Page 7 - HUC-JIR - Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity

T

his exhibition features the art of Judy Chicago, who

was born Judith Sylvia Cohen on July 20, 1939. She

was the first child of May Levinson and Arthur M. Cohen,

a couple that typified the secular idealism of a generation

that struggled to forge a new brand of Jewish identity, mili-

tant not only against injustice in American society, but often

against the religious strictures of immigrant parents who

themselves had fled Czarist anti-Semitism. Judy’s mother was

an eldest daughter who sacrificed her own artistic develop-

ment to help support younger siblings and her father was a

rabbi’s independent-minded youngest son pampered by older

sisters – both reared by energetic mothers who sustained

households when husbands proved less able to cope with the

new world. Both of her parents grew up in households in-

fused by Yiddish, which her paternal grandmother continued

to speak, calling her by her Yiddish name, Yudit Sipke. As a

result, Yiddish idiomatic expressions and phrases enlivened

Judy’s and rest of the family’s English-language speech.

Arthur Cohen’s pride in descent from the “blue blood” of

the Vilna Gaon strongly impressed his daughter: “Totally

devoted to my father, I believed him and was mortified when

I bled common red when I first cut myself.” Known as the

Gaon or “Eminence” of Vilna, Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon

Zalman (1720-1797) helped shape modern Jewish history.

Learned in the the

Torah

and

Talmud

,

the Gaon gained

renown both for emending the ancient texts – correcting

scribal errors – and for vigorous teaching that dealt also with

grammar and such secular subjects as science and mathemat-

ics, although virtually no secularizing influence had yet

touched Eastern European Jewry. At a time when many

women received no formal education, the Gaon, five of

whose eight children were daughters, urged that fathers

“

train” their daughters, who should read “moral books,”

especially on the Sabbath.

Although Chicago’s home did not practice Jewish ritual, “it

becomes obvious that I was raised in a household shaped by

what might be called Jewish ethical values,” she writes, “par-

ticularly the concept of

tikkun

,

the healing or repairing of the

world.” Her paternal grandfather, Benjamin Cohen, from

Slobodka, a shtetl near Kovna, Lithuania, attended the small

town’s

yeshiva

(

institution for higher learning in Judaism),

which came under the influence of religious reform known as

the

Musar

(

ethics) movement, motivated in part by the secu-

lar humanistic challenge of the

Haskalah

or Enlightenment

that came to Eastern Europe from Germany in the nineteenth

century. Musar reformists urged moral and ethical rejuvenation

and emphasized the ethical and homiletic strain of teaching

and preaching in Jewish tradition. The

Musar

’

s founder, Israel

Lipkin Salanter (1810-1883), stressed humility and taught

the precepts of leading a “perfect ethical life, exemplified by

compassion for the poor.” Benjamin’s exposure to such altru-

istic Judaic humanism, which is acknowledged to contain

“

potentially radical values,” eventually enabled him to pass

them on to his children, especially his youngest son Arthur.

When Arthur finished high school at the age of sixteen, he

had to go to work to support himself. He managed to get

hired as a substitute postal clerk, working nights at the

Chicago Post Office. At the time of the stock market crash in

Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity

Rainbow Shabbat,

Holocaust Project

5

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