© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 IMAGES 4Also available online – brill.nl/ima DOI: 10.1163/187180010X547666

DAVID SPERBERIndependent Scholar

ISRAELI ART DISCOURSE AND THE JEWISH VOICE

Abstract

Israeli critical art discourse reflects both opposition to Jewish tradi-tion and its enduring influence. Even when artists employ Jewish sources, scholars and critics often detach their art from the tradi-tionalist world. In this essay, the sociological concepts of “hybridization” and “purification” are therefore presented as fundamental processes underpinning the mainstream discourse of Israeli art.

This essay demonstrates how while processes of rift and recon-stitution with respect to Jewish tradition inform the Israeli art scene, Israeli art discourse, like modern art discourse in general, seeks to set itself apart from the worlds of religion and faith. This essay explains that a byproduct of this phenomenon is that those artists most squarely identifiable as “religious” are largely invisible to, and ignored by, the discourse.

Israeli hegemonic culture has always maintained an ambivalent, uneasy relationship with the Jewish world, in particular with its religious streams. Examining the interface of Israeli art and Judaism reveals that it too is multilayered: fixed, accepted patterns in art criticism and historiography indicate that art and secularism are often considered dia-metrically opposed to tradition and religion.1 At the

same time, the local art scene also evinces continu-ity with Jewish tradition and Jewish materials, with a filtering of Jewish content into local art.2 However, even when Israeli artists do incorporate traditional Jewish materials into their work, they take care—as do the critics—to set up a dichotomy between the traditional world as raw material, on the one hand, and the artwork into which it is being integrated, on the other.3 Thus, all traces of traditionalism are purged.

In this essay, I would like to point to these processes of rupture and reaffirmation as distinctive features of Israeli art in its relation to Jewish tradition. In this, the local art scene follows the general practice in modern art of drawing a sharp distinction between its own domain and that of religion and faith; at the same time, Israeli art does preserve a degree of con-tinuity with Jewish tradition. The discussion will be based on sociological insights into processes of hybrid-ization and purification (these terms will be explained shortly) as fundamental processes in the construction of mainstream art discourse in Israel.

1 This article is an expanded version of my article (in Hebrew) in Akdamot 24 (2010): 39–55. The principal arguments concern-ing the processes of hybridization and purification constructing Israeli art discourse appear in my “Rift and Reconstitution,” in Rupture and Repair in Art, Judaism, and Society [ in Hebrew and English], ed. Emily D. Bilski and Avigdor Shinan ( Jerusalem: The Adi Foundation, 2010), 100–105. I wish to thank Dr. Sara Friedman for translating this essay. I wish also to thank my father Prof. Daniel Sperber, as well as Esther Sperber, Elisheva Sperber, Tzahi Mezuman, Bruce Goldberger, Dvora Liss, and Mati Shemoelof.

On this rupture in the art world, see Alberta Arthurs and Glenn Wallach, eds., Crossroads: Art and Religion in American Life (New York: Center for Arts and Culture, 2001), 1–30, 31–70; Samuel Laeuchli, Religion and Art in Conflict: Introduction to a Cross-disciplinary Task (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 8. See further Marcus B. Burke, “Why Art Needs Religion, Why Religion Needs the Arts,” in Reluctant Partners: Art and Religion in Dialogue, ed. Alberta Arthurs and Glenn Wallach (New York: The Gallery at the American Bible Society, 2004), 168 nn. 1, 2.

2 In the past, “Bezalel” artists, along with others, were prominent in this respect, for example, Mordechai Ardon, Arie Aroch, and, in the 1970s, Michael Segan-Cohen (who also wrote an essay on the topic), Haim Maor, Yocheved Weinfeld, Michael

Grobman, Motti Mizrachi, Michael Druks, Avraham Ofek, and later on, the artist Moshe Gershuni. See Yigal Zalmona, One Hundred Years of Israeli Art [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2010), 452–489. For central theses and discussions of Israeli art and Judaism, see Perspectives on Israeli Art of the Seventies, Tikkun [catalogue: The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Tel Aviv University; in Hebrew and English], curator Mordechai Omer (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1998); Routes of Wandering: Nomadism, Journeys and Transitions in Contemporary Israeli Art [catalogue: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; in Hebrew and English], curator Sarit Shapira ( Jerusalem: The Israel Muzeum, 1991); Adam Baruch, “They’re Shooting Memory: Young Israeli Artists on Religious Experience: An Anti-religious Response?” [in Hebrew], Monitin 27 (November 1989): 56–58, 128. See also Sara Chinski, Sarit Shapira, Sarah Brietberg-Semel, Gideon Ofrat, and Shva Salhoov (below); Gideon Ofrat, Within a Local Context [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2004), 315–323, 324–338, 339–345, 383–395. See also Kobi Ben-Meir on the works of Motti Mizrachi from the 1970s in “Joseph Beuys as Healing Medium in 1970’s Israeli Art” [in Hebrew], Protocols: History and Theory 14 (2009), http://bezalel.secured.co.il/zope/home/he/1252746792.

3 On the “interpretative community,” see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 171.

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In the course of this essay I shall demonstrate how the view that modern art is founded upon secular principles has led its proponents to a stark differentiation between mainstream Israeli art and religion. Thus, most art produced by the religious population is excluded. For instance, although art critics devote much space each year to surveying and analyzing end-of-year exhibitions at Israel’s art institutes (including those on the periphery), it seems that no major critic has ever devoted a review to any of the art exhibitions of graduates of the art departments in Israeli religious colleges.

The point of departure in the art world is that no good art can emerge from the religious milieu; therefore, art critics dispense with visiting its exhibi-tions. Moreover, as I show later on, local art discourse has even developed a comprehensive the-sis on the art produced by “religious” artists. We will see how religious art is excluded from mainstream critical discussion. However, a closer look at con-temporary art created by observant Jews reveals that in fact there is no fixed correlation between such theses and artistic production as it is actually devel-oping in modern Orthodoxy.

1. Israeli Art within Jewish Discourse

The rift between Zionism and historical Judaism is ever present in secular Israeli cultural consciousness, and was stressed already in the writings of Zionist thinkers. For instance, Y. H. Brenner wrote, “We secular Jews have nothing in common with Judaism.”4 This rupture is typical of contemporary Israeli art. The artist Michal Na aman described it as follows:

“I am not integral to the Bible. The phrase [used in her works] ‘a kid in its mother’s milk’ is one that I do use, but it’s foreign to me.”5 In a similar context, Raffi Lavie remarked, “I’ve never felt the national-istic aspect of my being Jewish.”6 Yigal Tumarkin observes:

I’m a paradox: a citizen of Israel who detests most of its inhabitants; at the same time, I am intimately acquainted with every stone here, the landscape, the sunlight. I don’t feel Jewish, yet I’m from here, not from there. I have no ties to anyone in Germany, nor to the landscape or the land. Yet my culture is still mostly from there, not from here. Where do I come from? My Jewish mother? As an exile, where would I go—to my German father?7

Eran Shakine, belonging to a younger generation, uses the kippa (ritual skullcap) in his installations, and says: “I’m a complete ignoramus when it comes to Judaism; as soon as I thought of using the kippa, I went to consult with a friend who grew up in an observant home.”8

Many Israeli artists claim that their preoccupation with Jewish materials does not stem from issues of self-identity or from tradition in the sense of conti-nuity and connectedness with the past. Instead, they claim that they were motivated by external forces. “At the end of the day, no matter what happens, to the rest of the world you’re always a ‘Jewboy,’ ” says artist Gary Goldstein.9 And Shakine adds:

These symbols [ Judaica] help me deal with my iden-tity as a Jew living in Israel, as an Israeli. In Israel I am perhaps less aware of my identity, but whenever I leave the country I’m immediately identified with it.

4 Yossef Hever (= Yosef Haim Brenner), “In the Press and in Literature” [in Hebrew], Hapoel Hattzair, 4, no. 3 (22 Heshvan, 5671): 6–8; see also Avi Sagi, To Be a Jew: Brenner, An Existentialist Jew [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007). It should be emphasized that Zionist discourse comprised a vari-ety of approaches to Judaism. In the wake of post-liberal discourse in Europe, the distinction between religion and reli-giosity was widely accepted. Zionism in fact enabled the rejection of religion while at the same time appropriating reli-giosity for the benefit of nationalism. See further Zohar Maor, “Zionist Thought between Jewish Religiosity and Secular Nationalism” [in Hebrew], Innovations 5 (2010): 30–33; Graciela Trajtenberg points out that unlike those art critics in Europe who wrote in Hebrew, assiduously enhancing the reputation of Jewish art, critics in Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century did not engage with Jewish aspects of art and disre-garded the practice of Jewish art. See her Between Nationalism and Art: The Construction of the Israeli Field of Art During the Yishuv Period and the State’s Early Years [ in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes Press, 2006), 50–51.

5 Dana Arieli-Horowitz, Creators in Overburden: Rabin’s Assassination, Art and Politics [ in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes Press, 2005), 243.

6 Ruth Debel, “What Does It Mean to Be an Israeli Artist?,” Art News (May 1978): 55. A different, albeit controversial reading of Lavie’s work has recently been proposed by Shva Salhoov. See Shva Salhhov, “A Page of Raffi’s Bible Illustrations,” Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for the Bible and Contemporary Israeli Art [Catalogue: The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Tel Aviv University; in Hebrew], curator Mordechai Omer (Tel Aviv, 2010), 14.

