Maya Balakirsky Katz – författare

This book presents the first full-length study of a vast and complex visual tradition produced, revered, preserved, banned and destroyed by the Hasidic movement of Chabad. This rich repository of visual artifacts provides the archaeological data for an analysis of how the movement consolidated its influence during a period of political and economic transformation and survived its immigration to America in the wake of the Holocaust. As one of the most self-documented and media-preserved modern Jewish movements, Chabad's rich material culture, including the hand-held portrait, the 'rebbishe' space, the printer's mark and the public menorah, afford scholars a wider range of interpretive strategies for understanding the movement and the role of the visual experience in religion.

In the American imagination, the Soviet Union was a drab cultural wasteland, a place where playful creative work and individualism was heavily regulated and censored. Yet despite state control, some cultural industries flourished in the Soviet era, including animation. Drawing the Iron Curtain tells the story of the golden age of Soviet animation and the Jewish artists who enabled it to thrive.  Art historian Maya Balakirsky Katz reveals how the state-run animation studio Soyuzmultfilm brought together Jewish creative personnel from every corner of the Soviet Union and served as an unlikely haven for dissidents who were banned from working in other industries. Surveying a wide range of Soviet animation produced between 1919 and 1989, from cutting-edge art films like Tale of Tales to cartoons featuring “Soviet Mickey Mouse” Cheburashka, she finds that these works played a key role in articulating a cosmopolitan sensibility and a multicultural vision for the Soviet Union. Furthermore, she considers how Jewish filmmakers used animation to depict distinctive elements of their heritage and ethnic identity, whether producing films about the Holocaust or using fellow Jews as models for character drawings.   Providing a copiously illustrated introduction to many of Soyuzmultfilm’s key artistic achievements, while revealing the tumultuous social and political conditions in which these films were produced, Drawing the Iron Curtain has something to offer animation fans and students of Cold War history alike.

In the American imagination, the Soviet Union was a drab cultural wasteland, a place where playful creative work and individualism was heavily regulated and censored. Yet despite state control, some cultural industries flourished in the Soviet era, including animation. Drawing the Iron Curtain tells the story of the golden age of Soviet animation and the Jewish artists who enabled it to thrive.  Art historian Maya Balakirsky Katz reveals how the state-run animation studio Soyuzmultfilm brought together Jewish creative personnel from every corner of the Soviet Union and served as an unlikely haven for dissidents who were banned from working in other industries. Surveying a wide range of Soviet animation produced between 1919 and 1989, from cutting-edge art films like Tale of Tales to cartoons featuring “Soviet Mickey Mouse” Cheburashka, she finds that these works played a key role in articulating a cosmopolitan sensibility and a multicultural vision for the Soviet Union. Furthermore, she considers how Jewish filmmakers used animation to depict distinctive elements of their heritage and ethnic identity, whether producing films about the Holocaust or using fellow Jews as models for character drawings.   Providing a copiously illustrated introduction to many of Soyuzmultfilm’s key artistic achievements, while revealing the tumultuous social and political conditions in which these films were produced, Drawing the Iron Curtain has something to offer animation fans and students of Cold War history alike.

Religion, more than sexuality, cast psychoanalysis in controversy and onto the world stage even as it threatened to dismantle the psychoanalytic collective. In the founding years of the first psychoanalytic periodicals, relational dynamics shaped the psychoanalytic corpus on religion. The psychoanalytic pioneers developed their ideas in tandem even if in protest to one another. Religion is a topic worthy of engagement, not least because the symbolized terrain in the history of religion was so often deployed as a vehicle for motivating, disciplining, or editing out a member of the psychoanalytic community in publication. This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to religion and psychology, including a compelling denouement that reveals new narratives about longstanding rumours in the early history of the psychoanalytic movement. Above all, this volume demonstrates that the first generation of psychoanalysts succeeded in writing themselves into the history of religious thought and sacralizing the origins of psychoanalysis.

Religion, more than sexuality, cast psychoanalysis in controversy and onto the world stage even as it threatened to dismantle the psychoanalytic collective. In the founding years of the first psychoanalytic periodicals, relational dynamics shaped the psychoanalytic corpus on religion. The psychoanalytic pioneers developed their ideas in tandem even if in protest to one another. Religion is a topic worthy of engagement, not least because the symbolized terrain in the history of religion was so often deployed as a vehicle for motivating, disciplining, or editing out a member of the psychoanalytic community in publication. This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to religion and psychology, including a compelling denouement that reveals new narratives about longstanding rumours in the early history of the psychoanalytic movement. Above all, this volume demonstrates that the first generation of psychoanalysts succeeded in writing themselves into the history of religious thought and sacralizing the origins of psychoanalysis.

This book presents the first full-length study of a vast and complex visual tradition produced, revered, preserved, banned and destroyed by the Hasidic movement of Chabad. This rich repository of visual artifacts provides the archaeological data for an analysis of how the movement consolidated its influence during a period of political and economic transformation and survived its immigration to America in the wake of the Holocaust. As one of the most self-documented and media-preserved modern Jewish movements, Chabad's rich material culture, including the hand-held portrait, the 'rebbishe' space, the printer's mark and the public menorah, afford scholars a wider range of interpretive strategies for understanding the movement and the role of the visual experience in religion.