Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Jewish Art History Presentation at Ball State University Libraries





Jewish Art History:  2014 Bruce F. and Ildiko B. Meyer Memorial Lecture at Ball State University Libraries

The Friends of A.M. Bracken Library together with the Honors College and the Zeigler Committee for Jewish Studies is sponsoring the Bruce F. and Ildiko B. Meyer Memorial Lecture—Celebrating Marriage in Jewish Art: Medieval and Early Modern Perspectives.  Sharon Liberman Mintz, Curator of Graphics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Senior Consultant of Judaica at Sotheby’s, will present this illustrated talk on Monday, March 3 at 7:30 pm in Bracken Library room 104.

The celebration of Jewish marriage in the medieval period is visually recorded in a selection of Hebrew manuscripts that document the customs of European Jewry.  Complementing the medieval perspective, in the Early Modern era, the practice of decorated and illustrated ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts—shown above) provides a wealth of information concerning the artistic creativity, cultural interactions, and social history of the Jewish communities in which they were created.

Researchers of Jewish history will find extensive cartographic resources available from the Ball State University Libraries’ Atlas Collection and the GIS Research and Map Collection (GRMC) on the second floor of Bracken Library.  The GRMC includes hundreds of maps of Israel, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land.  The Atlas Collection includes several books covering Jewish history—The Illustrated Atlas of Jewish Civilization, Atlas of Medieval Jewish History (map above--click to enlarge), Atlas of Jewish History, Atlas of Modern Jewish History, The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, and The Routledge Atlas of Jewish History published in 2010.

The presentation is free and open to the public.  Free parking is available after 7:00 pm in the Emens Parking Garage.  For more information please contact John Straw, Assistant Dean for Digital Initiativesand Special Collections, at 765-285-5078 or Dr. Frank Felsenstein at 765-285-8405.

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