7 Yigal Tumarkin, “Identity,” Tumarkin 1981–1982 [Catalogue: Suzanne Dallal Centre for Dance and Theatre, Neve Tzedek; in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1982); Zalmona, One Hundred Years of Israeli Art, 463.

8 Dana Gilerman, “Inescapable Identity” [in Hebrew], Ha’aretz, “Gallery,” September 12, 2008 http://www.mouse.co.il/CM.articles_item,1023,209,27717,.aspx.

9 Arieli-Horowitz, Creators in Overburden, 212.

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There were times when I wanted to deny it. I spent three years in Europe and seven in New York—I wanted to be an international artist, but that wasn’t possible.10

As I have shown elsewhere, artistic manipulation of images from the Jewish symbolic repertoire often empties these symbols of their meaning.11 Many artists draw upon Jewish ritual objects alongside realia from contemporary Israeli culture, and, in a manifestly postmodern and post-Zionist act, empty them all of their meaning. Jewish symbols and texts often undergo intentional flattening. The “Jewishness” of objects and forms is then just one element among the wealth of cultural influences: deconstructed mas-ter narratives become empty forms of staged ritual.

2. “The Death of God”: Processes of Hybridization and Purification

Like modern Western art in general, new Jewish culture, including the art world in Israel, was inspired by the Nietzschean concept of “the death of God,” with the result that an extensive body of traditional thought was suppressed.12 Today too, Jewish themes are frequently excluded by the Israeli arts establish-ment. Jewish themes are generally subjected to strict purist control aimed at shaping content to fit the accepted norm. Content failing to adapt is as a rule marginalized.13

In his We Have Never Been Modern, sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour claims that the accepted dichotomy nature/culture is a quintes-sentially modernist invention, while in fact, human reality is experienced in a more hybrid manner.14 Like the dichotomy nature/culture, the polarity of religion versus secularism was introduced only with the advent of modernity. Therefore, suggests

sociologist Yehuda Shenhav, Latour’s claim is equally applicable to the dichotomy religion/secularism.15 This essentially postmodernist position uses the concept of “postreligion” to mean that “secularism” and “religion” are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are two interrelated concepts. “A postreligious perspective on the world succeeds in capturing com-plex hybrids of religion and secularism—without exchanging one for the other,” concludes Shenhav.16 Similarly William Franke emphasizes that it is pre-cisely our contemporary awareness of the inherent incompleteness of the world and its defiance of easy categorization that encourages a move back toward transcendence. Postmodernism returns to God without defining him in external, absolute terms, embracing the incomprehensibility of his existence. Postmodernism’s angst led to “postmodern theologi-cal revelation”: a theology serving as an external source for raising questions. Postmodern theology, by its very status external to the world and its (changing) values, possesses critical faculties vis-à-vis modern secular society.17

“Hybridization” and “purification” serve Latour as codes standing for modernity. In the tension between nature and culture (to which Latour’s state-ment refers), we find on the one hand primal, inchoate nature, and on the other—culture. While premodern hybridity did not pry apart what was melded together, modernity typically sought to modernize distinctions by setting them up as dichot-omies of opposing values. Modernism, according to Latour, both allows for the proliferation of hybrids and denies their very existence. While processes of hybridization can be discerned in non-modern soci-eties, purification of these dimensions, separating hybrids into distinct categories, can be found, in his opinion, only in modernized societies.18

10 Gilerman, “Inescapable Identity.”11 See David Sperber, Broken Vessels: Deconstructive Aspects in

Contemporary Jewish Art [in Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University; Jerusalem: The Leiber Center for Jewish Art Exhibitions, 2008), 32–42.

12 David Ohana, Neither Canaanites Nor Crusaders: The Origins of Israeli Mythology [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Keter, 2008), 45–61; Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in 18th-Century Europe [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2010). See also William Franke, “The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the Crisis of Values in Secular Modernity and Post-secular Modernity,” Religion and the Arts 11, no. 2 (2007): 214–241.

13 On the exclusion of Jewish discourse from Israeli art, see

for instance Adam Baruch, Our Life [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 2002), 78–81.

14 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

15 Yehuda Shenhav, “You Have Never Been Modern Zionists—Addendum to Bruno Latour, on hybridity and puri-fication” [in Hebrew], Theory and Criticism 26 (Spring 2005): 75–88.

16 Yehuda Shenhav, “Is There Such a Thing as Secular Jewish Culture” [in Hebrew], Ha’aretz, Literary Supplement, September 11, 2007, http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/903215.html.

17 Franke, “The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche.” 18 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

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Shenhav, following Latour, claims that positing simultaneous hybridization and purification is arti-ficial, since it fails to represent accurately attitudes towards religion. Shenhav suggests that Israeli nationalism was the decisive factor in creating the current dichotomized organization of the local art world. Israeli nationalism typically branded “reli-gion” as a signifier of non-modernity, and reserved “secular” as a signifier of modernity. Through this twofold act of signification, Israeli nationalism acquired a double voice: a primary, religious voice, and a modern, secular one. The first voice blends old and new into a hybrid intended to lend legiti-macy to the Zionist national enterprise, by ap-propriating the religious past and creating an impression of continuity between religious past and secular present (hybridization). The second, modern, voice turns outward to the external world as well as inward, to society: it seeks to modernize Zionism by turning its back on its own past (purification). During the process of purification, religion is marked as lacking in Western values, hence as non-modern, precisely in order to accentuate its contrast to elite culture—secular and modern in its very essence.

Let us also recall that oxymoronic concept, “inventing tradition,” coined by Eric Hobsbawm.19 According to Hobsbawm, every modern national tradition is an invention comprising at once new elements as well as motifs from the past which have undergone a change and have been reappropriated. Even when a given component remains “faithful” to the past, its position in the new cultural structure alters its meaning. This reinvention is a conscious, initiated process effected by cultural agents, though they remain unseen. The success of the invented tradition depends on eradicating all traces of the process itself, and refraining from exposing the mechanisms that rendered the new tradition the prevailing norm. Early exposure of the agents may

adversely affect mythicization of the process.20 In light of these hypotheses, I will analyze the ongoing relations between religion and modernity, in an extended test case: Judaism in hegemonic contem-porary Israeli art discourse.21

Sarah Chinski has demonstrated in a series of articles how “a society creates art in its own image,” and how dominant Zionist discourse is expressed in the foundational theses of Israeli art.22 Her argu-ment is based on the insight that while art is often perceived as undermining the system of received beliefs and opinions (doxa), it in fact takes part in the existing order and even perpetuates it.

Following Chinski, let us illustrate the relations between religion and modernity with a few central examples of works by canonical, influential contem-porary Israeli artists who have not necessarily declared an explicit interest in Judaism. In addition, I will also look at texts by the curators who present these works and their implied contexts. I confront the issue from two different directions: the analysis of artwork, paying close attention to the artist’s inner world; and the examination of interpretative trends. This combination accords with Bourdieu’s suggestion to examine art by a synthesis of analysis of the works themselves, on the one hand, with the analysis of various agencies involved in producing the social value of a work of art, on the other.23 We are speaking of a vicious circle whereby artist and interpretative response to the artwork construct the discourse itself, without deviating from accepted rules. Artists and critics have joined forces in cam-ouflaging core issues, as if to keep the point of departure invisible would render the field “objec-tive,” differentiated and delimited.24 The present essay sets out, on the contrary, to deconstruct mainstream discourse into its constitutive compo-nents—not to view the object as it is presented by the various agents in the field, but rather to show

19 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rager, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

20 On “the invention of tradition” see also Yael Guilat, “Embroidering a Nation—Women’s Organizations as Patrons of Popular Mainstream Art” [in Hebrew], in Women Artists in Israel, 1920–1970, ed. Ruth Markusc (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008), 181–224.

21 Ariela Azoulay, irrespective of Latour’s model, distinguished two implicit perceptions of a bond between past and present in Zionist museology: one links the past to the present, regard-ing the past as a link in a chain serving for the construction of concepts such as “historical right”; the other regards the past as completely detached from the present. Ariela Azoulay, Training

for Art: Critique of Museum Economics [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999), 121.

22 Sara Chinski, “Silence of the Fish: The Local versus the Universal in the Israeli Discourse on Art” [in Hebrew], Theory and Criticism 4 (Autumn 1993): 106; and ibid., “Eyes Wide Shut: The Acquired Albino Syndrome of the Israeli Art Field” [in Hebrew], Theory and Criticism 20 (Spring 2002): 57–86.

23 See Pierre Bourdieu, Questions de Sociologie (Les Éditions de Minuit, 1984); and Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

24 Azoulay, Training for Art, 45.

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how its meaning is constructed by their various stances. This critical approach is based on Bourdieu’s “field” theory, which rejects the idealistic perception of the work of art, seeking instead to understand it in relation to fields of cultural production. These latter derive inter alia from censorship, the general acceptance of the rules of the game by all its par-ticipants, and their tacit agreement to “keep playing the game.”25 One of the central insights of such approaches is that the fate of an artistic endeavor is governed by reciprocal relations between itself and broader social categories. The value accorded to a work of art derives at least as much from the status of the larger discourse in which it is embedded as from the inherent qualities of the work itself.

