As an immigrant artist of Jewish background, who borrowed freely from Christology, Jewish, mystical, and modernist motifs, David Aronson has been an equally acclaimed controversial figure in the Boston Expressionist school and beyond. Defying all clear categorization, his highly evocative art moves precariously between the realms of the religious the secular, between Judaism and humanism, tradition and modernity. This book includes rich reproductions of Aronson's works done in encaustic, pastel, coal and bronze. It also contains Aronson's 1967 lecture Real and Unreal: The Double Nature of...

Inventing New Beginnings is the first book-length study to examine the conceptual underpinnings of the -Jewish Renaissance, - or -return- to Judaism, that captured much of German-speaking Jewry between 1890 and 1938. The book addresses two very fundamental, yet hitherto strangely understated, questions: What did the term -renaissance- actually mean to the intellectuals and ideologues of the -Jewish Renaissance, - and how did this understanding relate to wider currents in European intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? It also addresses the...

Dreaming of Michelangelo is the first book-length study to explore the intellectual and cultural affinities between modern Judaism and the life and work of Michelangelo Buonarroti. It argues that Jewish intellectuals found themselves in the image of Michelangelo as an -unrequited lover- whose work expressed loneliness and a longing for humanity's response. The modern Jewish imagination thus became consciously idolatrous. Writers brought to life--literally--Michelangelo's sculptures, seeing in them their own worldly and emotional struggles. The Moses statue in particular became an...