Friend and Photographer to Frida Kahlo

By Renee Ghert-Zand for The Jewish Daily Forward

Many people are familiar with an iconic photograph of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo titled “Frida at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, NYC 1933.” In the picture, Kahlo is seated, and a small painted self-portrait hangs above her and slightly to the left on the wall. Less known than the photograph itself is the name of the woman who took it. Her name was Lucienne Bloch, and she was Kahlo’s friend, and an artist in her own right.

The Jewish Community Library in San Francisco currently has an exhibition of photographs by Lucienne Bloch, along with some taken by her father, the famous Swiss-born Jewish musical composer Ernest Bloch (1880-1959). The show, titled “A Shared Eye,” highlights the father’s interest in artfully documenting nature, and the daughter’s preferred focus on people and what the camera can catch of their psychological make-up.

Some of Ernest’s photographs of life in the Swiss countryside grab the eye, including “The Mushroom Lady, 1912” featuring an elderly woman in a witch-like ensemble looking straight into the camera while holding a giant mushroom in each hand. Lucienne’s photos of social and political demonstrations in New York and Detroit in the mid-1930’s are well composed. Also of note is her rare photo of Albert Einstein playing violin in a musical group at Princeton.

However, it is Lucienne’s intimate portraits of her friend Kahlo in the 1930s that fascinate and steal this show. There are a few photos that include Kahlo’s husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, but a group of seven images of Kahlo alone command the most attention. One photo has Kahlo with a doily on her head, another with her biting her necklace, and yet another with her by a window.

One titled, “Frida with Cinzano Bottle” was taken in 1935. “Frida caught Diego having an affair with her favorite sister, Cristina. To rebel against him, Frida cut off her long black hair. The Cinzano Bottle she holds represents the unborn child she could never give him,” Lucienne Bloch wrote in her diary about the image.

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An Inter-Everything Conversation About the Pew Survey

A three-part response to the Pew Survey. Read all three responses.

by Derek M. Kwait for NewVoices

We might just be the last Jewish organization to respond to the big bad Pew Survey and we’re fine with that. It seems like every response so far is other people telling us what how we need to feel about it, whether we should be scared, take it as a a dare to engage singles in their 20′s suffering attrition, be optimistic, or think they got it all wrong. But here at New Voices, we (and by “we” I mean “me,” editor Derek Kwait) aren’t so into having other people doing our thinking for us. To this end, we’ve engaged two of the best and brightest Jews in academia and two of NV’s best and brightest student writers to participate in an inter-generational, inter-denominational, inter-gender, inter-orientation, inter-community, inter-national (we included a Canadian)…in other words, inter-human dialogue on the Survey’s results in the hopes that, after hearing all these varied perspectives, you will be able to find yourself a little in all of them, and be a little offended by all of them.

By engaging such different Jews in conversation with each other here, we hope to engender better conversations among different Jews in campuses and communities out in the world, thus bolstering what all agree to be the most important thing about Jewish life: a strong and vibrant Jewish community.

Meet the conversers:

Dr. Steven M. Cohen [SMC] is Research Professor of Jewish Social Policy at Hebrew Union College in New York, and Director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU Wagner. He received an honorary doctorate from the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, the Marshall Sklare Award of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, and a National Jewish Book Award. He had been cited as one of the Forward Fifty. In 2012, he was elected president of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry.

Dr. Sarah Bunin Benor [SBB] is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. She teaches about the social science of American Jews, as well as about language and culture. She wrote the acclaimed book Becoming Frum, about the way Jews who become Orthodox later in life use language, has published many academic papers, and given lectures around the country about Jewish languages, linguistics, Yiddish, and American Jews. She edits the Journal of Jewish Languages and the Jewish Language Research Website, both of which she founded.

Eliana A. Glogauer [EAG] is New Voices’ chief editorialist. She currently studies government at IDC Herzliya, and is a co-founder of the Israel advocacy initiative, AskMeMore. She is the promised Canadian, from Toronto.

Jonathan P. Katz [JPK] is a New Voices contributor, and studies history and geography at the University of Chicago. Originally from New York City, he is also a polyglot and was a summer research intern for the Urban Land Institute.