3. Hybridization and Purification in Art and Language

We will trace these processes in works by prominent, influential Israeli artists affiliated with Raffi Lavie and his followers, known as the “Tel Aviv School” (dubbed “the Raffi Force” by Sarah Brietberg-Semel ).26 Although they do use Jewish materials, these are subjected to “displacement” and “exclusion,” and the work itself is presented as manifestly secular.27 For instance, Sarah Brietberg-Semel writes:

the painting [of Raffi Lavie] proclaims empty life devoid of godliness as worth living. One need only

look at his early drawings to see the figures with arms outstretched toward the heavens with such confidence, to understand that he is of the party of life, the party of immense nature, not of God or God’s orphan.28

Moreover, the Tel Aviv School has been the central axis for the development of the language and vocabulary of the Israeli art scene, since the 1980s.29 These artists are also influential instructors whose works employ the language of modern Western art and form the basis for its local adaptation.30 Curator Sarah Brietberg-Semel has called the historiograph-ical and interpretative outlook of Israeli hegemonic art the “meager materials” approach. This approach is perceived as inherently Tel Avivian and secular, with artist and teacher Raffi Lavie considered its most prominent representative. The “meager mate-rials” approach is for some Israeli artists an act of authenticity, concomitant with rejection of external concepts.31 This school claims total ignorance of things Jewish, yet its work is replete with symbols and concepts drawn from Jewish tradition. Other artists, such as Avraham Ofek, Pinchas Shaar, and Shemuel Boneh, whose works did constitute a hybridization of Judaism and modernity—but with-out self-purification effected by an act of signification in the quintessentially secular discourse—were excluded from the canon and relegated to the mar-gins of Israeli art.32

25 See further Howard Becker, Art World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Wesley Shrum, The Role of Critics in High and Popular Art, ed. John G. Richardson (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996). Ariela Azoulay in her Training for Art has applied these insights to Israeli art.

26 See The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art [Catalogue: Tel Aviv Museum of Art; in Hebrew with English summary], curator Sarah Brietberg-Semel (Tel Aviv, 1986).

27 See for instance Efrat Biberman and Deganit Berest on Raffi Lavie: “scribbles done in pencil on exposed or whitewashed plywood, devoid of awe or pathos: direct and secular,” Raffi Lavie: Please Read the Drawings [in Hebrew], ed. Efrat Biberman and Deganit Brest (Beit Berl: Ha’midrasha Art School, Beit Berl College, 2009), 5. See also Gideon Ofrat, Encounters with Art: Essays on Israeli Artists of the 20th Century [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Hasifria Hazionit, 2005), 462.

28 Brietberg-Semel, “Collage on Raffi,” Raffi Lavie: Please Read the Drawings, 42.

Adam Baruch has a different approach to Lavie. He discerns in Lavie’s work “an attempt to pry from the mundane routine a holiness of its own.” Adam Baruch, How Are Things at Home [in Hebrew] (Or Yehuda: Dvir, 2004), 187.

29 Gideon Ofrat put it nicely: “A painting by Raffi Lavie is an initiation rite for the Israeli critic. It seems that no local theoretician has ever won the sought-for entry ticket into the elite guild of critics without first confronting a painting by Lavie

and offering his interpretation. Be the critic ever so seasoned and active, or ever so young and clever, if he fails to pass this test—he will remain an outsider.” Ofrat, Encounters With Art, 456. See also Dalia Manor, “Artists as Leaders: Yosef Zaritsky and Raffi Lavie” [in Hebrew], ISRAEL: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel. History, Society, Culture 15 (2009): 33–66.

30 Miri Gal-Ezer points out that teaching art, especially at an institute of higher education, is in itself an influential position for determining the place an artist will occupy in the artistic canon, and for his remaining there over time. See Miri Gal-Ezer, “ ‘The Loser Wins’: Artists’ Lifestyle in the Israeli Field of Visual Arts” [in Hebrew], Devarim Aherim 2 (Spring 1997): 105–106.

31 See Azoulay, Training for Art, 174 ,32 Mordechai Omer cites Mordechai Ardon, along with some

of his followers of the intermediate generation of Israeli art in the 1970s, for the complex hybridity of religion and secularism in their work: “Ardon did hope for a better world, and was one of the few Israeli artists who did not exchange the Jewish uto-pia for the Modernist utopia.” Omer, Perspectives on Israeli Art of the Seventies, 489. In this context, it is appropriate to mention the doings of the Adi Foundation in the last few years. This foundation advances Jewish expression in art and design, inspired by a broad worldview, following which the common distinction between the religious and secular are often blurred.

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The presence of Jewish symbols, texts, and con-cepts in Raffi Lavie’s art has not hitherto been addressed in any discussion of his work. The prevail-ing interpretative position refrains from symbolic or narrative readings, preferring instead to foray into the realm of form and structure, an approach sup-ported by the artist.33 This has perpetuated inattention to the Jewish interest his work provides, and to its ties with Jewish tradition. The recent appearance of new interpretative paradigms has invested the Jewish imagery in Lavie’s work with new meanings.34 A reexamination of Lavie’s imagery exemplifies the point made above, namely, that in his work we find simultaneous hybridization and purification. Lavie’s collages often contain quotes from Jewish sources (Fig. 1), as well as images such as a bearded man, an angel, a menorah, a ladder, and parts of the Star of David (Figs. 2, 3, 4). Towards the end of his life (about 2003–2007), Lavie painted the Chagall series, as he himself called it. These paintings echo Chagall’s imagery: flying figures, couples, flowers, a ladder, a menorah, and a fiddle. In one of his paintings, Lavie inscribed the name “Chagall” in oversized charac-ters.35 Lavie himself is quoted as saying: “Ilana and I find ourselves countless times a day using expressions from the Bible and the sages; it’s a part of us.”36

Lavie’s imagery can perhaps be understood as “the Jewish world considered as the unconscious of Israeli culture,” as curator Sarit Shapira put it.37 Accordingly, these works would be understood as a manifestation of the collective Jewish unconscious, expressed by childlike scribbles. However, it seems to me that the paradigms proposed by Latour and Shenhav offer a more comprehensive explanatory tool. As suggested above, we have here two simul-taneous processes—hybridization and purification, ostensibly bridging the gap between old and new, but in fact actually reaffirming the new (modern, universal ) by means of the old and traditional. “New” stands here for the language of modern art. Lavie draws upon modern art for both content and form—for example, on international artists such as Paul Klee, Juan Miro, Robert Rauschenberg,38 and Cy Twombly, as well as on Israeli artists Aviva Uri and Aryeh Arokh.39 The “old” appears in his work as the motifs that refer the viewer to Jewish symbolism.

These processes can also be discerned in works by Lavie’s colleagues and students, for example, Yair Garbuz, whose local, ironic version of pop art is replete with “infantile” allusions to famous works of art and with intentionally garbled key concepts and

33 See Azoulay, Training for Art, 136–140. Later on, Lavie may have been more receptive to new interpretations. See Dalia Manor, “Artists as Leaders,” 61 n. 102; Zalmona, One Hundred Years of Israeli Art, 248. This is of tantamount importance when—as Liah Greenfeld-Peres found in her study—the artists, more than any other group in the art scene, set the criteria for evaluating and explaining their own art. On this point, see Liah Greenfeld, Different Worlds: A Sociological Study of Taste, Choice, and Success in Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 126.

34 In an interview with Raffi Lavie, which appeared in the journal Kav no. 4\5 (November 1982), the editor Nili Noyman attempted to prove to the artist that he was not only a formalist-universalist, as he claimed to be, but that his work formulated a fundamental concept regarding Israeli culture. The editor men-tioned in this context the Star of David appearing in his work already in 1957. In 1993, David Ginton offered an iconograph-ical analysis of Lavie’s paintings. In fact, since the nineties, new readings have increasingly focused on the imagery and content of texts incorporated into the work; see Azoulay, Training for Art, 191. Today we have a wealth of interpretative readings of his work, positioning themselves at various points on the axis between the poles of “fullness” and “emptiness.” This insight, currently presented by Efrat Biberman and Deganit Berest, was first pro-posed by Baruch, How Are Things at Home, 191. See Biberman and Berest, Raffi Lavie: Please Read the Drawings, 5–12.

35 On this series, see Uri Dessau, “Lavie and Gershuni, Together Again” [in Hebrew], Globes, November 18, 2003. However, Doreet Levitte Harten disagrees with Dessau’s analysis. See Doreet Levitte Harten, Raffi Lavie: The Israeli Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 53rd International Art Exhibition [Catalogue: The Israel Museum; Hebrew and English], curator Doreet Levitte Harten ( Jerusalem, 2009), 25. The “Jewish” themes in Lavie’s work were emphasized also by Uzi Zur in his review of the exhibition Raffi Lavie—Contemporary, Heavenly, Recent Paintings (Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv). Uzi Zur, “Open-ended and Beginning” [in Hebrew], Ha aretz, Literary Supplement, May 16, 2008, http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=984052.

36 Raffi Lavie in conversation with Dalia Karpel. See Dalia Karpel, “I Was Mean But Right” [in Hebrew], Ha aretz, Magazine Supplement, December 23, 2005, 48.

37 Raffi Lavie: Works from 1950 to 2003 [Catalogue: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Hebrew and English] curator Sarit Shapira ( Jerusalem, 2003), 343. Shapira frequently points out the Jewish aspects of Lavie’s work, as do David Ginton and Shva Salhoov.

