This book, a follow-up to Kitaj's influential First Diasporist Manifesto (1989), is a personal reflection on the Jewish Question in contemporary art as it is lived and painted and imagined by one of today's most innovative and controversial artists. In 615 distinct propositions that deliberately echo the Commandments of Jewish Law, Kitaj here channels his ideas for a new Diasporist art in a daring stream of consciousness. Including 41 images of the artist's work chosen by him to accompany the text, this beautifully crafted volume is a unique and fascinating look into an artist's unusual life and work. From The Second Diasporist Manifesto is: 'But I swore to become myself - the new Jewish painter of a skeptical Diasporist art, born in Modernism, which cleaves to my own uncanny Jewish life of study, painting, unthinkable thoughts and near death...I admit that my Manifesto-poem is very personal, as a poem can be. But one would have to also unpack the cultural secrets of a book on Islamic Art, or Chinese or Egyptian or African Art. My Jewish Art lives a more Modernist Secret life. The Jewish Diaspora is not the only one. It's just mine.'

An artist declares his credo on art and life

Short-listed for the Art and Christian Enquiry/Mercers' International Book Award 2009: 'a book which makes an outstanding contribution to the dialogue between religious faith and the visual arts'. What does modern Jewish art look like? Where many scholars, critics, and curators have gone searching for the essence of Jewish art in Biblical illustrations and other traditional subjects, Rosen sets out to discover Jewishness in unlikely places. How, he asks, have modern Jewish painters explored their Jewish identity using an artistic past which is- by and large - non-Jewish? In this new book we encounter some of the great works of Western art history through Jewish eyes. We see Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece re-imagined by Marc Chagall (1887-1985), traces of Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca in Philip Guston (1913-1980), and images by Diego Velazquez and Paul Cezanne studiously reworked by R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007). This highly comparative study draws on theological, philosophical and literary sources from Franz Rosenzweig to Franz Kafka and Philip Roth. Rosen deepens our understanding not only of Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj but also of how art might serve as a key resource for rethinking such fundamental Jewish concepts as family, tradition, and homeland.

Why have so many contemporary poets turned to source material, from newspapers to governmental records, as inspiration for their poetry? How can citational poems offer a means of social engagement? Contested Records analyzes how some of the most well-known twenty-first century North American poets work with fraught documents. Whether it’s the legal paperwork detailing the murder of 132 African captives, state transcriptions of the last words of death row inmates, or testimony from miners and rescue workers about a fatal mine disaster, author Michael Leong reveals that much of the power of contemporary poetry rests in its potential to select, adapt, evaluate, and extend public documentation. Examining the use of documents in the works of Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Amiri Baraka, Claudia Rankine, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others, Leong reveals how official records can evoke a wide range of emotions—from hatred to veneration, from indifference to empathy, from desire to disgust. He looks at techniques such as collage, plagiarism, re-reporting, and textual outsourcing, and evaluates some of the most loved—and reviled—contemporary North American poems. Ultimately, Leong finds that if bureaucracy and documentation have the power to police and traumatize through the exercise of state power, then so, too, can document-based poetry function as an unofficial, counterhegemonic, and popular practice that authenticates marginalized experiences at the fringes of our cultural memory.

March 1 - April 2, 2005

The relationship between Jews and the United States is necessarily complex: Jews have been instrumental in shaping American culture and, of course, Jewish culture and religion have likewise been profoundly recast in the United States, especially in the period following World War II. A major focus of this work is to consider the Jewish role in American life as well as the American role in shaping Jewish life. This fifth volume of the Casden Institute's annual review is organized along five broad themes: politics, values, image, education and culture.