This over-sized vol­ume rewards its read­ers with its strik­ing jack­et and full-col­or plates hand­some­ly match­ing the text. Lead­ing artists’ works are not the famil­iar ones, for the author is a long-time cura­tor of the Joods His­torisch Muse­um Ams­ter­dam; his selec­tions are fresh, drawn from muse­ums world­wide, with empha­sis nev­er­the­less on New York, Israel, Ams­ter­dam, and Germany. 

A six-page time­line, 2000 BCE-2005 CE, fol­lows the clear­ly­writ­ten intro­duc­tion, ​“Jew­ish Art and Jew­ish Peo­ple between Israel and Dias­po­ra.” The book then moves into essays, which often include ref­er­ences to archi­tec­ture and to oth­er artists work­ing at the same time. Each major clas­si­fi­ca­tion— The Image of Judaism, Jew­ish Eman­ci­pa­tion and Art, Holo­caust and its Remem­brance, and Jew­ish Art in the Mod­ern World — includes an intro­duc­tion. Fol­low­ing the dis­cus­sions and illus­tra­tions of ear­ly man­u­scripts and arti­facts, artists rang­ing from Oppen­heim, Lis­sit­sky, Kahlo, hap­pi­ly mix with Pis­sar­ro, Lieber­mann, and Cha­gall, and move on to Zad­kine, Safdie, and then the mod­ernists, such as Shahn, Rivers, LeWitt, for a total of nine plates to the 18th cen­tu­ry, and 60 artists, 19th cen­tu­ry to 2005. 

Both as a hand­some starter book and/​or a gift for the knowl­edge­able, My Grand­par­ents, My Par­ents, and I has a place on any bookshelf. 

Acknowl­edge­ment, bib­li­og­ra­phy, illus­tra­tion cred­its, introduction.