38 Rauschenberg was a source of inspiration for such prom-inent Israeli artists as Raffi Lavie, Michal Na aman, and Henry Shlezniak even prior to his 1975 exhibition at the Israel Museum (curator: Yona Fisher).

39 To the list of international artists we may add Arnolf Reiner and the Cobra group, although they were not well known in Israel in the 1950s.

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Fig. 1. Raffi Lavie, Untitled, 1972, acrylic and collage on plywood, 85 × 120 cm. Courtesy Tamar Geter, Givatayim.

Fig. 2. Raffi Lavie, Untitled, 2007, acrylic and pencil on plywood, 122 × 122 cm. Courtesy Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv.

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Fig. 3. Raffi Lavie, Untitled, 2007, acrylic and pencil on plywood, 122 × 122 cm. Courtesy Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Fig. 4. Raffi Lavie, front cover of the review Alpayim, no. 19 (2000).

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expressions borrowed from Jewish tradition.40 For instance, Garbuz takes aphorisms by Talmudic sages, along with other Jewish proverbs, and twists them into a kind of bad joke that uses humorous wordplay to deflect them from their original meaning by yield-ing nonexistent collocations and phrases. Hybridi-zation and purification also permeate the numerous series by Garbuz that invoke Jewish contexts, such as Léger, Gauguin, Jews, and Scraps; Streichman’s Jewish Side; Still Life Decorated with Yemenites; and A Life of Rattle. Garbuz had a one-man show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (1986, curator: Sarah Brietberg-Semel ) entitled Yair Garbuz Presents: A Jew, a Frenchman, and an Arab, which, according to curator Tali Tamir, succinctly sums up

a kind of Israeli fantasy of mixed identities: Parisian modernism, Middle Eastern Arab, and socialist pio-neer, along with the Old World Eastern European Jew who keeps cropping up. Israeli identity is herein revealed, willy-nilly, as a composite construct as a poetics of the unattainable.41

The recurrent phrase in his works—“I wasn’t secu-lar that day” (Fig. 5)—once again highlights his essentially secular stance, with his work serving as a barrier warding off traditionalism. His flashes of Yiddishkeit bridge past and present only ostensibly. The wordplay in the title of one of Garbuz’s series exemplifies this hybridity better than anything else: a familiar phrase from the traditional Jewish daily prayers is altered in a humorous, alliterative allusion (yielding moderni ani, “I am modern” instead of modeh ani, “I thank Thee”). Tradition hereby undergoes purification by the substitution of one word, bor-rowed from the domain of contemporary aesthetics, for a word in the traditional formula (Figs. 6, 7).

Hybridization of old and new occasionally under-goes purification by emphasizing the gap between Jewish tradition and the artist’s inner world. Curator Tami Katz-Freiman writes:

It seems that nostalgic, yearning attitudes toward tradition are totally nonexistent in Israeli art of the nineties. If there appear, from time to time, symbols originating in Jewish tradition or the Bible, it is always from a critical perspective, rather than a consecrating or nostalgic one.42

Michal Na aman was apparently the first member of the Tel Aviv School to seek out the Jewish con-text.43 Her works, she states, incorporate Jewish materials in order to give a non-Jewish perspective on Jewish sources. Her series Lord of Colors has become an Israeli icon of theology, art, and gender.44 Her manipulation of Hebrew letters and the names of God can be regarded in a sense as a continuation of traditional Jewish theological preoccupation with divine nature. The text of the Kedusha (Holiness) liturgy is based on verses from the book of Isaiah (chap. 6) that recount the prophet’s experiences of divine revelation and his encounter with angels and seraphs. Gideon Ofrat has noted the striking contrast in Na’aman’s work between the Hebrew word tzva’im (“colors,” playfully presented as the masculine form of the word tzva’ot, “hosts”) and the monochromatic painting (Fig. 8).45 Her earlier works paved the way for a series in which every painting is assigned a color, with a caption stating the relevant color in the center, for example, “Lord Brown” or “Lord Yellow.”

The titles of Ne’eman’s paintings are rich in intertextual allusions to classical Jewish sources: Touch Not My Anointed; The Parting of the Red Sea; The Flood; A Kid In Its Mother’s Milk (Half & Half ); Job; I, Qoheleth, Have Been King; All Things Are Full of Labor Man Cannot Utter It, and many more (Figs. 9, 10). Yet the images accompanying these titles taken in context never affirm Jewish tradition. Instead, the work adheres to secular, modern, and contemporary norms. This ambivalence is heightened by the switch from Hebrew to English in some of her series: while the title of the painting is in Hebrew, expressions

40 Refraining from reading narratives into art holds for Garbuz too; his works have been read as a manifesto, a kind of bulletin board that does not ascribe any importance to any of its ele-ments; see Azoulay, Training for Art, 213.

41 Tali Tamir, “Yair Garbuz” [in Hebrew], Israel Art Now, ed. Iris Rywkind Ben-Zour and Revital Alcalay (Tel Aviv: Modan, 2009), 68.

42 Tami Katz-Freiman, “A Matter of Distance,” Desert Cliché: Israel Now—Local Images [catalogue: Arad Museum, Israel; Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel; Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel; Baas Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida; Grey Art Gallery & Study Center of New York University, New York

City; in Hebrew and English], curators Tami Katz-Freiman and Amy Cappellazzo (Tel Aviv, 1996), 13.

43 See “Thou Shalt Make…”: The Renaissance of Judaism in Israeli Art [catalogue: Zman Le’omanut; in Hebrew], curator Gideon Ofrat (Tel Aviv, 2003), 15.

44 On gender discourse in her works—a discourse that had been repressed in the past—see Passing the Batonette: Four Decades of Feminism in Israeli Art [catalogue: Haifa Museum of Art; in Hebrew], curators Ilana Tenenbaum and Einat Amir (Haifa Museum of Art, in collaboration with Ha’midrasha, School of Art, Beit Berl College, 2007).

45 Ofrat, Thou Shalt Make, 58.

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Fig. 5. Yair Garbuz, Moderni Ani Lefanecha (Modern Before Thee), 2007, collage, acrylic, ink and pencil on paper, 30 × 21 cm. Courtesy Gordon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Fig. 6. Yair Garbuz, Moderni Ani Lefanecha (Modern Before Thee), 2007, acrylic, spray paint, enamel paint, pencil, wooden plate, handkerchief, and raffia ribbon on plywood, 30 × 40 cm. Courtesy Gordon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv.

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Fig. 7. Yair Garbuz, Moderni Ani Lefanecha (Modern Before Thee), 2007, collage, acrylic, spray paint, pencil, veneer and plastic letters on paper, 80 × 120 cm. Courtesy Gordon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Fig. 8. Michal Na aman, Adonai Tzva’im (Lord of Colors), 1976, pencil, photograph, and pepper on plywood, 38.2 × 43.5 cm. Courtesy The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Israeli Art, B94.0767.

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Fig. 9. Michal Na aman, Jehova Yehonah, 1976, acrylic, photograph, paper, and letraset on ply-wood, 13 × 42 cm. Courtesy Sarah Brietberg-Semel, Beit Aharon.

Fig. 10. Michal Na aman, All Things Are Full of Labor Man Cannot Utter It (detail ), 1974, black and white photograph, 29 × 19 cm. Courtesy Gordon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv.

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from Jewish texts are quoted in the work itself in English translation.

4. “Meager materials”: Hybridization and Purification in Israeli Art-critical Discourse

The paradigm we have adopted here can help us understand the art-theoretical positions informing attitudes to Jewish themes adopted by Israeli curators and critics. Moreover, identifying processes of hybridization and purification may also help explain the exclusion of traditional art from the local art discourse.

Sara Chinski has criticized the “meager materi-als” approach, pointing out its underlying binarism, namely, tradition versus secularism. She sees this, for instance, in the phrases “the blight of exile” vis-à-vis “courageous secularization.”46 Likewise, Chinski points to the way Judaism is appropriated by Sarah Brietberg-Semel, and the ensuing semi-antisemitic outlook.47 Dalia Manor has similarly noted the change in direction among critics since the 1980s from stressing continuity to depicting rupture, sub-verting negative labels that were current in the nineteenth century and using them to redefine the uniqueness of Israeli art.48 Manor claims that the “meager materials” approach characterizes Jewishness as “lack,” just like antisemitic theories claiming that the experience of being Jewish is one

of lack: “No aesthetics, no culture, no materials, no symbols, and no myths.”49

Brietberg-Semel’s incisive observation, “The Tel Avivian child [Raffi Lavie] has no religion, no nation, no homeland . . . no ideology,” has met with the fol-lowing comment by Shva Salhoov:

Things were never that unequivocal. In the depths, awaiting the right moment, were certain gestures whose religious, ideological, and national meaning cannot be ignored. The native Israeli [tsabar] who imagined his roots to be in the absolute present, in the sands of Tel Aviv, denuded of all memory, never truly shook off the imprint of his yesterdays.50

The exhibition The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art, curated by Sarah Brietberg-Semel at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1986, presented what is generally considered a fundamental, constitutive thesis in the historiography of Israeli art. In fact, however, the exhibition actually reaffirmed processes of hybridization and purification. In that exhibition, Brietberg-Semel presented a group of works that she claimed were all meager in materials. In her essay in the exhibition catalogue, Brietberg-Semel maneuvers among secular, modern features and the introduction of Jewish concepts and themes. She found that the relation obtaining between secular Tel Aviv art and the ostensible lack of aesthetic and material culture in Jewish tradition is in itself an act of hybridization.51 By contrast, in an act of

46 Chinski, Eyes Wide Shut, 118.47 Ibid.48 Dalia Manor, “Pride and Prejudice, or: Frequently-found

Models in the Historiography of Israeli Art” [in Hebrew], Protocols: History and Theory 1 (2005), http://bezalel.secured.co.il/zope/home/he/1126095346/1126096536-manor/#_edn6.

