The Jewish World: 100 Treasures of Art and Culture - Alla Efimova, Francesco Spagnolo

A museum with a special mission, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, “rather than defining objects of Jewish daily life as art, investigates Jewish material culture in its own right.” Part of the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, since 2010, the collection, founded in 1962 as the Judah L. Magnes Museum, “asks its visitors to rethink the role of materiality in Jewish culture, and its relation to art.” Now, with The Jewish World: 100 Treasures of Art and Culture (Skira/Rizzoli, $55), readers, too, can savor some of these magnificent objects and reflect on their role in Jewish history. Edited and with commentary by Alla Efimova and Francesco Spagnolo, the director and curator, respectively, of the Magnes Collection, this volume presents full-color photographs of artifacts ranging from amulets to menorahs (one crafted by Dalí, another made of guns, bullets, and steel), family portraits to carpets, Purim plates, and Ketubot from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, crafted in India and Italy. Tracing a geographical and historical span as wide as the variety of its woven, painted, sculpted, and illuminated treasures, this catalog works like a mosaic, assembling the glittering pieces of its larger story.