Unit: Things
Do the Daf baseball cap
While Judaica, in the sense of ceremonial art, is an established part of Jewish museum collections, the material culture of Judaism has yet to emerge as a field of study in its own right. We appreciate all the more the great private collector of Jewish ephemera, Peter Schweitzer, and Grace Cohen Grossman, who has pioneered the collecting of Jewish Americana at the Skirball Cultural Center and Museum in Los Angeles.
The material culture of religion, an emerging field of study, is of great potential interest to the study of Jews and Judaism. One need only look to Jeremy Stolow's study of ArtScroll, with its high production values; the Jewish branding endemic to Heebster culture noted by the Modiya team (Judah Cohen, David Koffman, Rachel Kranson, and Edward Portnoy); Shelley Hornstein's work on Holy Land / Israel postcards; Jeffrey Shandler's attention to the material culture of the Yiddish language; Jenna Weissman Joselit's consideration of the history of Jewish domestic material culture; and the redemptive shopping at nineteenth-century American Jewish charity fairs studied by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett to see what this topic might hold.
While scholars have focused primarily on the material culture of Christianity, the study of other religions is encouraged. We were provoked to think about the possibilities of this area of study by two articles, "Cross Selling: A Youth-focused Religious Brand Finds a Place in a Pop-Culture Temple--The Mall," in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (6 March 2005) and "How do Women Define the Sacred" in Lilith (fall 2006).
- Centre for Studies in the Visual Culture of Religion http://www.aber.ac.uk/visual-religion/index.html"
- Material History of American Religion Project http://www.materialreligion.org/
- Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief
http://www.bergpublishers.com/uk/edito_MReligion.pdf - Colleen McDannell. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.
- Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
- "Art, Religion, & Material Culture in America," syllabus by Douglas L. Winiarski, Department of Religion, University of Richmond, Spring 2004. http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/downloads/syllabi/Winiarski.pdf