Mendelssohn’s Tea Pot: How Artists Reinvent the Past, and the Jewish Future

By Jenna Weissman Joselit
Zeek Magazine

Izhar Patkin
JudenPorzellan

Lately, virtually everyone I know who has some kind of association – professional, emotional, familial, religious or intellectual – with the American Jewish community has been reading tea leaves, trying to figure out, in the wake of the Pew Research Center findings, what the future might hold.

I, too, have been reading tea leaves (Darjeeling, anyone?), but the ones I find at the bottom of my tea cup belong to Moses Mendelssohn, the celebrated 18th-century German Jewish philosopher who sought valiantly to come up with a series of strategies to align Jewishness with modernity. Continue article here