Continuing its distinguished tradition of focusing on central political, sociological, and cultural issues of Jewish life in the last century, Volume XXVI of the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry examines the visual revolution that has overtaken Jewish cultural life in the twentieth century onwards, with special attention given to the evolution of Jewish museums. Bringing together leading curators and scholars, Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History treats various forms of Jewish representation in museums in Europe and the United States before the Second World War and inquires into the nature and proliferation of Jewish museums following the Holocaust and the fall of Communism in Western and Eastern Europe. In addition, a pair of essays dedicated to six exhibitions that took place in Israel in 2008 to mark six decades of Israeli art raises significant issues on the relationship between art and gender, and art and politics. An introductory essay highlights the dramatic transformation in the appreciation of the visual in Jewish culture. The scope of the symposium offers one of the first scholarly attempts to treat this theme in several countries.
Also featured in this volume are a provocative essay on the nature of antisemitism in twentieth-century English society; review essays on Jewish fundamentalism and recent works on the subject of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territories; and reviews of new titles in Jewish Studies..

In recent years, music videos, celebrity dance contests and TikTok challenges have shaped the way we experience choreography and dance culture. During the Covid-19 pandemic when live performance events were cancelled, people confined to their homes turned to making and viewing short dance videos: created on mobile phones and designed to be easily replicable and shared on social media platforms. Dance has long had a relationship to film and the screen, from early films of Loie Fuller's Serpentine Dance (c. 1890s) which highlighted the mediums ability to capture movement and light, to the multi-screen presentations of the choreography of Merce Cunningham transposed into video by Charles Atlas. Visual artists today are inventively reformatting dance and choreographed movement for not only film and the screen but also specifically for the gallery setting, with its repeatable presentation and spatialised viewing conditions. Between Poetics and Politics will feature 10-12 short films by contemporary artists and choreographers that explore the intersection of dance, movement and moving image. These moving image works focus on performing bodies, and unfold as both as individual works but also as collective storytelling, exploring timely topics, ranging from gender politics and desire to bodily memory, resistance and personal healing, to indigeneity and collective identities. The works will be contextualised by three new essays.

The National Trust looks after one of the largest and most significant holdings of fine-art and heritage objects in the world. As well as internationally famous works of art, the collections also contain many remarkable but far less familiar objects with fascinating stories to tell. This celebration of curiosities and inventions features forgotten gadgets, unusual works of art, humorous gifts and peculiar personal treasures. From dodos and dioramas to witch bottles and wooden pets, every object provides unexpected insights into the lives of those who made, owned or used it. Selected by National Trust curators, the featured objects are accompanied by easy-to-read captions. The book concludes with a list of National Trust places where these intriguing collections can be found.

Pablo Picasso's artistic output is astonishing in its ambition and variety. This handsome publication examines a particular aspect of his legendary capacity for invention: his imaginative and original use of paper. He used it as a support for autonomous works, including etchings, prints and drawings, as well as for his papier-colle experiments of the 1910s and his revolutionary three-dimensional 'constructions', made of cardboard, paper and string. Sometimes, his use of paper was simply determined by circumstance: in occupied Paris, where art supplies were hard to come by, he ripped up paper tablecloths to make works of art. And, of course, his works on paper comprise the preparatory stages of some of his very greatest paintings, among them Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937). With reproductions of more than 300 works of art and additional texts by Violette Andres, Stephen Coppel, Emmanuelle Hincelin, Christopher Lloyd, Johan Popelard and Claustre Rafart Planas, this sumptuous study reveals the myriad ways in which Picasso's genius seized the potential of paper at different stages throughout his career.