Customer Reviews

Between Heaven and Earth: An Illuminated Torah Commentary

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BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH is not only stunningly beautiful, but the commentary is inspirational and brilliant. The artist/author has captured the beauty and spirituality of the Torah in her text and artistry. The book is magnificent.

This book is rich with interesting and beautiful images. Each image has new things to notice every time I look at them. I love the notes in the back which provide details on the symbolism and meaning of the illustrations. The colors and drawings are just beautiful.

'Between Heaven & Earth' is one of the great monuments of Jewish visual culture of the past century. I'm just waiting for everyone to discover it. Lederer does precisely what medieval patrons wanted their artists to do, looking deeply into the entirety of the tradition and riffing on it visually in a way that is simultaneously deeply satisfying and disturbing, both aesthetically and intellectually. But, like the richest and most wonder-full of medieval manuscripts, this is a work that will take digesting and that will manifest in all its thoughtfulness only to the most thoughtful.
Marc Michael Epstein
Professor of Religion
Vassar College

I have been spending time with Between Heaven and Earth and I think it is a fantastic piece of work, fantastical also. The sheer amount of detail, iconography, scholarship, and visual stimulation in the book is formidable and earns it the right to be called a work of Illumination. Some of the images speaks more to me than others, and for me the specific physiognomy, so to speak, of the figures does not always meet my own imagination of them. But when Ilene goes off road and renders the surreal and phantasmic, she creates potent images and I can only imagine what they might be like in "real life." I have scads of favorites: see pages19,20,31,51,59!!,67,75,77!!,85,99,132-33. In many of these she goes to another level as artist and imaginer.

She has created a work to be studied, week by week, and pored over with the eye and the mind. The commentary is a searching accompaniment to the imagery, decoding it and leading one to all kinds of kaballistic reflection. In fact Ilene is, it seems to me, a kaballist both in her hermeneutics but also in the role she gives to imagination itself.

This book has set the bar VERY high and also points a way to follow. Whether others will be able or want to follow her lead remains to be seen. But she has done a truly astounding job of delving and shaping. Each page tilts and turns and surprises.

The commentary challenges me to think further about the relation to text to image. Ilene has gone farther than I could or would wish to, and I will not make an argument with her about the balance between an image and the text and how much one might overwhelm or eclipse the other. She has taken the job seriously of giving her reader all the materials one would need to engage deeply with the images she creates. More than that and I think of on-going value to her book, is that it liberates readers to engage in their own acts of illumination, whether on paper or in their own minds. This is a gift.

I've always admired Lederer's illustration style and how she is able to blend elements of her folk influences and faith into her work. The Alchymical Zodiac is a pretty glorious example with 16 full-page illustrations, each representing a different symbol in astronomy, astrological and alchemy. I especially like how she incorporates the corresponding constellation with each figure, and I find Aries print pants to be a riot. The hand painted calligraphy is really beautiful as well. I'm tempted to cut this book apart, frame the images and hang them on my walls. But the book is best appreciated in totality with each succeeding page offering a fun and different interpretation of the zodiac. Even the kids will enjoy it.