Notes
I want to thank Ruth Ost for reading this essay and for having come home with me and seen all the faces in all of their glory. I also want to thank all of those who came in and out of the Temple Honors office as I was editing this journal for helping me with all of my technical questions about the unfamiliar computers and programs I was using.
1. Laura Levitt, Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (New York: Routledge, 1997).
2. "Changing Focus: Family Photograph and Jewish American Identity," panel discussion, The Rennert Women in Judaism Forum, Barnard College, New York, New York, January 31, 2001.
3. I thank Irena Klepfisz and Susan Shapiro for sharing their responses with me at Barnard. Here as in many other ways their insights remain crucial to my thinking.
4. The books tell a different important tale, but that is another story. For some account of that story, the story of the Great Books, see my introduction to Jews and Feminism, especially 7-10.
5. I thank my brother, David Levitt, for reminding me of how indecipherable this image is. Phone conversation, June 19, 2002.
6. My father's paintings were always a symbol of the intimacy and affection of the greater Levitt family including the generations of students who came to my parents' home to study "Great Books." These students carried precious "Irvs" with them to college. My father's work has been exhibited at numerous colleges and universities over the years, mostly in the dorm rooms of these and other students.
7. Although my father has at various times painted or drawn other kinds of images - landscapes, a few still-lives - the vast majority of his works are male faces, some full-body images, but mostly faces. There are very few female images since these are so much self-portraits.
9. I do need to note that this is a discussion about visual art, painting and drawing and not artistic production in three dimensions. Work with clay or sculpture is different. It is a practice my brother and I have both done and our pieces are on display in my parents' house, but these are minor works. They do not take up the kind of physical or psychic space that the paintings and drawings do. They were also produced outside of the confines of this home. They are high school and college creations.
10. It should be noted that this is not all any of us do. We do more than these neatly scripted gendered roles. Nevertheless this is a site where gender differences have been most pronounced. Although we all work with words, the production of visual images is a uniquely masculine enactment in my immediate family. For an example of my promotion of the arts in my own work and writing see Laura Levitt, "Photographing American Jews: Identifying American Jewish Life," in Mapping Jewish Identities, Laurence Silberstein ed., (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 65-96. This special issue is another example of this move to writing about visual culture in my own work.
11. Shelley Hornstein, Laurence Silberstein and Laura Levitt, ed., Sighting the Holocaust: Contemporary Visions (New York: NYU, forthcoming).
12. It should be noted, as I suggested earlier, paintings and drawings were not my father's only prized possessions. There were also short stories, plays and poems that he had written, and books, lots of books, the beginning of a life-long collection of first and rare editions of mostly twentieth-century American literature. These are some of the books on the shelving unit described earlier in this essay.
13. This was especially evident at the first joint show they did in the early 1990s in Dover, Delaware. At this event, Julie Locke, then a very young child, was able to tell other guests at the opening which pictures were done by which artist. Even she knew. My father and brother are scheduled to do another joint show scheduled for March 2003, at the Delaware Theater Company in Wilmington, Delaware.
14. "Changing Focus: Family Photography and Jewish American Identity," panel discussion, The Rennert Women in Judaism Forum, Barnard College, New York, New York, January 31, 2001.
15. See for example, Susan Shapiro, "The Uncanny Jew: A Brief History of an Image," Judaism, 46.1(Winter, 1997). Susan has been working for quite some time on a book on this topic and she has been kind enough to share chapters of that manuscript with me. We have been discussing the "uncanny" for years and it was her work that inspired my reading of the uncanny in the first chapter of Jews and Feminism.
16. See my reading of the interiors of Larry Sultan's parents' homes for another, and somewhat different, example of the aesthetics of excess in "Picturing American Jews." I also want to note that for my parents these activities have not lessened over the years. They have actually increased. My father's latest creations are miniature images. The production as well as display of these more recent works has only become livelier. As my brother suggested to me, these little images have numerous advantages for my parents. Because they take up less space, they are easy to add to already crowded walls. They are also easier to make more quickly, allowing my father to increase his production. It should also be noted that for my parents being prolific is itself a virtue. Again, I thank my brother for encouraging me to consider these things. Telephone conversation with David Levitt, June 29, 2002.
17. For an excellent account of this kind of Jewishness performed in terms of exceptionalness, see Adrienne Rich, "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity (1982)," Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 100-123.
18. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
19. In discussing this remembered conversation with my brother, he was less convinced of this reading. In fact, he considered this original discussion more an attempt on his part to relate something about his work to me in terms that I would find familiar. He explained that it may have been an effort on his part to help me better appreciate his show. Even if that was the case, it worked. It continues to speak to me. And, as he pointed out, this is not what most interests him in producing and displaying his art work. That is a story only he can tell. What I have suggested here is a partial explanation, something we share as siblings having grown up in our parents' home. Telephone conversation with David Levitt, June 29, 2002.
