San Antonio College Library

The story of Jewish synagogues is a story of absence and presence. Similarly to its people, synagogues are examples of survival despite conflict and persecution, such as the synagogues of Cordoba, Toledo and Budapest. Others are symbols of the strength and pride that comes from survival and perseverance, such as the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam or the Beth Sholom synagogue in the U.S., the only synagogue ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Native peoples today are best known to others, and often to themselves, through their fugitive poses: textual and graphic depictions preserved by scholarship, consumed by the dominant culture, and steeped in a modernist aesthetic of romantic victimry, tragedy, and nostalgia. Because such representations do not easily convey the immediacy and distinctiveness of Native cultures, they effectively celebrate the absence rather than the presence of the...