Looking Jewish

<p>Jewish art and visual culture--art made by Jews about Jews--in modern diasporic settings is the subject of <i>Looking Jewish</i>. Carol Zemel focuses on particular artists and cultural figures in interwar Eastern Europe and postwar America who blended Jewishness and mainstream modernism to create a diasporic art one that transcends dominant national traditions. She begins with a painting by Ken Aptekar entitled <i>Albert: Used to Be Abraham</i> a double portrait of a man which serves to illustrate Zemel's conception of the doubleness of Jewish diasporic art. She considers two interwar photographers Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic; images by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz; the pre- and postwar photographs of Roman Vishniac; the figure of the Jewish mother in postwar popular culture (Molly Goldberg); and works by R. B. Kitaj Ben Katchor and Vera Frenkel that explore Jewish identity in a postmodern environment.</p>