This course investigates the ways in which Jews have used visual culture to express religious ideas and address political circumstances, primarily in the pre- modern era. It interrogates the ideas of creation and creativity, the permissibility or impermissibility of the image in Judaism, the authorship of “Jewish” visual culture and whether/why this matters, the construction of individual and communal Jewish identity through art, architecture, and texts, and relations— collusions as well as collisions— between Jews and non-Jews as they play out in the realm of visual and material culture.
- Instructor: Marc Epstein