Gail Levin

BEYOND THE PALE: Jewish identity, radical politics and feminist art in the United States

Historians have not yet recognized how the cultural legacy of East European Jews helped change the status of women artists in the United States. Immigrant Jewish women in general reacted to institutionalized patriarchy with a desire for social change and the will to act to that end. Jewish women who were artists had professional reasons to embrace feminism, given womens virtual exclusion from professional notice. This article focuses on two pioneering feminist artists — Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro — and demonstrates the importance of their Jewish heritage, showing how and why they set in motion important changes in the tumultuous 1970s that continue to resonate in the art world today. An unusually large number of American feminist artists of the 1970s were Jewish. Their heritage resembles that of the Jewish feminist activist Betty Friedan, whose father emigrated from Eastern Europe. Once we examine the linked roles played by Jewish identity and leftist politics in the formation of the feminist art movement in the United States, it becomes evident that activism in the community of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the values that they passed on to the next generations made a significant contribution to the success of this movement.

JAPANESE CULTURAL INFLUENCE IN AMERICA: THE BOSTON-NEW YORK EXCHANGE

impact of Japanese art on American culture came to New York by way of Boston, where Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), a passionate collector and promoter of Japanese tradi tional arts, served from 1890 to 1895 as the first curator of the Japanese department of the Museum of Fine Arts. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, of Catalan ethnicity, Fenol losa graduated from Harvard before leaving for Japan in 1878 to teach political science and philosophy at Tokyo University at the invitation of the Meiji government. Despite the usual assumption that American knowl edge of Japanese art in this period originated in Boston, some publication and exhibition projects featuring Japanese art and culture actually began in New York and only then traveled to Fenollosa in Boston. I will doc

Jewish American Artists: whom does that include?

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