Woodmere, NY. Cong. Sons of Israel (1948-1950). Fritz Nathan & Eugene Schoen, archs. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber
Conference: New Papers on 20th Century American Jewish Buildings at College Art Association
This week is the annual College Art Association meeting at the Hilton Hotel in New York City. It is the largest gathering of art historians and art educators in the United States. I'll be speaking at one session devoted to the role of architecture in shaping post-World War II American Jewish identity.
Hamden, CT. Cong. Mishkan Israel. Fritz Nathan, arch. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber
One should be registered for the conference to attend. One can also register for the day or a single session. Go to: http://conference.collegeart.org/2013/registration/
(but this is the
last afternoon so who knows if they'll checking badges!)
Here is the session schedule:
Saturday, February 16, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM
Making Inroads, Paving the Way: Postwar Architecture, Design, and the Formation of Jewish-American Identity
Sutton Parlor Center, 2nd Floor
Chairs: Kai K. Gutschow, Carnegie Mellon University; Lynnette Widder, Columbia University
Newish and Jewish from Europe: Refugees, Survivors, and the Spread of Modernism in Postwar America
Samuel D. Gruber, Syracuse University
Non-Jewish Architecture for Jews: The Jersey Homesteads after Auschwitz
Daniel S. Palmer, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
A Symbolic Landscape for Suburbia: Baltimore Chizuk Amuno’s Hebrew Culture Garden
Jeremy Kargon, Morgan State University
The Faith of Albert Kahn
Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan
Here are the session abstracts:
CAA Session
Sat. Feb. 16, 2013, 2:30-5:00pm, NYC Hilton
Session Title: Making Inroads, Paving the Way: Post-war Architecture, Design and the Formation
of Jewish-American Identity
Chair: Kai K Gutschow
Co-Chair: Lynnette Widder
Session
Abstract:
What
role did Jewish-Americans play the establishment of modern
architecture and design in the postwar
period? What role did modern architecture and design play in
(re)establishing Jewish identity in post-war
America? This session seeks papers that explore alternatives to the
dominant story of moder architecture
and design in America, which often leaves out questions of identity
politics. The abstraction functionalism,
and mechanized production of modern architecture and design, as well
as the values of American
nationalism and American hegemony in a globalizing post-war world,
seemed to allow little space
for the overt promotion of identity. Assimilation was the order of
the day, and at times conformity seemed
to be implicated in even the newest "good design." The
post-Holocaust world demanded new answers
to questions of identity, assimilation, political engagement, and
self-assertion from American Jews.
At the same time the new, the upwardly mobile middle class, of which
so many Jews were a part, often
used modern architecture and design to express their intent to become
patrons, producers and tastemakers.
The confluence of these two trajectories can be traced throughout
Jewish contributions to “popular”
and “high” cultural production of the period. This development
threads through stories as diverse
as Rudolph Schindler’s 1946 house for showman Samuel L. 'Roxy'
Rothafel; the synagogues of Percival
Goodman; Julius Schulman’s role in creating the image of modern
architecture; Paul Rand’s work
as art director at ‘Apparel Arts’ and ‘Direction’ magazines;
the work of the Levitt brothers in establishing
Levittown; or the work of Edgar Kaufmann Jr. and Sr. in promoting
“good design” in Pittsburgh
and New York. The single family house, the backbone of the “American
Dream,” alongside the
developer suburb, and the commercial and cultural centers of
communities provide a particularly fertile
ground to explore identity formation. Families, developers, and
institutions often sought out particular
architects and builders to realize their own milieu. The media’s
role in creating the myth of modernism
and the American Dream, particularly at the scale of the domestic
interior and its wide range of
consumer goods, in the local strip mall, or in the community church
or temple, is also implicated in this storyline.
This session welcomes proposals in the areas of architecture, design,
film, media, and cultural studies
in order to consider the broad spectrum of design activities and
societal practices that bring together
modernism and the (re)-creation of Jewish- American identity in the
postwar era.
