First, Build an Art School. Then Build a Nation. A Jewish Response

JEWISH IDEAS DAILY
By Diana Muir Appelbaum

"Portrait of a Man Studying Torah" by Boris Schatz, 1930, Palestine

ISRAEL---Before Zionists built Israel’s first kibbutz, first university, or first luxury hotel, they built an art academy.  The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design opened in 1906, not because the Jewish homeland needed an art school more than it needed a university but because the Zionist leadership thought an art school would be an effective motor of economic growth. The man who built the art school was named Zalman Dov Baruch Schatz before he left his yeshiva to study art and changed his name to Boris. Arriving in Jerusalem in 1905, Schatz rapidly opened not one institution but three: an art academy, a national museum, and a series of workshops that would employ Jewish craft workers. [link]

"Art, Craft & Jewish National Identity" is a gem of an exhibition, on display through August 31 at the Bernard Museum of Judaica in Temple Emanu-El in New York.  Curated by Elka Deitsch and David Wachtel, it shows the way Bezalel artists blended the influences of the European Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements with artistic styles and techniques from Persia and the Middle East in a self-conscious effort to create a Hebrew national style.