CATHERINE M. SOUSSLOFF University of British Columbia THE NEW JEWISH VISUAL STUDIES: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEW This essay explores the historiographical dimensions studies will be charted and identified just as the of the new Jewish visual studies, including pedagogy responsibilities entailed with this field will also be and museology.1 The new Jewish visual studies refers delineated. to the body of scholarship published, courses offered, Vivian Mann’s contribution both as a teacher and exhibitions mounted over the last fifteen years, and scholar to many of the topics that I address which have interpreted the historical meaning and assumes, for me, as it no doubt does for many who aesthetic significance of Jewish visual culture and study them, a profound significance.3 Elsewhere in the arts. Together with these narratives a terminol- this issue, Richard I. Cohen has provided an assess- ogy specific to the new Jewish visual studies has also ment of her work. It is my hope that this essay will arisen, such as “Jewish history painting,” the “rabbi provide a useful comparative screen against which portrait,” the concept of “the Jewish artist,” and her important teaching and writing may be projected “the Jewish art historian.” These terms signal the and examined in future analyses of Jewish identity centrality of identity in the new Jewish visual studies. in visual representation. The importance of the identity of the maker and of the viewing subject in the interpretation of visual- Post-Orientalism: Teaching the Field of Study ized Jews and Jewish performances are prominent aspects of the new Jewish visual studies, which put The topic of teaching Jewish art and visual culture visual culture, art, and artifacts in dialogue with is virtually unexplored, although the definition and the following questions: What does it mean for one meaning of the concept of art in and for Judaism to have an identity? What does it mean to identify has been a persistent focus in the scholarly and with a culture? What does it mean to be identified theological literature at least as far back as the in terms of cultural membership?2 While keeping Enlightenment.4 Whether or not it is the case, as identity at the center of my investigations in this Russell Jacoby has recently asserted, that “If the essay, the landmarks in the scholarship, teaching, name of God is unpronounceable and the por- and museology that make up the new Jewish visual trait of God unprintable, a future of peace and 1 Catherine M. Soussloff, “Teaching the Three A’s of Jewish 2 David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz, eds., Jewish Identity and Visual Representation: Assimilation, Aniconism, Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1993). I take this and Art,” paper presented at the University of California, Davis, book to be a key marker of the beginning of the new ways conference “Beyond the People of the Book: Visual Culture of understanding Jewish identity in contemporary culture. In and the Construction of Jewish Identity, April 11–12, 2005,” regard to Jewish identity and visual culture specifically, see sponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies. I am grateful to Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., Too Jewish?: Challenging Traditional David Biale for the invitation to speak at this conference. I am Identities (New York: The Jewish Museum and New Brunswick: grateful also to Michael Brenson who gave me the opportunity Rutgers University, 1996; exhibition catalogue). to think about Jewish identity in American art criticism when he 3 The bibliography of Vivian Mann is enormous with too invited me to speak at the The Jewish Museum in New York City many entries to list here. For Mann’s impact on the new Jewish on the occasion of the exhibition curated by Norman Kleeblatt visual studies, see her Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts (New York: Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, Cambridge University, 2000); Art and Ceremony in Jewish Life: Essays 1940–1976 (May 1–September 21, 2008). Much of this paper in Jewish Art History (London: Pindar, 2005); “Images of Jud Süss would not have been possible without the encouragement and Oppenheimer, an Early Modern Jew,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge: discussion over the last fifteen years with friends and colleagues Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism and European Visual Culture before 1800 in the field. I am particularly grateful to Dana Arnold, Alla (ed. Mitchell Merback; Leiden, 2008), 257–74; and “Sephardi Efimova, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Norman Kleeblatt, Traditionalism in Ceremonial Art and Visual Culture,” in Rabbi Margaret Olin, Doug Rosen, Kerri Steinberg, and Carol Haskel Lookstein Jubilee Volume (ed. Rafael Medoff, in press). Zemel. The University of California, Santa Cruz’s Academic 4 Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Senate Committee on Research provided support for research Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton on this essay. University, 2000). