museum’s donor base, Snyder said, makes it more like the Met than like the Smithsonian or National Gallery. He is proud, as is a good portion of the Israeli press, that the renovation was completed on time and under budget, with a design that respects and enhances Kollek’s vision of a temple of high Western Art shaped by the specificity of its ethnographic origins and able to tap international networks for support.

Considering the many pressures on such a renewal project—political, financial, and cultural—Snyder, a white-haired, professorial director, could have easily turned Kollek’s old fashioned grandeur into a turgid mess. Instead, he brought in architect James Carpenter after reading a New York Times article praising his proposed fluid galleries connecting Santiago Calatrava’s transportation hub in lower Manhattan to already existing subway structures. Where the old design of the museum required visitors to endure a sun-baked uphill trudge from the parking lot vaguely reminiscent of the approach to Masada, Carpenter excelled at moving people and light through space in ways that the Times called “at times, magical.” Carpenter’s relatively unknown firm further satisfied the need for something less than a signature statement and more of a craftsman-like subordination to what was already there—a challenging task in a place like Jerusalem, where signature architectural statements abound and ideas about what was already there can be casus belli.

By most any measure, though, Carpenter’s adaptation—built by Chinese, Russian, and Palestinian laborers—is a success. What was once an austere jumble of concrete blocks meant to suggest an Arab village has been transformed into a spacious, easily navigable exhibit space, with clean lines, surprising views, and shade. Carpenter has added glass boxes shaded by transparent stacks of cast terracotta louvers to Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad’s original cement Modernist structures and, by displacing tons of Jerusalem stone and dirt, made it easier for old people and youth groups, who make up a majority of the visitors, to get up the hill. The semi-underground passage from the entrance pavilions to the central axis of the main galleries is fed natural light through prismatic glass and waterfalls. The effect is magical.

Inside, the sparely proportional aesthetic of the design firm Pentagram—refreshers of The Atlantic, the New York Jets football team, and other aging institutions struggling to keep up with changing times—has been brought to bear on the renewed Bronfman Archaeological Wing displays, which are now spare and well-proportioned. Where there was once a surfeit of decaying exhibits, there are currently 8,000 remarkable objects displayed, now properly lit, individuated, and tagged. Snyder considers himself “blessed with the privilege of interpreting the material culture” rather than obligated to put it all out there. As one curator put it, the redesign allows visitors to see much without looking at a lot.

The newly configured galleries lead visitors through a continuous, single narrative created out of carefully curated selections from the museum’s store of material objects and centered on a space dubbed the Cardo—the namesake for which, it could be noted, is the Roman remnant used now as the “center” of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter, not the physical center of the old city or the city of Jerusalem as a whole. From the Cardo visitors are shuttled into the three main galleries, one wing each for archeology, Jewish art and life, and fine art. Each series of galleries is laid out to encourage review of the collection in a single direction, and the effect of the narrative that is pressed on viewers is undeniably mind-blowing: Archeology takes us from a million-year-old set of wild bull horns, the “exodus from Africa,” and the dawn of civilization, through Canaan, Biblical Israel, Roman rule, Islamic conquest, and the Crusades (with minor detours for the “neighboring cultures” of Egypt, Greece, and a few others), and deposits us right at the door to Judaica. That gallery, in turn, transforms exceptional ceremonial objects in Jewish life into the standard-bearers of a culture at once apart but connected—the bridge between “the story toward one God” (as one curator described her archeological display) and the grand Western art-school narrative of art for art’s sake.

“It does give you a kind of subliminal, self-guiding unfolding,” Snyder said. Along the wall of the Cardo, at the entrance to the archeology wing, sits a 7th-century lintel from Galilee that features a Hebrew inscription from Deuteronomy 28 that neatly underscores the museum director’s point: “Blessed shall you be when you arrive, and blessed shall you be when you depart.”

