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Book Review
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
Richard I. Cohen. Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1998. Pp. xviii, 358. $50.00.
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This is a splendid book. It is the first effort to integrate art into the study of two major issues in the history of Jews in modern Europe: the status of Jews and Judaism within the larger society and the nature of Jewish responses to the new conditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does not pretend, however, to be a comprehensive history either of the representation of Jews in modern Western art or of Jewish artistic creativity. Rather, by exploring a selected number of themes, Richard I. Cohen aims to "offer an alternative entrée into the social landscape of European Jewish society" (p. 9). His clear narrative demonstrates how visual resources enhance our understanding of the changing image of Jews and the patterns of Jewish acculturation in the modern period. Ranging from the seventeenth century to the years before World War I, Cohen devotes the bulk of this lavishly illustrated book to the variety of ways Jews used art and artifacts to shape their identities vis-à-vis the traditional Jewish world most had left and the European societies in which they were increasingly integrated. |
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