It’s Time We Met: Ashkenazi Heritage at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is a seminar course and enrollment will be capped at around 25 students.

Instructor: Barbara Drake Boehm

This seminar course will consider the artistic and cultural heritage of Ashkenaz as evidenced in the collections and exhibitions of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Focusing principally on the medieval period, we will look at select centers of Jewish culture, such as Prague and Colmar. What do works of art created in Ashkenaz reveal about community life, religious practice, aesthetic sensibilities and Jewish contributions to society? What are the distinctive markers of taste, and what aspects are shared with the majority Christian population? Reading groundbreaking studies by scholars like Vivian Mann and Judith Kogel, we will consider how Ashkenazi heritage has been preserved, what is missing from the picture and how encyclopedic museums like the Met can best present it.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally to students throughout the class.

Barbara Drake Boehm is the Paul and Jill Ruddock Senior Curator for The Met Cloisters, where, in 2019, she organized its first exhibition to focus on Jewish artistic heritage, The Colmar Treasure: A Medieval Jewish Legacy. In 2016, Dr. Boehm served as co-curator of the exhibition Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven, which garnered the Alfred H. Barr Junior award for the best exhibition catalogue of the year and an Honorable Mention among Art Exhibitions from PROSE (American Publishers Awards for Professional & Scholarly Excellence). Prague: The Crown of Bohemia (2005), which won the George Wittenborn Award for its catalogue, was Barbara Boehm's first exhibition to incorporate Jewish culture into the narrative of a medieval cultural capital. She was co-organizer of Medieval Jewish Art in Context (2011–12), featuring The Washington Haggadah, Lisbon's Hebrew Bible and the Rylands Haggadah.

Barbara Boehm publishes and lectures widely and regularly leads a program on Art and the Holy Land for St. George's College, Jerusalem.

A graduate of Wellesley College, Dr. Boehm earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She holds a Certificate in Jewish Art from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

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