Photographers and video artists explore the question of who is Jewish, only to find the answer in a range of ages, races and backgrounds.
By Barbara Isenberg
Special to The Times
March 19, 2006
GROWING up in Beverly Hills, Jessica Shokrian often felt like an outsider at family gatherings. Her American-born mother was a convert to Judaism. And though English was the language spoken at home, the older members of her father's Iranian family would speak to one another in Farsi, a language she neither knew nor understood.
When she was 16, her father bought her a camera, and everything changed. "His family came from another place. They have this whole other history, this whole past I wasn't a part of," Shokrian explains. "Through photography, I was able to connect with my family in a way that didn't need words."
Today a professional photographer and filmmaker, Shokrian is one of 13 artists commissioned by New York's Jewish Museum to create photography, videos and multimedia installations on the topic of Jewish identity. Chronicling a panoply of Jews — young and old, native-born and émigré, black and white, Latino and Asian, assimilated and unassimilated — the artists ask and try to answer the question of who is Jewish.
Their investigations make up "The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography," opening at the Skirball Cultural Center this week. "You cannot make easy assumptions about who anybody is in the 21st century in America," says Lori Starr, Skirball senior vice president and museum director. "The story of Ellis Island and New York's Lower East Side is, by and large, the overwhelming story that people have of Jewish emigration to America. But this show really turns those assumptions upside down, saying Jews are not a monolithic single culture in America but in fact a very heterogeneous mix of people."
Chris Verene's "Prairie Jews," depicts his family and friends in Galesburg, Ill., where he grew up and where Jews were already living within 20 years of the city's founding in 1837. Verene's subjects, Jews and non-Jews, clown for the camera, pose with their friends, live alone into their 90s and otherwise go about their lives.
*
An apparent otherness
BLENDING in far less are the Orthodox Jews of Postville, Iowa. Russian-born Lubavitch Jew Aaron Rubashkin moved from New York to Postville in 1987, bought a former slaughterhouse and turned it into a meat-processing plant that eventually employed 350 people. Many were other Orthodox Jews, which, according to the show's catalog, made Postville home to the largest number of rabbis per capita in the United States.
Postville's Hasidic Jews brought their culture with them, establishing a synagogue, yeshiva and ritual baths for men and women. But what photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher feature in "Brooklyn Abroad" are such scenes of everyday life as kids at camp or riding bikes. Yet the Jews' otherness is always apparent, whether by the yarmulkes on their heads as they fish or the black hat and fringed clothing of a man mowing his lawn.
Several artists explore the worlds of black, Latino and Asian Jews. Avishai Mekonen, an Ethiopian Jew, came to America via Israel, and documents the not-unusual occurrence of double journeys by many Jews fleeing persecution, hunger and other evils. Mekonen and his American-born wife, Shari Rothfarb Mekonen, incorporate many of his experiences in their documentary "Judaism and Race in America," and a 10-minute segment of their film is included in the Skirball exhibition.
Dawoud Bey photographed teenagers of multiracial or otherwise mixed parentage, and accompanying audio interviews offer insight into how these adolescents view their heritage. Claire Saxe, 16, for instance, sees more connection to her grandmother, who is part Native American, than to her Jewish ancestors. Jacob Goldstein, 15, says simply: "My father was Belizean, my mom is American, and I'm Jewish. So I'm one of a kind, you could say."
Staged Jewish wedding photographs by Nikki S. Lee, a South Korean living in New York, are in keeping with other photos in Lee's "Parts" series. Lee photographs herself here as a luminous Jewish bride, her groom absent but for an occasionally seen hand, arm or nose.
While Lee's bride may be Jewish only because of her marriage, observes Skirball associate curator Tal Gozani, "her photos also explore the phenomenon of Asian Jews by marriage, conversion and adoption."
Also theatrical is the work of Yoshua Okon, a Los Angeles-based photographer and video artist born and raised in Mexico City. Okon asked four San Diego women, all members of a Spanish-speaking Jewish community group, to head out for the desert for his videos. There, one by one, each improvises the biblical tale of Ruth, a widowed non-Jew who chooses to follow her mother-in-law, Naomi, across the desert and back to her Jewish homeland.
"I thought the story of Ruth would give them a parameter in which to improvise and also be a metaphor," says Okon. "In the story, a non-Jew decides to be Jewish, and for me, it's very telling of how identity responds to a deliberate choice. You're Jewish because you decide to be Jewish."
