Sotheby’s has gigantic Judaica auctions every so often, and they often put the items on public display right before the auction. If you time your visit right, it’s almost as good as a museum (except that unlike a museum, it’s only open for three days, and then it’s over). Last time I was there, I […]
Right, yo. Click the image to see bigger. I’ve got nothing at all on this one; as I recall, it hasn’t been catalogued yet. No artist, no location, no date, nothing. So. What are they saying? Bring on the yeshiva jokes.
Today we have: An Open Letter to the Jewish Married Women Who Are Employed in The Millinery Center, and Also in The Garment and Fur Centers. The flyer isn’t dated. I assume it’s sometime in the 30s when lots of Jews were working in these areas, being ministered to by our Nathan Wolf, amongst others. […]
Possibly the best rabbinical business card ever; the rabbi “Gives Fatherly Advice to All,” and on the back, makes sure that you know “Ladies Invited.” Text of front: Tel. CHickering 4-2316 [that’s when you still had to call the exchange, and there were actual live people manning a switchboard] בית מדרש הדגול TIMES SQUARE SYNAGOGUE […]
I’ve been getting too much spam here lately, so I’ve installed a little widget that will ask you for input to prove that you’re not a robot. It asks you to type in a word from a picture; the word is from archives which are being digitised, so you make a small contribution to advancing […]
This caught my eye because it’s just weird to print a newspaper by lithography from a handwritten original. So I went a-searching, and discovered that this was the first Yiddish-language newspaper produced in America. Now the lithography makes much more sense; to produce a Yiddish newspaper you need a newspaper press and a set of […]
This is DR9 R30, but there’s nothing much in the catalogue about it, which is too bad. It’s a token of appreciation for someone from his co-religionists, in Italian, dated Genoa 1956 (click image to see bigger). We’re looking at it because it has a pretty border, more or less; nothing particularly innovative or unusual […]
Presenting the latest iteration of Tefillin Barbie. I’d keep making them like the original ones, but the ones with the long denim skirts are more or less impossible to find for a reasonable price now. I think this one’s quite cute; it’s the sort of outfit bat mitzvah girls wear. She’s available here. Now with […]
A clip from a testimonial,* signed by appreciative members of an Italian community in 1956. In the subsequent sixty years, note how one of the substances in the black ink has spread out around the signature, giving it a sort of halo. Ink can be funny like that. It’s one of the reasons artists use […]
Drawer 9 has a lot of pretty things like this: They’re mostly in Italian or Latin, and they have the most lovely illuminated borders, with coats of arms of cardinals. What they are are testimonials. When you supplied things such as furniture to cardinals’ households in seventeenth-century Rome, they might give you a testimonial, which […]
