Thursday, May 03, 2007

Exhibitions

Yesterday I stopped by the special exhibit of Spiderman comic books at the NYPL. They were displaying about 10 issues from the 1960s, including one from 1968 where Spidey grapples with students demonstrating on campus.

Then I met a teacher and a friend at the Met. We checked out the Jewish ossuary in the new Greek and Roman gallery. The rooms are nice and bright, but not particularly mindblowing. They had some Roman wall-paintings, though, which were cool.

We also visited an exhibit about Venice and the Islamic world. One of the things I found fascinating was an edition of the Koran, printed in Arabic in Venice in the 16th century. I guess the printers figured that they could do as well with Muslims as they were doing with Jews. But apparently it didn't catch on.

And we talked some more about this. About the open ark, with the Torah scrolls peeking out, and the curvy shofar, and the plate with fish at the bottom. Last week I read up for the class about the Sardis synagogue. By the way, I am pretty sure there is a ligature in one of the Hebrew inscriptions from Sardis, which was not identified correctly in the publication.

5 Comments:

Blogger DafKesher said...

What does the bowl fragment - from Italy - tell us about the half-baked theory Edrei and Mendels presentes in the JSP recently? Apparently we have Jews in Italy with some sort of Jewish connection in the 4th century. Hm.
Also, has anybody written about the bowl, or tried to decipher the (greek?) inscription?

6:21 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

dk- are you familiar with the work of L. Rutgers?

2:38 AM  
Blogger Menachem Mendel said...

Speaking of Sardis, I actually once met Prof. David Mitten of Harvard who worked for some time on the synagogue excavation. My cousin's husband was close to him when he studied at Harvard and I met him at their wedding and shmoozed a bit with him. Too bad I just found out about the Spiderman exhibition, I would have tried to get there.

2:49 AM  
Blogger DafKesher said...

no - do they have a first name as well? And where do I find L?

1:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry. Leonard V. Rutgers is his name. He wrote a monograph on the Jews of late ancient Rome.

2:43 AM  

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