20 minute read
Arts & Culture
New exhibit honors Milton Glaser, the Jewish design icon who invented the ‘I Love NY’ logo
BY JULIA GERGELY
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Most New Yorkers recognize the “I Love New York” logo, which can be found on everything from coffee mugs to snow globes to boxer briefs. Fewer, however, might recognize the man behind the logo, Milton Glaser. One of the most prolific graphic designers of the 20th century, his designs helped shape the experience of New York for the last half century.
A new exhibit at the School of Visual Arts’ Gramercy Gallery, “SVA ❤ Milton: The Legacy of Milton Glaser,” attempts to capture the process and the legacy of the designer, who was a professor at the school from 1960 until 2017. The exhibit invites visitors to explore just how much graphic design — and Glaser’s designs, in particular — shapes our every day. Among the displays from Glaser’s impressive body of work are album covers, a “Mad Men” poster, New York Magazine covers (Glaser co-founded the magazine in 1968), the Brooklyn Brewery logo, the DC Comics logo, the Celebrate Israel Parade logo and much more.
“There’s some stuff that people have interacted with continually over the course of their lives — you know, a million times — but maybe didn’t even realize it was Milton Glaser’s work,” said Beth Kleber, head of SVA’s Milton Glaser Archives, which opened in 2003.
An introduction panel into the exhibit explains Glaser’s pedagogy, “Art for Life” — his belief in building a common experience in art diffused throughout the city. A lifetime New Yorker, Glaser was born in the Bronx in 1929. He attended the High School of Music and Art (what is now LaGuardia High School of Music and Performing Arts) and graduated from Cooper Union College in 1951. He co-founded the influential Push Pin Studios in 1954, and throughout his career, Glaser showed his love for the city through his designs.
“It’s really profound,” Kleber said as she
GLASER’S DESIGNS CAME FROM A DEEP LOVE FOR THE CITY, AND THEY CHAMPIONED THE IDEA THAT ART CAN EXIST ANYWHERE. AS THE NEW YORK TIMES WROTE ON MILTON GLASER’S 90TH BIRTHDAY, “NO ONE HEARTS NY QUITE LIKE MILTON GLASER.”
(COSMOS SARCHIAPONE) THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS’ GRAMERCY GALLERY PUTS MILTON GLASER’S LOVE FOR NEW YORK ON DISPLAY, COMPLETE WITH A WALL COVERED IN THE ICONIC LOGO WHICH HE FAMOUSLY DESIGNED IN THE BACK OF A TAXI CAB IN 1976.
(JULIA GERGELY)
considered how much of his work shaped New York and its culture over the last halfcentury. “New York City was so important to him. It gave him excitement, all the intellectual and cultural stimulation you get from living here. It’s the basis for a lot of his work.”
Glaser was Jewish, although he didn’t discuss it often. Still, many of his design ideas came from his Jewish background, and the idea that he never felt “at home in any culture,” as he said in a 2009 interview with Hadassah Magazine.
A recreation of Glaser’s desk takes up a large portion of one of the rooms in the exhibit, and showcases the way Glaser found design in everything, from shells to a box of pencils to coins and stamps. In a section titled “The Work Behind the Work,” viewers get to see early drafts of different poster prints made throughout Glaser’s career. The city — all the different objects and ideas it contains — comes to life on Glaser’s pages through this visualization of his creative process.
Glaser died on June 26, 2020, on his 91st birthday.
“It was so hard when we were all dispersed and mostly working from home to celebrate him in a way that really felt meaningful,” Kleber said. “Once we were back in the office, we felt like we had an opportunity to present his work in a way that most people could benefit from.”
Another part of the exhibit is set up almost like a miniature city block, so that all of Glaser’s designs can be given their own context. A makeshift book stand showcases his book jackets; nearby is a restaurant-like booth that holds his food and wine labels. A faux record store features dozens of the album covers he’d done over the years.
“It’s a really fun way to experience his work, putting it into real world context,” Kleber said. “It was a way to better introduce him, or reintroduce him to students and to people who might recognize some of the stuff but not know who was responsible for it.”
