Letters / On the 2024 Winter Gift

I recently received a divinely-timed gift to hang on my wall in my cell at the Maury Correctional Institution: a print by Liora Ostroff drawn from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 1971 essay “Dissent.” I have recently begun identifying as Jewish and studying Judaism on a daily basis, but Jewish resources are limited here and I am presently indigent. I wanted to let Ms. Ostroff know of the lifeline I have through her work; I am blessed each time I am able to consider its content.

I am writing to register my disapproval at the 2024 Winter Gift. While I understand that there is a Jewish tradition of secularizing religious art, the shiviti amulet print fails on multiple fronts. A shiviti is an extremely sacred object, filled with holy names and psalms. As someone engaged in a Hasidic movement, the explicit replacement of the divine name with a mundane English word is quite off-putting. The piece uses the aesthetics of mystical practice without engaging meaningfully with it. The use of a faux Hebrew font for the English only adds to a sense of uncomfortable dissonance.

Your audience of leftist, metropolitan Yidn are increasingly rediscovering their spiritual tradition and finding ways to synthesize it with radical politics. Our mystical tradition is inherently radical and liberatory, but when stripped of its spiritual nature, that liberatory power also takes leave. In this moment of generational spiritual renewal, it would benefit your magazine to avoid pieces that remove divinity from our people’s sacred tools.

I’m writing to complain about the art you curated for this year’s winter gift: a secularized and sanitized spin on a shiviti amulet. In replacing liturgical verse and the names of Hashem with (frankly, boring) English text by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Liora Ostroff has de-Judaized the art form.

I appreciate that Jewish Currents is a historically secular magazine with a proud secular readership. However, this art isn’t just secular; it’s secularizing—and profaning—a sacred
art form without speaking substantively to that interplay. Worse, it suggests that Judaism needs to be secularized in order to be sufficiently radical. The sad undercurrent here is that many radical Jews want to connect to our mystical traditions but have no idea where to start. Art like this severs, rather than fosters, that connection.

A response from the artist:

Shiviti amulets have a short and controversial history, just like the Sabbatean—not Hasidic—movement from which they arose. Religious authorities originally considered them profane and idolatrous, which speaks to the way questions of authenticity, blasphemy, and holiness are already inherent in the form.

Even if these amulets have now been enshrined in sacred tradition, the letter writers’ rubric for assessing their authenticity seems hazy. They take issue with the aesthetics of the “Hebrew”-style font. But to me, the font is a conscious nod to kitsch, which is often acknowledged as a hallmark of earnest, sentimental religious art. Similarly, the objection to the use of English words seems strange. Kaddish is recited in Aramaic because it was the spoken language of the time, and the rabbis insisted that daveners should understand their own prayer. I am reminded of a story told by the Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, about a child who does not know how to pray and instead recites the aleph-bet; his prayer is holy because it is sincere, and his earnestness is rewarded directly by God.

These letters also nod to the long history of Jewish artistic renewal, but do not engage with it. Others have found fertile ground in the shiviti: In “The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture,” Jonathan D. Sarna explores syncretism in Jewish folk art, offering the example of an 1861 papercut shiviti by Phillip Cohen that sets two American flags atop the traditional texts and motifs. As Jewish Currents contributing editor Maia Ipp writes in her essay “Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde,” “At the very center of both Judaism and experimental art-making is a generative tension between modernity and tradition, between a commitment to the lineage that formed us, and the desire to see and represent the world anew.”

Finally, the letters’ accusation of “profaning” reminds me of tiresome controversies in the world of modern art, including debates around Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, featuring a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, or Chris Ofili’s 1996 painting The Holy Virgin Mary, which incorporates pieces of elephant dung. In response to accusations that he was profaning the image of the Virgin Mary, Ofili, a Roman Catholic with an earnest investment in honoring his own religious background, said, “I’m interested in ideas of beauty . . . and elephant dung in itself is quite a beautiful object.” While I do not feel that using the prophetic speech of a notable rabbi in a mystical format is profanation, even if it were, that would sit well within hallowed traditions of both Jewish and contemporary art.