Tag Archives: image

(Abstraction) Extreme Illusionism and Detailed Rendering (Vija Celmins)

Posted on February 16, 2020 by zjb

Getting back to work about my impressions about some exhibitions that have since come and gone, this one being Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory. Vija Celmins  (pronounced VEE-ya SELL-mins) is one of those artists, women, whose career … Continue reading →

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An Icon of American Jewishness (Kirk Douglas at the Wall)

Posted on February 6, 2020 by zjb

With those man-hands and that craggy face, Kirk Douglas in 1977 is an icon of American Jewishness, ancient and modern at the Western Wall in Jerusalem; secular and religious; performative and phallogocentric. (h/t Matthew Menachem Feuer)

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(Iconic Jewishness) David Sassoon (Mumbai)

Posted on February 2, 2020 by zjb

Heschel speculates somewhere (I think in God in Search of Man) about what Judaism would have turned into or, let’s say, looked like if major Jewish communities had found themselves settled in India as opposed to Europe. Perhaps more iconic … Continue reading →

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(Posthuman Catalogue) Jewish Art & Aesthetics of Judaism

Posted on December 6, 2019 by zjb

Stepping back at the long arc of Jewish art in tandem with the history of Jewish thought gives to view a kind of cataloge. Included are black inky letters their script and configuration, rosettes and arabesques and other ornamental figures, … Continue reading →

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(Digital Image & Object) Auschwitz Christmas Ornaments

Posted on December 4, 2019 by zjb

About the Auschwitz Christmas ornaments on sale at Amazon, here’s an article at wired explaining what happened. These are digital products created by an algorithm which scooped up in a random way public domain images available on the internet. Ready … Continue reading →

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Talmud & The Casuistic Style (Shlomo Deshen & the Jews of Morocco)

Posted on August 18, 2019 by zjb

Working through 18th and 19th century halakhic sources (in this case, responsa) to get a bead on traditional Moroccan Jewish life prior to formal colonial period (prior to the establishment of the French protectorate in 1912), Shlomo Deshen said something … Continue reading →

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(Relic) Amos Oz (Hand)

Posted on December 30, 2018 by zjb

This photograph posted on Twitter by his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, of Amos Oz’s  hand before, at, or just after the moment of his passing is both deeply touching and very odd. A frozen photographic image, it is not unlike a … Continue reading →

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Stealing Baby Jesus & The Life of Christian Images (Spirit of Christmas)

Posted on December 23, 2018 by zjb

Is this a trend? About this utterly bizarre story, this article in the New York Times which you can read here about the images of baby Jesus stolen from holiday crèches across small town America reminded me of The Lives … Continue reading →

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Thought and Image (Deleuze Cinema)

Posted on July 11, 2018 by zjb

I’m reading chapters 7-8 of Cinema 2 as a single, complete, and coherent unit that touch upon the image as a work of thought. There are 3 complex parts to these reflections in chapter 7. The endpoint is to theorize … Continue reading →

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Judaism & The Fetish: A Quick Note on Marx and the (Religious) Imagination

Posted on September 27, 2017 by zjb

Marx was a bitter cuss, the odd positioning of whom in relation to religion from a Religious Studies perspective relates to the binary disambiguation in his thinking between what’s genuinely real and what’s not, namely mental projections and ideological phrasings. … Continue reading →

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