“SVA ❤ Milton: The Legacy of Milton
Glaser” is on view through Jan. 15, 2022 at the SVA Gramercy Gallery at 209 East 23rd Street. Advance registration is required.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5
Bassin, AIPAC’s longtime political director.
It’s a sea change for a lobby that since its launch in the first half of the 1950s has assiduously cultivated an image of being above the political fray, at least on the surface. The annual policy conference, suspended this year and next because of the pandemic, is welcoming to all comers, Democrats and Republicans alike, and lawmakers in either party who tangled with AIPAC were barely mentioned by name at past conferences. The named enemies were those foreign governments perceived as threatening Israel — Iran is a recurring villain — and the narrative was that AIPAC was uniting Congress against those bad actors.
AIPAC has become more domestically combative in recent years as a cadre of Israel critics among progressive Democrats has become more vocal. Two presidential candidates, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, boycotted AIPAC’s annual policy conference in 2020.
AIPAC in its online advertising has recently targeted Israel’s harshest critics on the left, including Reps. Ilhan Omar and Betty McCollum of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. The lobby has also singled out Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who consistently obstructs assistance to Israel, although he frames that as being in Israel’s interest.
Behind the scenes, AIPAC could be hard-hitting. It published a candidates’ scoring guide, but endeavored to make sure that only AIPAC insiders and donors had access.
AIPAC members were also rewarded with honors depending on how much they gave a candidate. Politicians held fundraisers at hotels and restaurants not on the campus of an AIPAC event, like the policy conference, but never more than walking distance.
Actual PACs popped up that barely tried to hide their origins at a meeting of AIPAC-affiliated minds; Pro-Israel America, launched in 2019, is led by two former senior AIPAC staffers.
In a statement announcing the new PACs, AIPAC made it clear that in the current polarized environment, maintaining a veneer of politesse was no longer a nicety the lobby could afford.
“The DC political environment has been undergoing profound change,” the statement said. “Hyperpartisanshiup, high congressional turnover and the exponential growth in the cost of campaigns now dominate the landscape.”
Notably, AIPAC’s upstart rival, J Street, also runs an adjacent regular PAC, although not a super PAC, which requires greater infrastructure and investment.
AIPAC will retain its 501 (c) 4 tax exempt status, which allows it to engage in politics as long as politics are not its main endeavor. An affiliate, the American Israel Educational Fund, which subsidizes trips to Israel for lawmakers and other influencers, has 501 (c) 3 status, which allows for greater tax exemptions. That status is limited to organizations whose aims are educational, religious or charitable.
An AIPAC official who spoke anonymously to share strategy said the launch of the PACs was part of an effort to modernize the lobby. The official noted AIPAC’s expanded social media presence and said an AIPAC app would soon be forthcoming.
U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE MIKE POMPEO SPEAKS AT THE ANNUAL AMERICAN ISRAEL PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE (AIPAC) CONFERENCE IN WASHINGTON, D.C., ON MARCH 25, 2019
(MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES)
A Christmas tree, a menorah, a lawsuit
The latest fight over holidays in public schools
BY GABE STUNTMAN
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — For some time, Shel Lyons has scrutinized her children’s public elementary school for what she describes as a pattern of favoring Christianity over other religions.
This year, the Jewish parent found what she thought was clear evidence when an outdoor tree lighting was planned at the school, located in Carmel, California. She asked to bring a giant inflatable menorah to display alongside the tree, but the school’s administration and parent-teacher organization denied the request.
Three days before the planned Dec. 10 tree lighting, Lyons took them to court over it. An attorney, Lyons filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California against the school district, Superintendent Ted Knight and Carmel River School Principal Jay Marden, seeking a temporary restraining order that would have required the school to allow the inflatable menorah.
Three days after that, Lyons — who has a third-grader at the K-5 school and is the parent of two of its graduates — voluntarily withdrew the suit, after a judge found she had not met the “high standard” required for the restraining order.
The dispute has raised decades-old questions about how to properly include students of different faiths at a public elementary school, and has also revived a national debate over what it means to show preference to a specific religion — which is unconstitutional by a public school, according to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Officials at the Carmel River School contend that the tree lighting was nonreligious in nature and intended only to celebrate the holiday season. But Lyons saw the Dec. 10 event as not a religion-neutral affair but a Christian one.