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 IMAGES 3 Also available online – brill.nl/ima DOI: 10.1163/187180010X500234 the new jewish visual studies: a historiographical review 103 happiness—a world without anxiety—may not be the construction of modern Jewish subjectivities in describable,” it is clearly important to understand regard to visual culture, such as: the prohibition of how and why we teach or do not teach Jewish art and images and assimilation; cosmopolitanism, diasporas, visual culture.5 What scholarly and artistic choices go and the Jewish Diaspora; anti-Semitism and the rise into the instruction of a topic as obviously fraught of mass culture; and the effects of the Shoah on with a dialectics of aesthetics and theology as Jewish visual culture. My responsibilities as a teacher can identity in modern art and performance? When the be termed broadly both as ethical and as histori- art historian Joseph Gutmann taught—or attempted cally situated, that is, determined by my own time to teach—Jewish art at Wayne State University in and place (as well as those of my students), and by the decades following World War II, he grappled the history of the Jews in modernity. My views as consistently and in significantly interesting ways with reflected in my course outline, reading selections, the problematic relationships between the methods assignments, and lectures were also determined by of an art history established to consider Christian art my particular scholarly formation and the history and art theory and the visual artifacts of Jewish cul- of the disciplines that I know best—art history and tures, widely understood to be underpinned by the visual and performance studies?8 scripture’s prohibition toward visual imagery.6 In the Begun thirty years ago, my undergraduate and first issue of this journal, Carol Zemel suggested graduate training, like that of virtually all American the topics and issues that pertain to “an agenda for students in the history of European art, never the study of modern Jewish visual culture,” including: addressed Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness.9 In the past, “questions of idolatry, the ethics of visuality and pic- art history defined its areas of study according to turing the unrepresentable, nationalism in traditional nation-states and stylistic movements related to his- cultural historiography, diasporic art production, torical periods. Beginning in the early 1990s—the and a suggested review of Jewish cultural issues in so-called era of multiculturalism—many disciplines theorists . .”7 Obviously, the ethical concerns raised in the arts, humanities, and social sciences began to by the study of modern Jewish visual culture affect change their methods and presuppositions under the the teacher of Jewish visual art and performance influence of the new field of cultural studies. Studies in the American public research university today. of the historical and continuing effects of colonial- When I first envisioned the course “Jewish Identity ism on post-colonial societies turned to diasporas as in Visual Representation” in 2001, my students and a central aspect of these investigations; the Jewish I engaged simultaneously with the visual culture of Diaspora, however, had always to be distinguished modernity and with the social history of the Jews in and (usually) excluded from the post-colonial stud- the modern period. We addressed a set of complex ies of later diasporas.10 As James Clifford put it in issues related to the lives of Jewish subjects and 1994: “Viewed in this perspective, the diaspora 5 Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti- 9 A study of the archeological complex of Dura Europos Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University, 2005), 144. This was an exception to this statement. On this topic related to art quotation suggests the current extension of Adorno’s famous history, see now, Margaret Olin, “ ‘Early Christian Synagogues’ dictum: “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.” On the and ‘Jewish Art Historians’: The Discovery of the Synagogue significance of Adorno’s statement for visual representation and of Dura Europos,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 mimesis, see Lisa Saltzman, “To Figure, or Not to Figure: The (2000):7–28. Following my graduate work, one of my teachers at Iconoclastic Proscription and Its Theoretical Legacy,” in Jewish Bryn Mawr College, Steven Z. Levine, did a significant amount Identity in Modern Art history (ed. Catherine M. Soussloff; Los of research in art history and Jewish visual culture, see Steven Angeles: University of California, 1999), 67–84 and, now, Lydia Z. Levine, “Mutual Facing: A Memoir of Friedom,” in Refracting Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Visions: Essays on the Writing of Michael Fried (ed. Jill Beaulieu, Mary Theory (New York: Columbia University, 2008), 171–203. Roberts, Toni Ross; Sydney: Power, 2000), 289–323. I gratefully 6 On this complex point and pedagogy, see Margaret Olin, acknowledge the encouragement and erudition of Steven Levine Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art in my investigation of Jewish identity in art history.