49 Ibid.50 Shva Salhoov, Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for the Bible, 12.

Salhoov too makes an effort to breed a hybrid of old and new in her interpretation of Lavie’s works, thereby discovering their Jewish aspects. However, Salhoov’s reference to the world of tradition as “the past,” and her emphasizing that the image of Israeli art is “quintessentially secular, with Jewish sources” (ibid.), are in themselves an act of modernistic purification.

51 Additional examples of such hybrids can be found in Brietberg-Semel, who writes, “Despite the aforementioned art-ists having no affinity with Judaism, there is nonetheless in their work a relation to the meaning of being a Jew, a meaning distinct from pagan or Christian meaning—it is the allegorical meaning found in myths and symbols” (Brietberg-Semel, The Want of Matter, 16). Similarly, “The immense importance of text in the work of the Tel Aviv School connects them to the Jewish world they are no longer part of. Preferring the written word to the world of sensory phenomena is a quintessentially Jewish idea” (ibid., 17); further on, she distinguishes between the “secular” Tel Aviv School and other, more “Jewish” artists.

Indeed, as she notes there, the artist Moshe Gershuni treats Jewish themes in a different spirit altogether from the main-stream under discussion. Recently, the curator wrote about Gershuni as follows: “Gershuni offers to the progressive secular culture an emotional spectrum which it does not acknowledge, a fundamental and complex moment.” See Gershuni [Catalogue: Tel Aviv Museum of Art; in Hebrew, with selected translations], curator Sara Brietberg-Semel (Tel Aviv, 2010), 132. Similarly, Doron Ravina wrote: “. . . One can never define him [Gershuni] as completely secular, neither with respect to Judaism nor to art.” See ibid., 24. However, she affirms the Jewishness even of those she labels completely secular. Brietberg-Semel, Want of Matter, 21–22. See also Sarah Brietberg-Semel, “Agrippa vs. Nimrod” [in Hebrew], Kav 19 (1999): 98–100, where she attacks the canonical approach that considers Danziger’s statue as representative of Hebrew nationalism. The curator proposed instead Arie Aroch’s abstract Agrippas Street (1964) as a worthy alternative with more “Jewish” values. Her preference for Aroch’s work to that of Danziger lends support to our analysis as to processes of “hybridization” and “purification” lying at the center of her discussion. As opposed to Danziger’s Nimrod, which evokes a wish to sever all ties with Jewish tradition and to construct a pre-Jewish native generation, Aroch’s work is a hybrid of Judaism and modernism. For more on Danziger’s “Nimrod” and its cultural context, see Ohana, Neither Canaanites Nor Crusaders, 99–153.

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purification, the curator identified collage and text elements in the exhibited works, functioning as a secular substitute within the essentially verbal, non-visual, Jewish tradition. The ambivalence is attested in the very title of her essay in the catalogue: “The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art,” and in the juxtaposition of modern terminology with a biblical verse: “The thing is very close to you” (Deuteronomy 30:14).52

In 2003, an exhibition entitled Thou Shalt Make . . ., curated by Gideon Ofrat at the Zman le-Omanut Gallery in Tel Aviv, highlighted the theme of “The Jewish Renaissance in Contemporary Israeli Art.” The theme fit in nicely with the resurgent Israeli interest in the classical Jewish sources (“the Jewish bookshelf ”)—an essentially secular quest to reinter-pret Judaism in accordance with contemporary values. The works shown in the exhibition for the most part incorporated traditional Jewish materials by contextualizing them in the modern world, often by defiant deconstruction.53

Once again, we can usefully apply the Latour-Shenhav paradigm: hybridization is enacted by linking past and present, and by choosing to show mainly works by artists who “seek to affirm an enlightened cultural synthesis between Israeliness and Jewishness,” as the curator put it.54 At the same time, he presented the works as “secular,” thereby setting up a binary opposition between reaffirmation of the traditional past and defiance against it—a classic purification process.55 Pieces that were difficult to invest with “secular” significance remained outside of the exhibition. Thus, for instance, religious (and right-wing) artist Avner Bar Hama recounts that the curator was familiar with his work, and he was even invited to show him relevant pieces for the exhibi-tion, but in the end his work was not included since,

he says, the curator told him that his work essentially reaffirms tradition rather than undermining it. Here too, the title of the exhibition reveals its complexity: “Jewish Renaissance” suggests continuity vis-à-vis the quasi-biblical Thou Shalt Make . . ., a paraphrase of “Thou shalt not make for yourself a sculptured image or any likeness” (Exodus 20:3), with the mock quotation providing a counterpoint to the very verse to which it alludes and from which it dissociates itself.

This exhibition accords with the general thrust of Ofrat’s extensive activity in the field of Israeli art, which can serve as a counterexample to what we have been describing, if only due to its extreme nature. Ofrat, a dynamic independent curator, was active for many years in the formation of the Israeli artistic canon. His historiographical output is deter-minedly consistent, but for many years failed to attain the mainstream center.56 Ofrat is among the few prominent curators who offer marginal trends a chance at visibility, and constitutes the main link between Jewish past and Israeli present in Israeli art historiography.57 However, Ofrat is at the same time the great excluder, as founder of a cultural approach that excludes religious and right-wing artists from the Israeli canon.58 His aesthetic views on religious art—art “wearing a kippa,” as he puts it—ignore the politics of the gaze.59 As a pretense for excluding religious art, he employs stark standards of “quality” (often justifiably) derived from the modernistic view of artistic autonomy. For instance, Ofrat claims: “Observant artists . . . tend to assert faith and ideology as artistic content that weighs them down until they drown in a shallow swamp having absolutely noth-ing to do with the formal and content-based complexity of one hundred and fifty years of mod-ern (not to mention postmodern) art.”60 And: “The

52 On this partial quotation of the verse and its feminist context, see Osnat Rechter, “Three Women Curators in Israeli Art” [in Hebrew], HaMidrasha 10 (2007): 106.

53 Ofrat is personally sympathetic to Jewish-religious mani-festations in Israeli secular art; see his Washington Crossing the Jordan: Selected Essays 1984–2008 [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Hasifria Hazionit, 2008), 202. See too Ofrat on showing manifestly secular art dealing with Jewish themes: Gideon Ofrat, Thou Shalt Make, 175.

54 Ofrat, Thou Shalt Make, 35: “We are not dealing here with artists undergoing a Jewish-religious revival, but rather with secular artists seeking to realize a kind of religiosity, by a Jewish-religious aspect of their art, often paradoxical, often dialectic.”

55 Ibid., 58: “We are dealing with a totally secular, non-believing encounter.”

56 See Azoulay, Training for Art, 31, 152–15357 Ofrat himself emphasizes the exclusion of “Jewish” artists.

See his No New Nation [catalogue: Zman Le-Omanut; in Hebrew], curator Gideon Ofrat (Tel Aviv, 2004), 4. He also distinguishes between the various trends in other exhibitions he curated (No New Nation vs. Thou Shalt Make), 4.

58 Gideon Ofrat, “Is Right-wing Art Possible in Israel?” [ in Hebrew], New Directions 9 (2003): 139–150 ; Gideon Ofrat, “Are We Witnessing an Artistic ‘Cultural Revolution’ among Observant Israelis?” [in Hebrew], New Directions 17 (2008): 139–150. Both essays have recently been reprinted in Ofrat, Washington Crossing the Jordan [in Hebrew], 191–201, 202–211.

59 Ofrat, Washington Crossing the Jordan, 202–211.60 Ibid., 210.

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local art discourse . . . will reject the spirit of collective values in the industrious effort to found a new Jewish-Israeli art . . . too value-laden for a field . . . that cannot tolerate a value-based approach.”61 As for artistic renewal in religious circles, Ofrat states: “This trend is necessarily permeated with the sense of its own value and the aspiration (at times pathetic) of setting up alternatives to the hegemony of secular culture.”62

Furthermore, most earlier historiographers of Israeli art began their discussions of Israeli art with the opening of the Bezalel Art Academy in 1906, thereby detracting from the role of the more remote past as an influence on contemporary Israeli culture. Ofrat, on the other hand, begins his discussion with the traditional artists of the Old Yishuv in Palestine.63 However, he often undervalues their work, which is, according to him, “functional religious art, without any personal expression . . . a-temporal, and totally unaware of art history.”64

In conclusion, it may be claimed that not only does hegemonic discourse tend to exclude “Jewish”, neoconservative, observant, and other groups (right-wing, Oriental, and so forth) by a combination of hybridization and extensive purification; it also actu-ally appropriates Jewish-religious content for its own needs and those of the elite it represents. While hybridization is explicitly evident, purification remains implicit.