The allegations of “systemic endorsement of Christian beliefs” were “very serious,” and “the feelings of exclusion experienced by the minor children are particularly troubling,” Judge Beth Labson Freeman wrote in the ruling against a restraining order. But she did not rule on a larger question posed in Lyons’ lawsuit: whether the school had shown a pattern of
SHEL LYONS, A PARENT AT CARMEL RIVER SCHOOL IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, SUED THE SCHOOL DEC. 7, 2021, AFTER IT REFUSED TO ALLOW AN INFLATABLE MENORAH (LEFT) AT AN EVENT CENTERED AROUND THE SCHOOL’S “HOLIDAY TREE” (RIGHT). THE LAWSUIT WAS QUICKLY DISMISSED. favoring Christianity.
The Dec. 10 gathering was hosted by Carmel River School’s PTA, which required the permission of administrators to hold the event on school property. Though described as a tree lighting, the festivities also involved decorating the tree, planted on school grounds, with ornaments.
Lyons saw the event plainly as a Christmas tree ceremony and said that while Christmas-themed celebrations and symbols are everywhere at the school, symbols of other holidays, such as Chanukah and Kwanzaa, are not.
The school does make attempts to include Chanukah around the holidays. But when a Chanukah song was sung at her child’s kindergarten holiday music show several years ago, Lyons said, it was introduced as an “Israeli” song, implying to her that the Christmas songs were simply “American” songs.
“I had to explain to them we are not Israeli, my daughter doesn’t speak Hebrew,” she said.
Prior to the tree lighting event, the PTA invited school families to bring an item to decorate the tree “that reflects their family, heritage, and/or faith.”
Lyons said she and her husband “were shocked by the ignorance and offensiveness of that suggestion.” They didn’t want to hang anything related to their family’s Judaism on a tree that’s a symbol of a Christian holiday.
Instead, she asked to bring a Chanukah object — a 6-foot tall inflatable hanukkiah, or menorah — to display alongside the tree.
The PTA and the school refused, saying it did not meet the qualifications for an ornament: that the object be able to fit into a paper lunch bag.
“Large inflatables have never been used on the School campus as part of December holiday celebrations,” Marden wrote in a declaration filed with the court.
The school said it offered Lyons the opportunity to display her inflatable menorah elsewhere “when the use would not conflict with the scheduled event.” Lyons said the offer was made after Chanukah had ended, but if it were made earlier she would have considered it.
To many Jews, the idea of decorating a tree in December with a Jewish object feels odd, if not unseemly. Rabbi Bruce Greenbaum of Carmel’s Reform synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, said he would in general advise congregants against it.
Greenbaum sent his children to the Carmel River School and said he called to voice his displeasure when he heard about the recent controversy.
“Don’t turn your hanukkiah into a Christmas decoration,” he said. “That’s desecrating the hanukkiah.”
He didn’t buy the notion that the tree lighting ceremony was unrelated to Christmas, despite the tree being an existing one on school grounds.
“I told them there’s no such thing as a
tree lighting, which is what they’re calling it,” he said. “You can call it a tree lighting, but it’s just a Christmas tree lighting.”
The Carmel Unified School District did not respond to a request for comment, citing ongoing litigation.
Legally, Lyons — who had asked the judge to declare the Carmel River School’s practices unconstitutional, and to order school administrators to change course — faced an uphill climb from the beginning. That’s according to Charles Russo, a law professor at the University of Dayton who specializes in education law and in 2014 coauthored a paper on legal issues surrounding the celebration of Christmas in public schools.
Russo pointed to the fact that, in the 1989 Supreme Court case County of Alleghany v. American Civil Liberties Union, in which the ACLU sued the Pittsburgh county over displays of a menorah, Christmas tree and nativity scene on city property, the court held that the Christmas tree “is not itself a religious symbol.”
“If the school officials did not have some explicit Christian symbol,” like a baby Jesus or a nativity scene, he said, “I don’t think [the lawsuit] is going to go too far.”
Lyons said she has not ruled out filing a new lawsuit. She also said she had looked into finding a new school for her thirdgrader, but the other elementary school in her district was full. She said ultimately she was dismayed by the school’s response to her complaints, whether administrators are legally protected or not.