================================
Paper
title: Newish and Jewish from Europe: Refugees, Survivors and the
Spread of Modernism in the Post-World
War II American Jewish Community
Speaker:
Samuel Gruber, Syracuse University
Abstract:
The architecture of the American Jewish community was transformed
following World War II by
émigré and refugee architects engaged to design synagogues and
Jewish Community Centers. Eric Mendelsohn’s
synagogues for St. Louis, Cleveland and elsewhere are well known but
the work of Frit Nathan,
Mendelsohn’s German-Jewish contemporary, is virtually forgotten.
Nathan arrived in the Unite States
in 1940 and designed synagogues, teamed with émigré artists, in the
New York and New Haven metro
areas. Both architects helped create the architectural language for
Jewish institutional buildings that
was adopted by American. We can now add the work of refugee
architects David Moed of Antwerp (arrived
1939), and Norbert Troller from Brno who after surviving Terezin and
Auschwitz came to Americ and designed scores of JCCs from the late 1940s through the early
1960s for small Jewish communitie across America. Other Jewish refugees and survivors also championed a
modern aesthetic for
synagogues.
================================
Paper
title: Non-Jewish Architecture for Jews: the Jersey Homesteads after
Auschwitz
Speaker:
Daniel S. Palmer, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Abstract:
The post-1945 transformations of the community and buildings in the
Jersey Homesteads (present
day Roosevelt, NJ) demonstrate how Jews assimilated into the culture
of suburban America. The government
established this agro-industrial cooperative in 1933 to relocate an
entirely Jewish population of
immigrant garment workers from New York City’s slums to a rural
garden city of modernist concrete housing
with a clothing factory so they could be self-sufficient. Once the
government divested itself of sponsorship
and the community became fragmented, leftist co-operation gave way to
a suburban enclave of
commuters with Jewish religious life in a newly built synagogue as
one of the few remaining cohesive elements.
This paper analyzes the town’s adaptations after World War II, when
demographics diversified and
many homeowners altered their houses to look more conventional. These
changes show an important dimension
of the complex relationship between American Jews and the
architecture of the “American Dream.”
=================================
Paper
title: A Symbolic Landscape for Suburbia: Baltimore Chizuk Amuno’s
"Hebrew Culture Garden"
Speaker:
Jeremy Kargon, Morgan State University
Abstract:
The embrace of modern architecture by American Jewish institutions
was historicall coincident
with
many Jewish communities’ migration from city centers to suburban
environments. This geographic shift,
accelerating after World War II, reflected changes in widely-held
attitudes towards landscape as well
as towards architecture. A useful case study is a design for
Baltimore’s Chizuk Amuno congregation, which
in 1954 began planning a suburban campus with New York architect
Daniel Schwartzman. Among the
congregation’s most important initial requests was a “Hebrew
Culture Garden,” inspired by Cleveland’s
ensemble of public ethnic-cultural gardens dating to the 1920’s.
Chizuk Amuno’s original interpretation
of this earlier example and its development throughout the
synagogue-planning process illustrate
the Baltimore Jewish community’s changing engagement with patterns
of settlement, public space,
cultural consumption, and the balance between religious and secular
Jewish identities.
=================================
Paper
title: The Faith of Albert Kahn
Speaker:
Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan
Abstract:
Albert Kahn (d. 1942) is a foil to the heroic figures of modern
architecture. His factory complexes
exemplified conditions of modern building in the 20th century, but
also helped establish precisely
what modern architecture was not—raw function, and service. As
Kahn’s own history ended, architects
materially influenced by images of his work fled Europe for the
United States. Not all Jewish the
émigrés were nonetheless associated with forced emigration. The
most successful, perhaps no surprisingly,
were not Jewish, seemingly able to separate work from ethnicity. The
“international style directly
associated with Jewishness by the Nazis, was deployed in the U.S. to
suppress ethnic affiliations and
maintain architecture as elite aesthetic practice. Here, then, two
not-modernisms: industrial building; and
Jewish identity in architecture. In Kahn, these two coincide,
suggesting a new story to whic mainstream
postwar modernism now becomes the foil: an architecture that embedded
ethnicity and professionalism
at once.