Novelist and essayist A. B. Yehoshua offers an interesting insight into the realm of Israeli fiction, and his observation holds true for our topic too. According to Yehoshua, literary circles during the 1948 War of Independence (or the “Nakba” in Palestinian terms) and through the 1950s and 60s were as a rule not hostile toward Judaism or obser-vant Jews. The incorporation of religious representations into literature was made possible precisely because the world of observant Judaism was seen to be in decline and on the verge of disappearing,

hence non-threatening to mainstream secular Israel.65 It thus emerges that the rupture with tradi-tion, and the self-confidence deriving from the rise of local secularism, is precisely what enabled writers to include traditional elements. Inclusion of these elements entered modern secular discourse only when the field grew secure in its status as an unchal-lenged secular discipline.

5. Art Under the kippa

“Otherness” has long since become a much-discussed topic in the world of art, with a variety of backgrounds now warmly accepted in mainstream discourse.66 To illustrate: in the past decades, Palestinian artists have become an integral part of the discourse of Israeli art. It is important to note that the recognition and acceptance of Palestinian artists into Israeli art discourse results not only from multicultural trends, but also (and possibly for the most part) due to their correspondence with the leftist agenda, which dominates the discourse. This is not the case in regard to the religious stream in Israeli art, which remains excluded and marginal-ized. This can be attributed to the processes of hybridization and purification underlying Israeli art discourse, as discussed above, as well as to the link-age habitually made between being observant and being right wing; right-wing political views are also customarily excluded from mainstream discourse, as will be discussed shortly.67 Let us note, incidentally, that the link between right-wing politics and religious Zionism in Israel, albeit an accepted generalization, is far from accurate, at least in respect to women visual artists in religious circles. I have discussed elsewhere the work of some Israeli religious women artists (Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov, Nechama Golan, and Orit Freilich). Despite being openly religious and firmly situated in an observant milieu, their

61 Ibid., 209.62 Ibid.63 See, for instance, The Story of Art in Israel from Bezalel in 1906

to the Present [in Hebrew], ed. Benjamin Tammuz (Tel Aviv: Modan, 1980), 12. See too Shalom Sabar, “The Binding of Isaac in the Works of Moshe Mizrahi, Pioneer of Popular Art in Eretz Israel” [in Hebrew], in Tribute to Menahem: Essays in Honour of Rabbi Menahem Hacohen, ed. Hana Amit, Aviad Hacohen, and Haim Be’er ( Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007), 20.

64 See Gideon Ofrat, Washington Crossing the Jordan, 12. By contrast, Shalom Sabar has noted the influence of Ashkenazi art on the work of Moshe Mizrahi (an early artist in Eretz Israel,

even prior to the opening of the Bezalel Art Academy) and the political connection between his paintings and events in Eretz Israel at the time; see Sabar, “The Binding of Isaac,” 20.

65 A. B. Yehoshua, Literature of the 1948 Generation: Identity Card [in Hebrew] (Or Yehuda: Dvir, 1998), 82–85.

66 At the same time, it should be noted that most artists shown in the new permanent exhibition at the Israel Museum’s Israeli Art gallery (2010, curators: Yigal Zalmona and Amitai Mendelson) are Jewish, Ashkenazi, secular men. See Yonatan Amir, “A Canon in Three Voices,” Programma 2 (Spring 2010): 140–147.

67 See my “Others—Forbidden” [in Hebrew], Eretz Aheret 57 ( June–July 2010): 20–26.

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work issues a call for dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian cultures. They have found a way to include the Other in their traditional worldview, and apply a profound humanistic sensitivity to their treatment of the Jewish-Muslim encounter.68

To return to our main discussion, the expelling of the religious artist is not only a result of the processes of hybridization and purification but also due to the religious world itself. The religious world has cut itself off from the art discourse as part of the prevailing dichotomy of art/religion. In addition to the paucity of artistic production, the shortage of art scholars, critics, and theoreticians who could attribute meaning to the production that does exist, as works of art per se, further deepens the exclusion of religious art from Israeli discourse. As Bourdieu has claimed, the position of art in the artistic hier-archy is not necessarily contingent upon any inherent value of the object itself but rather on the quality of the discourse surrounding it and accord-ing it a superior place in the hierarchy to that of other objects.69 Israeli religious circles have unwisely neglected to create an art-critical field that would be sophisticated enough to compete with other fields of power in the internal hierarchy of the local art establishment.

At the same time, it must be emphasized that the Israeli art establishment clearly demarcates the boundaries separating itself from the domain of religion, in an act of purification designed to present secular art as modern, enlightened, and progressive. The argument ensuing from this position is that no worthwhile contemporary art can be created from within a neo-traditional worldview. However, this claim is based largely upon generalizations, and fails to adequately explain the increasingly central place that artistic creation is occupying in Jewish religious circles.

Local art-critical discussion too, following the view that modern art was founded upon secular principles, generally draws a sharp distinction between itself and the world of religion and faith. The assumption that the two are completely distinct from each other stems primarily from the fact that the disciplines of art and museology are modern, secular constructs based upon a clear differentiation between art and craft. This division in effect set art up as a differentiated field of high culture. In antiq-uity, and in Europe in the Middle Ages, no clear distinction was made between art and craft. Only in the early seventeenth century can we speak, sociologically, of the emergence of art as high cul-ture, taught as part of the humanities. The process itself began already during the Italian Renaissance and accelerated during the modern era. Finally, nineteenth-century modernity created the distinc-tion, based on the concept of “art for art’s sake.”70 Art and religion thus became rivals, with art often perceived as the modern antithesis to religion—indeed, its usurper.71 Moreover, the sublime—religious, theological, metaphysical, and mystical—became antithetical to the aesthetic and formal sublime of art, in contradistinction to art in premodernity.

The emergent binary opposition of art and religion was further decisively influenced by the far-reaching perceptual changes accompanying the advent of modernity, as a result of the rise of the new means of reduplication and the loss of the “aura” of the original, in Walter Benjamin’s analysis. Benjamin perceived a shift between two fundamental values in the conceptualization of the work of art: ritual value and exhibition value. In premodernity, the role of art in religious and magical ritual made for its low exhibition value, its aura not being con-tingent upon its exhibition to the public. Modern reduplication techniques subsequently freed art

68 See David Sperber, “Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Art of Three Israeli Religious Women” [in Hebrew], http://maarav.org.il/2009/05/24/sperber28409.

69 See the works of Bourdieu cited above in n. 23; Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?

70 See Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity vs. Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (1982): 3–14.

71 See Howes Graham, The Art of the Sacred: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 130–167; see also Franke, “The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche”; Arthurs and Wallach, Crossroads, 1–30, 31–70; Samuel Laeuchli, Religion and Art in Conflict: Introduction to a Cross-disciplinary Task (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1961), 8. Sources

on this topic can be found in Marcus B. Burke, “Why Art Needs Religion, Why Religion Needs the Arts,” in Reluctant Partners, 168 nn. 1–2. Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), emphasizes that Jewish thinkers did not deny visual imagery, but neither did they give in to modern constructs of art as a religion in its own right. See also Daniel Morris, “Reimagining the ‘Artless Jew’: A Commentary on Recent Interventions in Jewish Art History,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 140–145; Margaret Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

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from ritual, producing exhibition values whose essence is completely detached from religion.72 According to Benjamin, modern techniques of reproduction severed the object from the domain of tradition, undermined the “aura” of the religious or secular original, and made it contemporary with the gaze of the viewer.73 Likewise, Roland Barthes regarded photography as superseding religious ritual; he considered “the pictorial” to be “contemporary with the cessation of ritual.”74

Hans Belting aptly articulated the difference between art and image. According to Belting, the concept of art only came into being after the Reformation, when visual imagery lost its immediate sacred context. Once the icon was stripped of its spiritual context and treated merely as a painting, its status changed radically. The work of art was now analyzed from an aesthetic, not religious, per-spective, and not to determine its authenticity, as had been the case previously.75 The manner in which the long-standing traditional interconnection between art and religion was dissolved, and the consequent intuitive modernist linking of art with secularism was instituted, was the product of art theoretical constructs, and was accompanied by the accumulation of symbolic, social, and political capital serving political domination.76 In the Israeli context, the field distinguishes between tradition-affirming art and tradition-desecrating art. Affirmationists are adored, desecrationists are abhorred. The field thus situates itself as humanis-tic and progressive—that is, according to mainstream views, as secular. This situation has a political expres-sion: it is habitually claimed that the European field of modern art is founded on the concept of the avant-garde, which linked left-wing politics and values to art. Today, these same principles serve to

exclude right-wing Israeli artists and those with an explicitly Zionist agenda. Sergio Edelsztein, the most outstanding curator in the field of video art in Israel, was quoted as having stated, “It is not for nothing that in museums there are not many who hold right-wing views. . . . Art stems from a humanistic outlook, which requires a corresponding political stand.”77

In fact, Dana Arieli-Horowitz has shown that the link between avant-garde art and the political left was never all that unequivocal.78 A heated debate over this issue was sparked by a long article by the curator Gideon Ofrat, entitled “Is Right-wing Art Possible in Israel?” In the article, Ofrat claimed that the very combination between right-wing politics and art is an oxymoron. Based on the perception of the necessary ties between art and avant-garde, left-wing politics, Ofrat claimed that no good art could possibly emerge from Israeli right-wing circles. The article concludes with the following devastating state-ment: “Right-wing millionaires can fund organs like Tchelet (Azure) and centers like Shalem to promote right-wing thinking. However, no amount of money or initiative will ever produce a good right-wing artist.”79 In contradistinction to left-wing, post-Zionist art, perceived in criticism and art discourse as humanistic expression and sublime avant-garde, the Other branch of art is for the most part deni-grated as reactionary, simplistic, folkloristic, and inferior.