What exactly lies between the twinned blessings of Deuteronomy and high modernism is hard to fathom. One thing that the framers of the museum’s narrative cannot be accused of is trading on the dead. A pair of odd videos describe Israel’s annual memorial holidays, with a brief mention of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, but in general, save for a scattering of pieces of contemporary art, the Israel Museum steers clear of the Holocaust and Israel’s wars, the same way that New York’s Museum of Modern Art avoids un-aesthetic entanglements with negro slavery or the Civil War.

The narrative beyond the triumphant issuing-forth of Judaism into the history of Western fine art is remarkably ignorant and parochial. Africa, Rome, and Greece are mere back-story to the history of the Jews, who exist in all times and all places at the unmoving center of the world: “The Roman conqueror brought with him many cultural, political, and technological innovations. These blended in with the fabric of local life, but frequently fomented unrest.” Visitors will learn that Islam, Egypt, and the short-lived Christian Crusaders were accomplished, somewhat quaint, and ultimately defunct local cultures that “neighbored” or “influenced” the Jewish people. In the Iron Age, we’re told, swords were beaten into ploughshares—the importance of several thousand years of human history being reduced to a single prophetic aphorism. Nearby, Pentagram has used one of their signature lowercase pull quotes to decorate a display case with the motto “so goes humanity” in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, as if rehearsing for a future commission designing hip new make-up counters for the Body Shop.

While the museum’s lack of imagination about the rest of the world might in theory be explained or compensated for by a profound devotion to Jewish history and religious experience, that is not the case here. The museum presents splendid objects like a 15th-century Mishneh Torah from Northern Italy and a man’s hooded cape from the Atlas Mountains, but the manner of their presentation here strips them of the meaning of God or the practice of belief. Ritual objects are transformed into “ceremonial art” without the significance or the beauty of ceremony. There are kippahs, and there are 120 Hanukkah lamps from 15 countries, each neatly fetishized in individual glass vitrine, but not a single pair of tefillin, whose weird, strappy forms have nothing in common with the shiny polished metal forms of Brancusi and might raise questions about God and prayer that would clearly make the museum and its imagined audience uncomfortable. It is as if a Reform rabbi of yore had brought the pseudo-ecumenical, all-welcoming approach of the suburban temple of the 1960s to the modern pseudo-religion of the museum.

World Jewry is represented in comparative arrays of ceremonial and cultural objects and most notably in four beautifully restored synagogues from India, northern Italy, southern Germany, and, now, 18th-century Suriname, all reconstructed like the Met’s Temple of Dendur. Yet the way that these displays are framed makes it seem less like the scattering of Jews was the result of relentless persecution and more the work of a Greek-style god sowing plentiful Jewish seed in order to enrich the many lands of His creation. This ecumenical tone extends to the exhibit of a single exposed Torah scroll: Its explanatory card is titled, “What is a Torah?”

This effort at inclusion (Welcome, dear foreigner! We Jews are happy to explain who we are!) runs both ways, to comic effect. Where does Israeli art fit in the pantheon of Western Fine Art? Does work by Shahar Marcus belong next to a minor Jackson Pollock, dear reader? If the Shahar Marcus in question was a 2006 video of the Israeli artist “dropping” ingredients for a sabich onto a giant canvas-like pita, would that sway your opinion? A Giacometti leads to a 17th-century leopard head mask from Benin, which leads to Ohad Meromi’s “The Boy From South Tel Aviv,” a 20-foot-tall sculpture of a black-skinned naked youth that I imagine might have been commissioned by a brothel in Leipzig. And so it goes.

Right across from the broad entrance to the Edmund and Lily Safra Fine Arts Wing is a room for modern Israeli art that has been divided by its curator into its three walls, each with a theme. To the left is art using “Hebrew/Jewish symbols,” such as Mordechai Ardon’s “At the Gates of Jerusalem,” and to the right is art that explores “the Body and the Landscape.” But straight ahead, visible from almost the moment you enter the Cardo 100 yards away, is Yosef Zaritsky’s “Untitled,” from 1964, a pale green painting of pure abstraction. A search for something Jewish in that will be in vain.

