"THE JEWISH IDENTITY" EXHIBITION AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography
September 23, 2005 - January 29, 2006

Through photographs and video works by distinguished contemporary artists, The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography will explore the remarkable racial, social, and ethnic diversity of Jews in the United States today.

The Jewish Museum has commissioned ten projects from thirteen photographers and video artists who have collaborated with individuals, families, and organizations across the U.S. to create images that portray the complexity of Jewish identity today. The works of art in the exhibition raise questions about photography's ability to represent cultural identity while examining the breadth and challenges posed by the multiplicity of the American Jewish experience. The faces of American Jews are as varied as the face of America. Thus the exhibition serves to question stereotypes, challenge traditional assumptions, and look at issues of racism and anti-Semitism in America.

PRAIRIE JEWS

With Prairie Jews, part of the series Galesburg, Chris Verene notes that no one in his small Midwestern hometown would know who is Jewish without asking. Representations of regional Jews tend to stereotype both the people of the dominant culture—in Verene's case, “the people of the prairie”—and the Jews who assimilate into that local culture. Verene's pictures and the stories he tells through his handwritten texts challenge and complicate notions of who is “inside” and who is “outside” the mainstream.

YOSHUA OKON

In Casting: Prototype for a Stereotype, Yoshua Okon provided women from the Ken community-a secular Latino Jewish communal organization based in San Diego-with oral fragments of the Book of Ruth, some stage directions, and props, and then videotaped them. In the biblical tale, Ruth, a Moabite woman and great-grandmother of King David, is married to a Judean. After her husband's death, she returned to his family's ancestral homeland with her mother-in-law, Naomi. For Okon, the story offered a paradigm of a Mexican-United States-Jewish-mother stereotype. His video captures the stream-of-consciousness improvisations as well as the behavioral conventions that emerged in their performances.

JAIME PERMUTH

Jaime Permuth follows three narratives centered within the Spanish-speaking congregation El Centro de Estudios Judíos Torat Emet (Torat Emet Center for Jewish Studies), founded in Riverdale, in the Bronx, by a young Sephardi rabbi of Cuban descent, Rigoberto Emmanuel Viñas. In La conversión de Carmen (Carmen's Conversion), a ritual process brings a newcomer formally into the community; Kashrut en la casa Liker (Kashrut in the Liker Home) follows the Liker family as they make their kitchen kosher; and La bat mitzvah de Gila Viñas (Gila Viñas's Bat Mitzvah) takes place at the Rabbi's new synagogue in Yonkers, a congregation made up of mostly elderly survivors of the Holocaust.

ANDREA ROBBINS AND MAX BECHER

Fixed by the camera's frontal, iconic gaze, the photographic subjects of Andrea Robbins and Max Becher portraits, landscapes, and architectural motifs-reveal much about dislocated and reconstituted cultural experience. The series 770 depicts replicas of the Brooklyn home of the Lubavitcher rebbe, who died in 1994, situated in various geographic locales from Jerusalem to São Paulo. In Israel there are three such Collegiate Gothic Revival "copies" believed to be the only red brick buildings in the country. Through repetition and unexpected juxtapositions, these photographs are inescapable reminders of the Hasidic community's simultaneous resistance to assimilation and its claim to authenticity.

DAWOUD BEY PROJECT

In Dawoud Bey's collaborative photographic and audio project, created with Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, adolescents from Jewish backgrounds speak for themselves about issues of race, religion, and ethnicity. Jacob is the only child of a single Jewish mother; his father was from Belize and died when he was younger. In the audio Jacob recounts: "People base too much on the way people look, like, the way people dress, like they look at me, and might think, like, I'm in a gang or something....When people don't know that much about you and your're just like, 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, I'm Jewish.' They're like, 'What?' That's something they'd never expect." Presented close up and in shallow space, Bey's subjects undermine easy assumptions about Jewishness and affirm his belief that young people “are arbiters of style in the community; their appearance speaks most strongly of how a community of people defines themselves at a particular historical moment.”

RAINER GANAHL

Rainer Ganahl was born more than a decade after the end of World War II in Austria, yet there is little tension between artist and subjects in this project, The Language of Emigration. The installation is made up of both photographs and video interviews. The artist interviewed three women who are refugees from the Holocaust and their children and grandchildren. He also took photographs of the interiors of their homes. In their conversations with Ganahl, the subjects all reveal complex feelings about home, family, and community.

JUDAISM AND RACE IN AMERICA

This still from Shari Rothfarb Mekonen and Avishai Mekonen's work-in-progress, a documentary entitled Judaism and Race in America, follows Avishai Mekonen's search for his identity as a Jew of color new to America. An Ethiopian Israeli Avishai Mekonen undertakes a journey that intersects with the stories of other Jews of color in the United States. Stylistically, the film layers his past and present lives and uses vérité footage to reveal and illuminate its central themes of visibility, acceptance, diaspora, and community. Such strategies allow the filmmakers to confront one of the central questions pertaining to both their own lives and to the lives of those they have interviewed: What does it mean to be a Jew?