If the law allows the school’s approach, “it doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if kids get hurt.”
A version of this article was originally published in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reposted with permission.
Fox News host says Christmas trees are about Jesus — and Chanukah
BY RON KAMPEAS
(JTA) — Chanukah is over, but Jews may have another chance: A Fox News host explained that the Christmas tree represents the Christmas spirit — and Chanukah.
Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt made her interfaith declaration after a man was arrested for allegedly setting fire to the Christmas tree outside Fox News Channel
FOX ANCHOR AINSLEY EARHARDT DURING”FOX & FRIENDS” AT FOX NEWS CHANNEL STUDIOS IN NEW YORK, NOV. 14, 2019.
(JOHN LAMPARSKI/GETTY IMAGES) headquarters in New York.
“It’s a tree that unites us, that brings us together. It is about the Christmas spirit, it is about the holiday season, it is about Jesus, it is about Chanukah,” Earhardt said on Fox & Friends, the morning show she co-hosts. “It is about everything we stand for as a country and being able to worship the way you want to worship. It makes me so mad.”
Chanukah commemorates the rededication of the Jewish temple several centuries before the birth of Jesus, and its main story is about a Jewish sect’s resistance to assimilating into the dominant religious culture. The two holidays, Christmas and Chanukah, are coincidental in their midwinter timings, but in little else.
There is suggestive evidence in the New Testament that Jesus attended a Chanukah event. The party, described in John 10:22, was not the most successful of mixers: Some angry Jews confronted Jesus about his claim to messiahhood, and it almost ended in a stoning. The apostle does not report any tree-burnings, however.
The Christmas tree outside of Fox News has caught on fire.
One man has been arrested in the Fox News tree-burning, which fully engulfed the 50-foot structure shortly after midnight Wednesday. The right-wing network had dedicated its “All-American Tree,” which had been decorated with red, white and blue ornaments, over the weekend. At the Hebrew Center for Health and Rehabilitation, we understand that comfort and familiarity is a key part of the journey to wellness. We also understand that maintaining your religious beliefs and principles is fundamental in continued enrichment of life. Our Kosher meal services allow residents to maintain their dietary requirements throughout their stay with us. At the Hebrew Center, we ensure we follow all principles of Kosher including purchase, storage, preparation, and service.
At the Hebrew Center for Health and Rehabilitation, we also offer a variety of other services and amenities to ensure your stay is as comfortable as possible.
THESE SERVICES INCLUDE: • Passport to Rehabilitation
Program • Long-Term Skilled
Nursing Care • Specialized Memory Care • Respite Care Program • Palliative Care and
Hospice Services
Coordination
OUR AMENITIES INCLUDE:
• Barber/Beauty Shop • Café • Cultural Menus • Laundry and housekeeping services • Patient and
Family education • Life Enrichment
HKC רשכ
For more information on our Kosher program, please contact: DIRECTOR, PASTORAL SERVICES - (860) 523-3800 Hebrew Center for Health and Rehabilitation One Abrahms Boulevard, West Hartford, CT 06117
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OPINION A Troubling Milestone: When FDR Appeased Vichy
BY RAFAEL MEDOFF
Eighty years ago this month, two tiny French islands near Nova Scotia and Maine briefly became the center of international controversy when De Gaulle’s Free French liberated them—and President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded that they be given back to the pro-Nazi Vichy French. The 80th anniversary of this strange and long-forgotten episode, which took place just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, sheds light on the curious streak of appeasement that sometimes infected the Roosevelt administration’s foreign policy.
“Appeasement” is a term that usually is associated with the policy pursued by England and France in the 1930s, when they repeatedly made concessions to Hitler in the naive belief that doing so would prevent a war.
The policy was manifest most notoriously in the autumn of 1938, when the British and French acquiesced in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in the name of “peace in our time.”
President Roosevelt was not directly involved those negotiations, but he pressed both sides to keep the talks going and supported their outcome.
The Roosevelt administration’s support for appeasement was dramatized by the tragic story of Holocaust rescuer Varian Fry. In 1940, Fry, an American journalist and editor, traveled to southern France, which was then governed by the Nazi puppet regime headquartered at Vichy.