In the same vein, the researcher Dror Eydar speaks of “the politicization of the gaze.” Eydar draws upon an approach claiming that aesthetic and philosophical debates usually have manifestly polit-ical roots, which construct the way the gaze is directed toward works of art.80 He points to pro-cesses of “exclusion” on the one hand (of right-wing artists and others), and of “adoration” on the other

72 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (1936; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

73 Ibid.74 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New

York: Hill and Wang, 1981).75 Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach

to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 302–303, 470–472. See also the discussion in Worley Taylor, “Reparations and Conversations: A Future for Contemporary Art Theo-logical Reflection,” accessed October 1, 2010, http://thesocietyforcriticalimagination.wordpress.com/2007/09/18/rep-arations-and-conversations-mr-taylor-worley-91807/.

76 The discussion employs the terms coined by Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, such as “cultural capital,” “symbolic capital,” “field,” etc. Bourdieu posits that each field

defines itself inter alia by political power in negotiating for objects and interests. See, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–258.

77 Daniel Silberberg, “Not for Nothing Are There No Right-wingers in Museums” [in Hebrew], Walla, “Culture,” August 24, 2010, http://e.walla.co.il/?w=/265/1725269.

78 Dana Arieli-Horowitz, Creators and Dictators: Avant-garde and Mobilized Art in Totalitarian Regimes [ in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Haim Rubin Tel Aviv University Press, 2008).

79 Ofrat, Washington Crossing the Jordan, 201.80 See Dror Eydar, “Guards at the Door: On ’Exclusion’ and

Politicization of the Aesthetic in Israeli Art Discourse” [in Hebrew], Protocols: History and Theory 10 (2008), http://bezalel.secured.co.il/zope/home/he/1220527665.

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(of secular leftist art) governing local art discourse. In Israel, he claims, excellence is silenced when it comes from the political rival (i.e., right-wing poli-tics), while inferior, weak artists are concurrently empowered when they belong to the “right” (i.e., left-wing post-Zionist) camp. Moreover, Eydar points out that judging art in Israel is governed by binary concepts of religious-secular, right-left, and so forth. This judgment employs aesthetic values to confirm the superiority of one camp over the other.

To return to Ofrat, in his essay “Is There a ‘Cultural Revolution’ among National-religious Artists?,”81 which treats artists wearing the crocheted kippa, he moves from empirical observations on the backwardness of religious art to black-and-white generalizations, claiming:

Why shouldn’t we acknowledge the fact that the new Jewish art was born the moment the kippa was removed? . . . I have no interest in calling for removal of the kippa in practice—merely for its conceptual removal, albeit temporary and partial—the moment one walks into the studio. As if to say: “Take your kippa off your head, for the ground where you are standing is—not holy!”82

But Ofrat’s assumption—that the new Jewish art was born of “removing the kippa”—is faulty, and fails to accurately account for the renewal of mod-ern Jewish art. Early Jewish modernists in Europe worked in an atmosphere of emancipation, between the old world of tradition and the new opportunities offered by modernity. Secularism as such did not characterize either them or their work.83

It should be noted that Ofrat’s observations on observant Jewish society—whose art he set out to investigate—evince a pronounced lack of familiarity on his part with his object of study. Ofrat himself is aware that this accusation may be leveled at him.84 Ofrat directs a barb at observant society: “We do have, of course, a few ultra-Orthodox artists: in

Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, and other parts of (Greater) Israel.”85 The fact is, however, that the ultra-Orthodox do not typically live beyond the Green Line, and Greater Israel is a term taken from the repertoire of Zionist religious messianism, not that of the ultra-Orthodox. Furthermore, Ofrat mentions the ban on watching television as typical of national-religious Jews,86 although in fact this behavior is not typical of modern Orthodox circles in Israel. Ofrat also speaks of the Emuna and Talpiot colleges—both are women’s art teachers’ colleges—as “training young men and women in the visual arts.”87 Finally, he is prone to generalizations—for instance, his claim that observant Jews are not consumers of art, offer-ing in explanation that “paintings by Raffi Lavie, Moshe Gershuni, etc., will not be found hanging on the wall of a religious Jewish home.”88 On this point, it is worthwhile citing Adam Baruch’s account of growing up in a religious Zionist home: “As a boy, I grew up on Raffi Lavie too.”89

Ofrat’s argument is based on the perception of modern art as necessarily avant-garde. He adopts the modernist-purist view that religion, as the oppo-site of secularism, suffers from an inherent lack. Indeed, key cultural figures do often claim, based on similar assumptions, that no worthwhile religious artistic creativity is possible today. The author Yoram Kaniuk, for instance, has claimed that no truly good contemporary poetry can emerge from observant Jewish circles, since poetry requires authentic expres-sion of experience attained through inner freedom, whereas any expression of religious content will always be biased and artificial.90 Similarly, Gilad Meltzer, head of the theoretical studies program at the Beit Berl College School of Art (“Ha’midrasha”), recently stated that in his view, “the question is not why right-wing and religious artists are not accepted by the establishment and its discourse, but why — for the most part — they produce inferior art.”91 This view is frequently found in hegemonic writing, often

81 Ofrat, Washington Crossing the Jordan, 208.82 Ibid. 83 See, for instance, Andreas Gotzmann, “Traditional Jewish

Life Revived: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s Vision of Modern Jewry,” in Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th-Century Art, ed. Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk (Cologne: Wienand, 1999), 132–250.

84 Ofrat, Washington Crossing the Jordan, 202. 85 Ibid., 203.86 Ibid., 203.87 Ibid., 207.

88 Ibid., 208.89 Adam Baruch, How Are Things at Home, 189, 191. Baruch

regards the tendency that Ofrat attributes to religious circles—namely, to compartmentalize art—as typical of Israeli society in general; see ibid., 218–219.

90 A reference to the conversation appears in Dov Berkoviz, “Artistic Creation and Avodat Hashem” [in Hebrew], Tsohar 34 (2009): 67.

91 Gilad Meltzer, “Life in Chromo: Where are the Margins?” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, Literary Supplement, May 9, 2010.

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accompanied by a tendency to attribute to canonical, secular creators and viewers an over-generous dose of critical inquisitiveness and sophistication, while at the same time belittling the artistic creation of the religious Other as mere affirmation of traditional Jewish forms.

Such statements are often based on theoretical distinctions that have become the bon ton, applied as undeniable truth. Moreover, insofar as religious Jews are categorized as the Other of Israeli society, they are denied an independent voice. Indeed, the demonization of the observant Jew often utilizes stereotypical Jewish attributes. It is therefore not surprising that the mainstream field of art excludes religious artists.92 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has recently traced the development of this rupture in a study of critical writ-ing against an exhibition by Yosef-Joseph Dadoune at the Petah Tikva Museum in 2008 (curator:

Dorit Gur-Arye). Dadoune showed Sion: A Cinematic Trilogy—a series of video art replete with sensual-ity and emotion. The character of Zion, played by Ronit Alkabetz, is seen walking around the Louvre in Paris, as she (inter alia) reads the Bible. This portrayal offers a different cultural reading, one emphasizing the peripheral and ritual aspects by using the eternal dimension as both a subver-sive and a poetic element (Fig. 11).93 The strange actions by the character echo elements in the work of German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) who planned, after World War II, to launch a new therapeutic artistic language based on a spiritual-shamanistic ethos. Raz-Krakotzkin claimed that the violent reaction of the critics evinced “an expression of deep anxiety, culminating in the fierce attack of a prominent critic.”94 This anxiety derives from, among other sources, the threat posed by the exhibition’s challenge to the accepted binary

Fig. 11. Yosef-Joseph Dadoune, Sion, 2003–2007, photograph, 30 × 60 cm. Courtesy Arnold Druck, Jerusalem.

92 See Eydar, “Guards at the Door.” 93 On the connection between the art of Beuys and Israeli

art, see Kobi Ben-Meir, “Joseph Beuys as Healing Medium in 1970’s Israeli Art.”

94 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Zion: Between Redemption of the Shekhinah and the Unraveling of Hagar” [in Hebrew and English], Hakivun Mizrakh (East-Word) 17 (Winter 2008–2009): 81.

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oppositions of religiosity-secularism, Jewish-Arab, religion-art.