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Lou Reed’s Rabbi

The rock star’s new tribute to his teacher, the writer Delmore Schwartz, illuminates their common genius

By Jake Marmer for Tablet Magazine

This piece was originally published on October 29, 2012. Lou Reed died Sunday, October 27, 2013.
Lou Reed is the indelibly hip version of Woody Allen’s Zelig: A human chameleon continually and thoroughly transformed by his surroundings. The difference, of course, is that while Allen’s film character grotesquely altered his physical appearance and worldviews so he would be liked, Reed’s radical shifts have been determined by desire to duck expectations, to shake up and subvert established forms of normalcy. As an iconic rock star, Reed has lived out his numerous rebirths and in the process popularized if not outright invented a number of musical genres—art-rock, avant-pop, noise, and punk, among others.

What remained constant throughout his transformations, however, is Reed’s rootedness in literature. His lyrics have always been filled with references that ranged from Shakespeare to the Marquis de Sade, from Edgar Allan Poe to James Joyce. And now, after over half a century of bona fide writing and composing, Reed has penned a piece that is among his very finest bits of writing to date—an introduction to the New Directions reissue of Delmore Schwartz’s collection of short stories In Dream Begin Responsibilities.

Schwartz, a star of the New York literary scene in the 1930 and ’40s, was a poet, innovative prose writer, cultural critic, and, at one time, a professor of English literature at the University of Syracuse, where Reed met him in the early 1960s. As is clear from the introduction to In Dream Begin Responsibilities, Schwartz’s impact on Reed’s life has not waned one bit over the years: “You were the greatest man I ever met. … Your titles were more than enough to raise the muse of fire on my neck.” Lovingly Reed recollects: “We gathered around you as you read Finnegans Wake. So hilarious but impenetrable without you. You said there were few things better than to devote one’s life to Joyce.”

Reed’s piece surges from descriptive to lyrical, from poetry to prose. At times reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg “Kaddish”—another epic tribute—Reed’s elegy is a tragicomic stream of consciousness and ecstatic excavation of memory: “Reading Yeats and the bell had rung but the poem was not over you hadn’t finished reading—liquid rivulets sprang from your nose but still you would not stop reading. I was transfixed. I cried—the love of the word.” The usage of em-dashes, as in Ginsberg’s work, intensifies the potency of the free-associative leaps. The incisiveness and vividness of the portrayal are tremendous: “Some drinks later—his shirt undone—one tail front right hanging—tie askew—fly unzipped. Oh Delmore. You were so beautiful. Named for a silent star dancer Frank Delmore.”

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Meet Diane von Furstenberg

by lkatz for The Conspiracy /newvoices

Legendary fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg’s mother was in Auschwitz 18 months before she was born. Born Diane Simone Michelle Halfin on December 31, 1946 in Belgium, her parents, Leon and Liliane Halfin, were both Jewish. Her mother’s greatest gift to her was the conviction that “fear is not an option,” Von Furstenberg said at an United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York event. At the same event, she added that she has tried to teach her own children that independence are among the first steps to freedom.

Von Furstenberg attended school in Switzerland, Spain and England, and in 1965 started at the University of Madrid. She transferred to the University of Geneva after one year, where she majored in economics. While there, she met Prince Eduard Egon von Furstenburg, who inherited the Fiat fortune. The two married in July 1969 – she designed her own wedding dress. Although she was not popular with her fiancé’s family due to her religion, she became Diane, Princess of Furstenberg. “I was this banal little Jewish girl who married this good-looking hotshot prince,” she told The Wall Street Journal. The couple had two children before splitting in 1974.

Following the break up, von Furstenberg promised herself she would become financially self-sufficient. She started out working for various large-scale production clothes manufactures. In 1972 she started her own business in New York City, and opened up a showroom on Seventh Avenue. Her father and a friend helped her get started financially. Her most successful piece, the wrap dress, has become an iconic fashion design. Her company’s sales topped one million dollars after only a few months. By 1976 over a million of her signature dresses had been sold, and she landed on the cover of both The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, the latter dubbing her “the most marketable woman since Coco Chanel.”

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