Practicing Jews: Art, Identity, and Culture

About

Practicing Jews: Art, Identity and Culture is an outreach component of the Conney Project on Jewish Arts, directed by Professor Douglas Rosenberg.

The Conney Project on Jewish Arts will build on the foundation already in place at the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at UW-Madison, which includes the Conney Undergraduate Seminar in Judaism and the Arts and the Conney Colloquium on Jewish Arts. The goal of the five-year plan is the creation of a Jewish Arts research center. The intention behind the Conney Project on Jewish Arts is to create dialogue, facilitate new knowledge, and function as a center of activity in the area of the Jewish contribution to the arts, both historically and in the contemporary era. The Conney Project on Jewish Arts will create opportunities for both scholars and practicing artists to meet and exchange ideas in the Conney Colloquium, held biannually on the UW-Madison campus. Selected papers will subsequently be included in a series of published volumes. The Conney Undergraduate Seminar will also continue on a biannual basis (alternating with the Colloquium), with its roster of visiting artists bringing new and exciting ideas to campus for our students. Selected artists and directors will be invited as artists-in-residence in the Projects media center, where they will have access to a digital media production facility for the creation of documentaries and art projects of Jewish content. The film screening and visiting artist series will also continue as part of the larger framework of the Project, and artists will be asked to participate in the digital archive and documentary production program that will include on-camera interviews as well as an archive of their work. A feature-length documentary on Jews and the arts is part of our long-range plan as well.

By combining all of these elements, The Conney Project on Jewish Arts will, in the course of the next five years, amass a vast collection of historically valuable media pertaining to the Jewish contribution in the arts, one that will be made available to scholars and students in the form of streaming media, digital archives, DVDs and television projects.

The Center for Jewish Studies and The Conney Project will be a resource center and an archive of scholarship on the Jewish contribution to the arts, as well as an archive of art produced by Jewish artists. Additionally, the Project will function as sponsor and promoter both of active scholarship on the Jewish contribution to the arts and of new thinking and production among Jewish artists.