Upon closer observation, the world of religious art proves much more complex than such criticisms assume.95 Certainly, conservative approaches are to be found there, backed by rabbinical authority (typically in the art departments of religious col-leges), but it is equally true that some artists—women, for the most part—are free of any rabbinical influ-ence and often train an inquisitive and critical eye on their multifaceted world.96 Such artists are gener-ally affiliated with the neotraditional or postmodern traditional streams, and their work fairly consistently fits into the post-secular discourse that “succeeds in capturing complex hybrids of religion and secular-ism, without exchanging one for the other.”97 Indeed, accepted social distinctions, notably the binary opposition religious-secular, do not always obtain in one’s personal identity. Many young artists who studied in the religious education system live in a world that draws upon Jewish tradition or quotes it. Furthermore, the new “formerly religious” trend—people who grow up observant and then ostensibly break ties with religious Judaism, yet without really making a clean break, a phenomenon that has been on the rise in recent years—also produces a new kind of art, based on partial affinity, not total rejection.98

We are also witnessing a recent reawakening among rabbis in the margins of the modern Ortho-dox stream, who are articulating a historic revision

of traditional rabbinical considerations of the visual arts. In a conference entitled “Belief in Creation: The Arts Conference of Religious Education” (2008), the rabbis heading yeshivot in Israel set forth a broad foundation for incorporating visual art into their curricula.99 Likewise, Rabbi Haim Brovender has suggested that those students for whom Torah study is not spiritually inspiring might set the books aside and choose art as a parallel track.100 In these views, artistic creativity is directed at profound introspec-tion; therefore, the question of the limits of art need not arise at all. The pedagogical outlook of these rabbis is based on educating to “seek” and on empha-sizing life’s complexities. They are attentive to the fact that contemporary art engages not only with the beautiful and pure, but also with the entire spectrum of human experience. These rabbis are challenging the old distinction, both cultural and rabbinic, between high and low culture and between art and reality, and are encouraging their followers to close up the gap between Jewish learning as practiced in yeshivot and academies and a modern lifestyle (the Internet, music, and so forth). For these rabbis, art is religious worship, a place of profound experience. The traditional dichotomy of artists versus rabbis is replaced here by a fruitful reciprocal exchange.101

Contrary to an oft-heard claim made in art-critical circles, namely that religion by its very nature precludes any possibility of critical thinking and artistic freedom, we find that biblical and midrashic

95 Religious creativity is on the rise. We need mention only the journals Dimuy and Mashiv Ha-Ruah; the Ma’aleh School of Television, Film, and the Arts; Shuli Rand, musician and actor; the Ta’ir drama group; the men’s theatre-dance school Kol Atzmotai Tomarna; Aspaklarya theatre; art study tracks at religious teachers’ colleges; the yeshiva for musicians; and tracks for art, literature, dance, and music in women’s and men’s schools, colleges, and yeshivot. It is also worth noting the new trend of becoming observant while continuing to produce excellent artistic work; examples of this are singers Shuli Rand and Evyatar Banai. This was not the common case in the past—for example, Uri Zohar and Pupik Arnon.

96 For a critique of rabbinical responsa on art and art studies at religious teachers’ colleges, see David Sperber, “ ‘Guards of the City Walls’—Art, Rabbis, and Trends in Religious Education” [in Hebrew], Tav+ 11 (Summer 2008): 81–88. It should be noted that sociology now avoids automatic identification of new religious movements with an anti-modernist stance. See Lorene L. Dawson, “Anti-Modernism, Modernism and Postmodernism: Struggling with the Cultural Significance of New Religious Movements,” Sociology of Religion 59, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 131–156.

97 Yehuda Shenhav, “Is There Such a Thing as Secular Jewish Culture.”

98 Likewise, the opposition religious/secular is not applicable

to Arab Judaism, as has been widely noted.99 A roundtable session was held at the conference, with the

participation of the following rabbis: Yuval Sherlo, Dov Berkowitz, Ronen Ben David, Motti Hershkopp, Yehoshua Weitzman, and Benny Kalmanzon.

100 See Haim Brovender, “Towards Ahavat Hashem: Art and the Religious Experience,” in Wisdom From All My Teachers: Challenges and Initiatives in Contemporary Torah Education, ed. Jeffrey Saks and Susan Handelman ( Jerusalem: ATID & Urim Publications, 2003), 49–73.

101 See also Yuval Sherlo, “Thoughts on Culture and Art” [in Hebrew], in Memorial Volume in Honor of Zevulun Hammer ( Jerusalem: Ministry of Education/ Department of Religious Education, 1999), 407–424; Yuval Sherlo, “Portrait of the Religious Artist: Introduction and Curriculum Draft” [in Hebrew], accessed October 1, 2010, http://www.daat.ac.il/DAAT/kitveyet/taleley/dmuto-2.htm. Let us mention, too, that in recent years there has developed in Orthodox (and even ultra-Orthodox) circles a mass of responsa literature dealing with matters of art. Indeed, the bulk of this literature is extremely conservative; however, its actual appearance indicates that the engagement with the arts in Israeli Orthodox society has broadened. On this subject see Sperber, “Guards of the City Walls,” 84–86.

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writings, followed by contemporary modern Orthodox thinkers, do actually often focus on the tension between norms and deviation from them.102 This critical approach has accompanied Judaism at least since the midrash telling of Abraham the patriarch smashing the idols. In Jewish tradition, especially in midrashic literature, we often find representations of “sacrilege” and of figures hurling accusations at God. Critical awareness of this type was manifested in dif-ferent periods and genres: from biblical descriptions of Abraham bargaining with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:16–33), through observations on the part of midrashic sages, for example, that Hannah “hurled accusations at the heavens” (Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 31b), to Hasidic thought and post-Holocaust Jewish theology.103

Moreover, a post-secular perspective that succeeds in capturing complex intertwinings of religion and secularism is in tune with the Oriental observant ambience that previously prevailed in Israel, which did not exhibit the strict distinction between religiosity and secularism upheld by Ashkenazi European Jewry.104 As mentioned, new combinations have recently appeared in postmodern Orthodoxy, too, for exam-ple in the writings of the late Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg in the tradition of Rabbi Nahman of Breslau, asking questions with no answers, offering a relativism that is open to ins-piration, and observing a “soft religion.” Rabbi Rosenberg’s vision held that “the man of faith will have to adopt a rationalist, skeptical view that will not be detrimental to his faith, and the other side will have to become accustomed to regarding the man of faith not as a primitive but as offering a real alternative for our existence in the world.”105 Recently, a new label has been suggested for this old-new type: “the seculo-religious Jew,” a hybrid creature in whom “religious eros” and rational criticism are inextricably intertwined.106

102 David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992). For an example of the oft-heard claim, see Gideon Ofrat: “How can any art whatsoever ever compete with the name of God? Would not any believer in God forsake his own self and prefer to devote his life to Torah and to our Creator?” Ofrat, Washington Crossing the Jordan, 201.

103 Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Daniel J. Lasker, “Blasphemy: Jewish Concept,” Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 2 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005), 268–271.

104 See Yehuda Shenhav, “Is There Such a Thing as Secular Jewish Culture”; idem, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2006); Gil Nidjar, The Jew, the Arab (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Reuven Snir, “From al-Samaw’al to Ibn al-Samaw’al: Modern Arab-Jewish Culture, Its Historical Background and Current Demise,” Acta Orientalia (Oslo) 67 (2006): 19–79.

105 Shimon G. Rosenberg, Broken Vessels: Torah and Religious Zionism in the Postmodern Age [in Hebrew] (Efrat Yeshiva, 2004), 13–28, 45–55.

106 Moshe Meir, “ ‘From the Four Corners’ (Ezek. 37): A Response to Baruch Kahana” [in Hebrew], Akdamot 21 (2008): 184–187.

107 This distinction was raised in a different context by Nadav Berman, “Traditionalism: Challenge or Threat?” [in Hebrew], De’ot 44 (October 2009): 38–40.

Accordingly, a close look at the work of many religious artists (to mention just a few: Nechama Golan, Andi Arnovitz, Chanah Goldberg, Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov, Orit Freilich, Orit Adar Bachar, Hagit Molgan, Raya Bruckenthal, Udi Charka, Hadassah Goldvicht, and Ronen Siman-Tov) often reveals a hybrid, multiple worldview of quest and complexity, with the underlying assump-tion that sacred and nonsacred, religion and secularism, traditional continuity versus discontinu-ity, are all different facets of the person, the human being, behind the work of art (Figs. 12–15).

Religious artistic renewal differs from hegemonic secular local art in the blurring, in the religious scene, of those time-honored dichotomies of freedom and provocation versus the unquestioning reaffirmation of traditional religious values. To put it differently, the religious scene is challenging the opposition between doing art “with a kippa” and doing art without one. It seems that the essential difference between these two modes can be related to perspec-tives on history’s dialogue with secularism. This dialogue ranges along the two axes of similarity and difference. Contemporary artistic production in the religious milieu is as vibrant and subversive as desecrationist treatment of Jewish themes is in canonical Israeli art. On the other hand, whereas the secular mainstream focuses on the validity of the tradition, thereby tending toward a defiant stance, the focus among the newly active observant artists is often deflected to the formation of the tradition, not just its validity.107

Thus, the renewal in religious Jewish art creates a world of imagery that can be used to subject Judaism to a critical but loving examination. This kind of affinity can therefore challenge hegemonic discourse, which has adopted modernistic approaches according to which art is perceived solely as a field “having nothing to do with religion.”

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Fig. 12. Nechama Golan, Untitled, 2002, installation: photograph of the Talmud tractate Kiddushim, folio 1a, glue, 30 × 12 × 18 cm. Collection of the artist.

Fig. 13. Raya Brukental, Ariel Zilber, Transformation, 2009, pencil on paper, 48 × 60 cm. Collection of the artist.

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Fig. 15. Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov, Prayer Rug 3, 2003, oil on canvas, 125 × 80 cm. Collection of the artist.

Fig. 14. Andi Arnovitz, Vest of Prayers, 2009, Japanese paper, thread, found prayerbook pages, 82 × 56 cm. Collection of the artist.

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