The Jews are, after all, a diaspora people, says Susan Chevlowe, a New York-based scholar and art historian who curated the Jewish Museum show. Changes in the 2000 census allowed people to check off multiple boxes, and in a way that's what this show is doing. Groups overlap in America and in this show. "We wanted photographers to look at Jews across racial, ethnic and cultural lines. People make assumptions about other people on the basis of how they see them, and visual assumptions often misrepresent people."
*
More room for artists
SEVERAL years in the making, the Jewish Identity Project began when New Yorker Vivian Shapiro, who had adopted a Chinese daughter with her partner, was struck by the multiracial population of children at her synagogue. Shapiro urged the Jewish Museum to put together a photographic exhibition on the topic of Jewish identity, says Chevlowe, and initiated a series of meetings that developed the notion.
The Skirball exhibition includes the same artworks by the same artists but takes advantage of the venue's larger gallery space. Each artist or pair of artists is given a room within the gallery.
The only piece altered for Los Angeles is Shokrian's, says Tal Gozani, managing curator of the exhibition here. Rather than playing consecutively on just one monitor as in New York, the filmmaker's six videos now play on three monitors alongside one another. "Having it on just one monitor didn't do it justice in terms of presenting these stories and how they are interwoven," Gozani says. "Given that we have such a large Persian community in Los Angeles and the Skirball hasn't done anything that deals explicitly with that Persian Jewish population, it was so relevant."
Shokrian's three monitors depict her family at both happy and sad occasions, beginning with her sister's engagement party and concluding with the solitary Sabbath meal preparations of her recently widowed aunt. In one film, Persian Jews march down Los Angeles streets, clapping as they carry a Torah from one place to another, while in another, children throw flowers on her uncle's freshly made grave. Her widowed aunt is in the last frames, walking Fairfax streets as she buys fruit and vegetables, riding the bus home and, finally, being alone in her kitchen cooking and weeping.
"I'm shooting my family all the time, and they ask, 'Why are you always shooting us?' " says Shokrian. "They didn't understand, and I didn't understand either. Now I'm feeling a real sense of understanding about myself, why I'm doing this work and what I've been looking for. Sometimes I think they don't feel I care about them. I'm hoping that when they come see this piece, they will understand how much I do care."
Special to The Times
March 19, 2006
GROWING up in Beverly Hills, Jessica Shokrian often felt like an outsider at family gatherings. Her American-born mother was a convert to Judaism. And though English was the language spoken at home, the older members of her father's Iranian family would speak to one another in Farsi, a language she neither knew nor understood.
When she was 16, her father bought her a camera, and everything changed. "His family came from another place. They have this whole other history, this whole past I wasn't a part of," Shokrian explains. "Through photography, I was able to connect with my family in a way that didn't need words."
Today a professional photographer and filmmaker, Shokrian is one of 13 artists commissioned by New York's Jewish Museum to create photography, videos and multimedia installations on the topic of Jewish identity. Chronicling a panoply of Jews — young and old, native-born and émigré, black and white, Latino and Asian, assimilated and unassimilated — the artists ask and try to answer the question of who is Jewish.
Their investigations make up "The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography," opening at the Skirball Cultural Center this week. "You cannot make easy assumptions about who anybody is in the 21st century in America," says Lori Starr, Skirball senior vice president and museum director. "The story of Ellis Island and New York's Lower East Side is, by and large, the overwhelming story that people have of Jewish emigration to America. But this show really turns those assumptions upside down, saying Jews are not a monolithic single culture in America but in fact a very heterogeneous mix of people."
Chris Verene's "Prairie Jews," depicts his family and friends in Galesburg, Ill., where he grew up and where Jews were already living within 20 years of the city's founding in 1837. Verene's subjects, Jews and non-Jews, clown for the camera, pose with their friends, live alone into their 90s and otherwise go about their lives.
*
An apparent otherness
BLENDING in far less are the Orthodox Jews of Postville, Iowa. Russian-born Lubavitch Jew Aaron Rubashkin moved from New York to Postville in 1987, bought a former slaughterhouse and turned it into a meat-processing plant that eventually employed 350 people. Many were other Orthodox Jews, which, according to the show's catalog, made Postville home to the largest number of rabbis per capita in the United States.