Fry organized an underground network that saved more than 2,000 refugee scientists, artists and political dissidents, many of them Jews. Among the rescued were painter Marc Chagall, philosopher Hannah Arendt, author Franz Werfel, and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Otto Meyerhof.
When the Germans and Vichy French complained to Washington about Fry’s activities, Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed the U.S. ambassador in Paris to inform Fry “that this Government can not, repeat not, countenance [him] carrying on activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.”
Fry refused to stop rescuing refugees; so the Roosevelt administration responded by canceling his passport, forcing him to leave France in 1941.
REICHSMARSCHALL HERMANN GÖRING, ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL FIGURES IN THE NAZI PARTY, IS MET BY ADM. FRANÇOIS DARLAN AND MARSHAL HENRI PHILIPPE PÉTAIN, AFTER GÖRING’S ARRIVAL IN ST. FLORENTIN-VERGIGNY, FRANCE, CA. DEC. 1941. PÉTAIN AND DARLAN WERE CHIEF COLLABORATORS WITH NAZI GERMANY.
(NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
St. Pierre and Miquelon, the two French islands off the coast of North America, situated between Nova Scotia and New Foundland, northeast of Maine. The two French colonial possessions had come under Vichy rule when the Nazis installed the puppet regime in 1940.
On December 24, 1941, the Free French—the government-in-exile headed by General Charles de Gaulle—sent a naval force that ousted the islands’ Vichyite rulers. A plebiscite held the following day found 98 percent of the islands’ inhabitants supported the overthrow of the Vichyites.
Rather than celebrate this small but symbolic victory over Axis occupiers in the Western hemisphere, the Roosevelt administration denounced De Gaulle’s “arbitrary” action and tried to convince the Canadian government to restore St. Pierre and Miquelon to Vichy’s control.
The “nasty little incident,” as Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle called it in his memoirs, threatened to upset the administration’s policy of tolerating Vichy rule over French colonies. Washington hoped its policy would persuade the Vichy to be less pro-Nazi. Like other attempts at appeasing dictators, it did not turn out as hoped.
The State Department castigated the liberating force as “the so-called Free French,” indicating that it regarded Vichy, not the resistance, as the legitimate rulers of the two islands.
Vichy officials praised the Roosevelt administration’s stance on the islands as “a severe lesson to the dissidents.” A group of prominent American liberal intellectuals, on the other hand, denounced the administration’s policy of “appeasing undemocratic and pro-Axis governments.”
Praise from fascists and denunciations by liberals created something of a public relations headache for FDR. Shaken by the rising tide of criticism, Secretary of State Cordell Hull implausibly claimed that his use of the term “so-called” referred not to the Free French, but to the ships they had used. Pressed by reporters to elaborate on U.S. policy toward Vichy, Hull said he would not comment further because the matter “was too complicated.”
After months of floating rumors that the Free French would agree to leave St. Pierre and Miquelon, the Roosevelt administration finally dropped the issue, when it became clear that neither De Gaulle nor the inhabitants of the islands were willing to surrender to Vichy.
Washington’s policy of appeasing Vichy, however, continued. After the Allies liberated North Africa from the Nazis in November 1942, President Roosevelt agreed to leave Vichyite Admiral Francois Darlan in power. That sparked a veritable uprising from FDR’s liberal supporters.
The New Republic protested that it “sticks in the craw of majorities of the British and French, and of democrats everywhere, [that] we are employing a French Quisling.” Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau said the Darlan deal “afflicts my soul.”
A delegation of American Jewish leaders met with senior U.S. officials in March 1943. They charged that “the anti-Jewish legacy of the Nazis remains intact in North Africa,” pointing to the fact that thousands of Jews were still languishing in slave labor camps under the continuing Vichyite rule. The camps continued operating until the summer of 1943, and anti-Jewish laws in North Africa were finally abolished only in October.
From the shutdown of Varian Fry’s rescue mission, to the St. Pierre-Miquelon controversy, to the Darlan deal, FDR’s policy of appeasing the Vichy French constituted a stain on America’s moral conscience and a deviation from the high ideals that the war against the Axis represented.
