San Antonio College Library

A fascinating and enlightening examination of art through the lens of Jewish culture and history. In this beautifully illustrated book, Rabbi and art historian Edward van Voolen has brought together numerous works that expand our view of Jewish life and art. Organized in a loosely chronological format, this book introduces readers to works that reflect the dramatic events of the past and explore the eternal search for Jewish identity. He points out...

Judaism visits one of the earliest synagogues on the mountain fort of Masada, the Gothic Old-New Synagogue in Prague and nineteenth-century houses of worship in Budapest, Liverpool and New York, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece Beth Sholom near Philadelphia.

The menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum, has traversed millennia as a living symbol of Judaism and the Jewish people. Naturally, it did not pass through the ages unaltered. The Menorah explores the cultural and intellectual history of the Western world's oldest continuously used religious symbol. This meticulously researched yet deeply personal history explains how the menorah illuminates the great changes and continuities in Jewish culture, from...

"Complex Identities is a joint effort by American and Israeli scholars who ask challenging questions about art as formed by society and ethnicity. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European, American, and Israeli artists, the contributors delve into the many ways in which Jewish artists have responded to their Jewishness and to the societies in which they lived, and how these factors have influenced their art, their choice of subject matter,...

A fictionalized account of the turbulent history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript which has survived into the twentieth century thanks to people of various faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Hanna Heath, a manuscript conservator hired to restore the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo, finds and pursues clues to crucial moments in the book's history.