The Israel Museum offers an answer, knowingly or not, to the fundamental questions that bring many tourists to Jerusalem in the first place. Who are the Jews? Where did they come from? What record is there of their historical presence, in these lands and elsewhere? What beautiful objects have they produced, and why? Of course, the question of who is a Jew—and, by extension, an Israeli—is hardly a settled one, and if a museum is throwing its institutional heft and $100 million behind an answer, it seems naïve at best to assert that there is nothing personal, political, controversial, painful, embattled, tense, moving, or unsettling about that.

Once press activities were over, I was free to roam Jerusalem for a day, and while my colleagues from art and architecture glossies and European dailies partook of the free guided tour of the Old City, I walked through the contested neighborhood of Silwan, where I couldn’t find a single person who had ever visited the Israel Museum. I then walked up the Mount of Olives to watch the sun set behind the Temple Mount. Below me were the thousands of graves of those who hope to be led through the Golden Gate upon the return of the Messiah. That’s when I thought that Mansfeld’s original design for the museum wasn’t based on an Arab village, as he said, but on the haphazard, boxy geometry of Hebrew tombs I was looking at, with their flat top slabs and stark devotional presence. Like the ancient bones within, the exhibits at the Israel Museum may represent millennia of history and yearning, but they have notably failed to come back to life.

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.”

Click any square above to see a larger version

Powerful stories and symbols are on display in an exhibit of some 170 works of contemporary Israeli jewelry, at the Newark Museum through June 25. Pearly seashell brooches shaped like fighter planes commemorate a jeweler’s husband killed in a 1956 war; a gold necklace’s links are wrapped around multicolored Jerusalem stones, to express its jeweler’s unshakable love for the arid local landscape; camouflage-painted leaves dangling from yet another artisan’s silk choker resemble both grave wreaths and the floral crowns that kindergarteners wear in Shavuot parades.

The show, “Women’s Tales: Four Leading Israeli Jewelers,” organized in 2006 by the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, is the first major traveling show of Israeli jewelry. Its contents, handmade between 1966 and 2005, have been circulating for a year, and next year will be displayed at the Israel Museum. Davira S. Taragin, the director of exhibitions and programs at the Racine Art Museum, curated the exhibit with Alex Ward, the Israel Museum’s curator of design and architecture. Taragin dreamed up the idea in 2002, she explains, “because jewelers in Israel—in fact all kinds of decorative artists there—aren’t well known at all, unlike the fine artists there. The jewelers are producing incredibly varied and important work, often drawing on their life experiences. The pieces are as vital and evocative as anything being made now in Europe or the U.S.”

Bianca Eshel-Gershuni was born in 1932. A Bulgarian native who emigrated in 1939, she was widowed young; her husband, a combat pilot, died in the 1956 Sinai campaign. In her rough-textured jewelry, mostly rendered in gold and often shaped like flowers or animals, she juxtaposes pearls and jades with improbable found objects, including feathers, mirrors, burlap, tinfoil, perfume sample vials, a camera lens, and a camel’s tooth. She lives in Ra’anana.

Deganit Stern Schocken, born in 1947, is a kibbutz native who now lives in Herzliya. Her work has evolved dramatically over her two-decade career. Austere necklaces of cylinders and triangles have segued to spiral brooches nestled in silk, origami-like paper pendants, and flakes of tinted wax on silver rings.

Jerusalem artist Esther Knobel was born in 1949 and emigrated to Israel as a toddler with her Polish parents. Her jewelry is playfully homespun: She twists and pounds gold wires and titanium sheets into simulated safety pins and darning needles, recycles tin cans into snail-shaped brooches, and laminates flower petals as trim for pendants.

Vered Kaminski, born in 1953, is the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors turned kibbutzniks. Her work ranges from Bauhaus-inspired grids and honeycombs to filigrees of steel triangles, Calder-esque mobiles and cartoony portraits in scribbled silver wire, to baskets made of brass mesh snarled around pebbles. She lives in Jerusalem.