Fragment of a Synagogue Screen with Menorah, 6th-7th century

The Synagogue at Ashkelon
During the Byzantine period, the synagogue was constructed to promote an atmosphere of sanctity and was often referred to as "the holy place." It featured wall inscriptions and intricately carved reliefs as well as a chancel screen. An innovation adopted from Christian contexts and seen in many synagogues from this period, the screen separated the Holy Ark housing the Torah scrolls, the most sacred part of the synagogue, from the rest of the hall. Fragments of the Ashkelon Synagogue were discovered during the nineteenth century, though no complete structure has ever been excavated.
Each side of this intricately carved relief from the synagogue’s chancel screen features a menorah alongside guilloches containing rosettes. The menorah is flanked by a shofar (ram’s horn), a lulav (palm frond), and an ethrog (citron), which often appear in the decoration of Byzantine synagogues.

The Mishneh Torah

The Mishneh Torah is the magnum opus of Moses Maimonides, the renowned medieval philosopher. This remarkable text consolidates Jewish law into a systematic, comprehensive and accessible anthology, still consulted by rabbis and scholars today.

This manuscript copy of the Mishneh Torah is one of the most sumptuous ever made. Large illuminations illustrating aspects of the law preface different sections of the book. Law books rarely benefitted from such lavish decoration. With no iconographic precedent to guide him, the painter looked to the world around him. Thus the manuscript provides an opulent guide to contemporary costume, buildings, and customs. With its burnished gold letters and inventive narrative scenes, it attests to the refined aesthetic sensibility of the elite members of Italy’s Jewish community.

Hostages

Noa Argamani, Carmel Gat, Agam Berger

New collage prints

In the middle of the war, I needed a break from everything related to it—a moment to rest. The news about the pope selling out the Jews was a heavy blow. My response was denial—or positivity, if you prefer to call it that. I choose what defines me, not the pope. With all due respect, I decide what I’m about: color, shape, jokes, and flowers. I feel that collage can be deeply serious, too, but for now, it was simply fun.

David Bowie’s list of 100 favorite books

I came across this list, and I absolutely loved it.

It might take me a while to get everything linked, but I’m definitely assigning myself this homework!

Its fun to mark them as you go. I am adding a printable version of the list for you to download:

Download

  1. Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse

  2. Room at the Top – John Braine

  3. On Having No Head – Douglas Harding

  4. Kafka Was the Rage – Anatole Broyard

  5. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

  6. City of Night – John Rechy

  7. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz

  8. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

  9. Iliad – Homer (translated by E.V. Rieu)

  10. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

  11. Tadanori Yokoo – Tadanori Yokoo

  12. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin

  13. Inside the Whale and Other Essays – George Orwell

  14. Mr. Norris Changes Trains – Christopher Isherwood

  15. Halls Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art – James A. Hall

  16. David Bomberg – Richard Cork

  17. Blast – Edited by Wyndham Lewis

  18. Passing – Nella Larsen

  19. Beyond the Brillo Box – Arthur C. Danto

  20. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes

  21. In Bluebeard’s Castle – George Steiner

  22. Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd

  23. The Divided Self – R.D. Laing

  24. The Stranger – Albert Camus

  25. Infants of the Spring – Wallace Thurman

  26. The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf

  27. The Songlines – Bruce Chatwin

  28. Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

  29. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

  30. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark

  31. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

  32. Herzog – Saul Bellow

  33. Puckoon – Spike Milligan

  34. Black Boy – Richard Wright

  35. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

  36. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea – Yukio Mishima

  37. Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler

  38. The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot

  39. McTeague – Frank Norris

  40. Money – Martin Amis

  41. The Outsider – Colin Wilson

  42. Strange People – Frank Edwards

  43. English Journey – J.B. Priestley

  44. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

  45. The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West

  46. 1984 – George Orwell

  47. Animal Farm – George Orwell

  48. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

  49. The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin

  50. A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn

  51. The Age of American Unreason – Susan Jacoby

  52. Metropolitan Life – Fran Lebowitz

  53. The Coast of Utopia – Tom Stoppard

  54. The Bridge – Hart Crane

  55. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

  56. The Portable Dorothy Parker – Dorothy Parker

  57. The Trial – Franz Kafka

  58. All the Emperor’s Horses – David Kidd

  59. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea – Yukio Mishima

  60. Tales of Beatnik Glory – Ed Sanders

  61. Nowhere to Run – Gerri Hirshey

  62. Before the Deluge – Otto Friedrich

  63. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson – Camille Paglia

  64. The American Way of Death – Jessica Mitford

  65. Teenage – Jon Savage

  66. Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh

  67. The Hidden Persuaders – Vance Packard

  68. The Trial of Henry Kissinger – Christopher Hitchens

  69. Maldoror – Comte de Lautréamont

  70. On the Road – Jack Kerouac

  71. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – Lawrence Weschler

  72. Zanoni – Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  73. Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual – Eliphas Lévi

  74. The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels

  75. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  76. Inferno – Dante Alighieri

  77. A Grave for a Dolphin – Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  78. The Insult – Rupert Thomson

  79. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

  80. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters

  81. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

  82. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz – F. Scott Fitzgerald

  83. Lady into Fox – David Garnett

  84. Orlando – Virginia Woolf

  85. Seven Years in Tibet – Heinrich Harrer

  86. The Spirit of Man – Robert Byron

  87. The Man Who Fell to Earth – Walter Tevis

  88. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

  89. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

  90. Hunger – Knut Hamsun

  91. A Night to Remember – Walter Lord

  92. The Outsider – Albert Camus

  93. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka

  94. We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

  95. A People's Tragedy – Orlando Figes

  96. The Story of Art – E.H. Gombrich

  97. Lives of the Great Composers – Harold C. Schonberg

  98. The Origin of the Species – Charles Darwin

  99. A Season in Hell – Arthur Rimbaud

  100. Interviews With Francis Bacon – David Sylvester