Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the Holocaust (New Perspectives on Jewish Studies) [Hardcover]

Shelley Hornstein (Editor), Laura Levitt (Editor), Laurence Silberstein (Editor)

Book Description

Series: New Perspectives on Jewish Studies | Publication Date: October 1, 2003

Impossible Images brings together a distinguished group of contributors, including artists, photographers, cultural critics, and historians, to analyze the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in and through paintings, architecture, photographs, museums, and monuments.

Exploring frequently neglected aspects of contemporary art after the Holocaust, the volume demonstrates how visual culture informs Jewish memory, and makes clear that art matters in contemporary Jewish studies. Accepting that knowledge is culturally constructed, Impossible Images makes explicit the ways in which context matters. It shows how the places where an artist works shape what is produced, in what ways the space in which a work of art is exhibited and how it is named influences what is seen or not seen, and how calling attention to certain details in a visual work, such as a gesture, a color, or an icon, can change the meaning assigned to the work as a whole.

Written accessibly for a general readership and those interested in art and art history, the volume also includes 20 color plates from leading artists Alice Lok Cahana, Judy Chicago, Debbie Teicholz, and Mindy Weisel.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The essays probe the growing vocabulary of Holocaust imagery and address the various ways (in varied venues) that the Holocaust has been remembered, represented, and received.”
-American Jewish History

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“(Makes) a cogent case for a deeper, unmastered engagement with Holocause trauma.”
-Journal of Jewish Studies

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About the Author

Shelley Hornstein is associate professor of art and architectural history at York University, Toronto.

Laura Levitt is Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University. She is the author of Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home and co-editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust and Judaism Since Gender.

Laurence J. Silberstein is Philip and Muriel Berman Professor of Jewish Studies at Lehigh University, where he directs the Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 340 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (October 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081479825X
• ISBN-13: 978-0814798256
• Product Dimensions: 11.6 x 9.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,980,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Levitt is the author of American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007) and Jews and Feminism: the Ambivalent Search for Home (1997). She is co-editor with Miriam Peskowitz of Judaism since Gender (1997); and with Shelley Hornstein and Laurence Silberstein an editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (2003). With Rebecca Alpert she co-edited "Jewish Feminist and Our Fathers," a special issue of Bridges 14.1(Spring 2009) and she is the editor of "Changing Focus: Family Photography and American Jewish Identity," The Scholar & Feminist Online, 1.3(Winter 2003) www.barnard.edu/sfonline. She is a Professor of Religion, Jewish studies and Gender at Temple University where she serves as the interim director of the Women's Studies Program and coordinates the Greater Philadelphia Women's Studies Consortium (GPWSC). She is currently at work on a new project about Criminal Archives, the materials in police storage rooms and their relationship to issues of justice and collected memories. Laura was the long-term director of Jewish studies at Temple and one of its founders.