Postville's Hasidic Jews brought their culture with them, establishing a synagogue, yeshiva and ritual baths for men and women. But what photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher feature in "Brooklyn Abroad" are such scenes of everyday life as kids at camp or riding bikes. Yet the Jews' otherness is always apparent, whether by the yarmulkes on their heads as they fish or the black hat and fringed clothing of a man mowing his lawn.
Several artists explore the worlds of black, Latino and Asian Jews. Avishai Mekonen, an Ethiopian Jew, came to America via Israel, and documents the not-unusual occurrence of double journeys by many Jews fleeing persecution, hunger and other evils. Mekonen and his American-born wife, Shari Rothfarb Mekonen, incorporate many of his experiences in their documentary "Judaism and Race in America," and a 10-minute segment of their film is included in the Skirball exhibition.
Dawoud Bey photographed teenagers of multiracial or otherwise mixed parentage, and accompanying audio interviews offer insight into how these adolescents view their heritage. Claire Saxe, 16, for instance, sees more connection to her grandmother, who is part Native American, than to her Jewish ancestors. Jacob Goldstein, 15, says simply: "My father was Belizean, my mom is American, and I'm Jewish. So I'm one of a kind, you could say."
Staged Jewish wedding photographs by Nikki S. Lee, a South Korean living in New York, are in keeping with other photos in Lee's "Parts" series. Lee photographs herself here as a luminous Jewish bride, her groom absent but for an occasionally seen hand, arm or nose.
While Lee's bride may be Jewish only because of her marriage, observes Skirball associate curator Tal Gozani, "her photos also explore the phenomenon of Asian Jews by marriage, conversion and adoption."
Also theatrical is the work of Yoshua Okon, a Los Angeles-based photographer and video artist born and raised in Mexico City. Okon asked four San Diego women, all members of a Spanish-speaking Jewish community group, to head out for the desert for his videos. There, one by one, each improvises the biblical tale of Ruth, a widowed non-Jew who chooses to follow her mother-in-law, Naomi, across the desert and back to her Jewish homeland.
"I thought the story of Ruth would give them a parameter in which to improvise and also be a metaphor," says Okon. "In the story, a non-Jew decides to be Jewish, and for me, it's very telling of how identity responds to a deliberate choice. You're Jewish because you decide to be Jewish."
The Jews are, after all, a diaspora people, says Susan Chevlowe, a New York-based scholar and art historian who curated the Jewish Museum show. Changes in the 2000 census allowed people to check off multiple boxes, and in a way that's what this show is doing. Groups overlap in America and in this show. "We wanted photographers to look at Jews across racial, ethnic and cultural lines. People make assumptions about other people on the basis of how they see them, and visual assumptions often misrepresent people."
*
More room for artists
SEVERAL years in the making, the Jewish Identity Project began when New Yorker Vivian Shapiro, who had adopted a Chinese daughter with her partner, was struck by the multiracial population of children at her synagogue. Shapiro urged the Jewish Museum to put together a photographic exhibition on the topic of Jewish identity, says Chevlowe, and initiated a series of meetings that developed the notion.
The Skirball exhibition includes the same artworks by the same artists but takes advantage of the venue's larger gallery space. Each artist or pair of artists is given a room within the gallery.
The only piece altered for Los Angeles is Shokrian's, says Tal Gozani, managing curator of the exhibition here. Rather than playing consecutively on just one monitor as in New York, the filmmaker's six videos now play on three monitors alongside one another. "Having it on just one monitor didn't do it justice in terms of presenting these stories and how they are interwoven," Gozani says. "Given that we have such a large Persian community in Los Angeles and the Skirball hasn't done anything that deals explicitly with that Persian Jewish population, it was so relevant."
Shokrian's three monitors depict her family at both happy and sad occasions, beginning with her sister's engagement party and concluding with the solitary Sabbath meal preparations of her recently widowed aunt. In one film, Persian Jews march down Los Angeles streets, clapping as they carry a Torah from one place to another, while in another, children throw flowers on her uncle's freshly made grave. Her widowed aunt is in the last frames, walking Fairfax streets as she buys fruit and vegetables, riding the bus home and, finally, being alone in her kitchen cooking and weeping.
"I'm shooting my family all the time, and they ask, 'Why are you always shooting us?' " says Shokrian. "They didn't understand, and I didn't understand either. Now I'm feeling a real sense of understanding about myself, why I'm doing this work and what I've been looking for. Sometimes I think they don't feel I care about them. I'm hoping that when they come see this piece, they will understand how much I do care."
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