Speaking Volumes

Let me first say that I think Yale has consistently had the finest line-up of books - season after season - during the last two decades or more. Their titles have been consistent in quality and interest, ranging all over the intellectual map as far as subject matter is concerned. Yale publishes books for the general reader and the specialist, and also manages to create some of the most beautiful art and architecture volumes in the country.

It's been no different this year. The titles alone tell a story of excellence: Irving Penn: Platinum Prints, Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression, Eyes of Memory, Jewish Women and Their Salons, Ponary Diary and Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama, to mention just a few.

But The Jewish Identity Project by Susan Chevlowe, with additional contributions by Joanna Lindenbaum and Ilan Stavans, is another story altogether; it took me long hours of perusal to finally warm up to portions of it. The book was tied to an exhibit at New York's Jewish Museum, which has since closed, and which usually is an indicator of excellence; but there was something half-baked about the notion behind the project, and especially with what's featured in the early sections.

Identity is at the crux of the 10 photographic and video projects that make up the volume. Though American Jews have often been considered a fairly homogeneous ethnic group, the photographers gathered here beg to differ. Recent waves of immigration to the United States have made things far more complex than perhaps most Jews even know.

These artists - including Dawoud Bey; Tirtza Even and Brian Karl; Rainer Ganahl; Nikki S. Lee; Shari Rothfarb Mekonen and Avishai Mekonen; Yoshua Okon; Jaime Permuth; Andrea Robbins and Max Becher; Jessica Shokrian; and Chris Verene - look at individual communities of Jews throughout the United States, and try not only to dispel stereotypes but to offer new definitions of what makes a Jew a Jew.

It's not a negligible venture in principle, but let's just say that some of the results turned out better than others. The book begins with several cumbersome essays by Chevlowe, Stavans and somewhat later Lindenbaum, which don't set the venture soaring. And the first few artist portfolios - by Bey, Even and Karl, and Ganahl - are dispiriting, even pedestrian in their stab at artistry or sociology, or both.

The book gains a certain sweetness with Nikki S. Lee's staged "wedding" between herself - an Asian - and a Jewish friend. But the photos are few in number and don't seem to yield much of a point beyond their sweetness.

The book falls off again with the next two projects, although begins to gather strength with Jaime Permuth's look at "Carmen's Conversion," which is done in a richly textured black-andwhite. And while its various images tell a story, many of the images have a power all their own - especially in term of their composition - without any need for explication.

The book really soars when we enter Postville, Iowa, and meet members of the Orthodox community there. You may remember that when the Orthodox moved to the small Iowa town to run the kosher meat-packing plant there, a great deal of social friction occurred. The photographers, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, don't get into all that. They just point their cameras and let the paradoxes speak for themselves. And it's not just the paradoxical content that grips you. The sheer color in these images - of the vast Iowa sky, especially - is captivating enough, and then the photos go on to tell all kinds of tales about the people depicted.

The only other section that is as outstanding is Chris Verene's "Prairie Jews." The pictures are wonderful, and sometimes very moving, as are the stories behind them.

I'm not certain either of the sections I've highlighted really address the issue of identity per se. The photos of Jews in the Middle West and far West are simply a version of Jews as exotica, people setting down roots in unexpected places, locales were Jews have always been scarce.

But it matters little that a requirement seems unmet in these cases. I was simply glad to make the acquaintance of these photos, since they lifted the whole enterprise to another level and possess a quality that will stay with me for quite some time.