What is it that keeps Jewish identity from petrifying, from becoming a relic of a time long past? The question of Jewish resilience has perplexed both Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers for centuries. “All things are mortal but the Jew,” wrote Mark Twain in the late 1800s. “All other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” There have been countless historical moments in which it would have been more convenient to allow Jewish identity to die out, if only as a means to survival. But we are determined not only to survive but also to survive as Jews.
In a recent piece in the journal Sapir, Daniel B. Schwartz wonders why Jewish people still exist at all. He notes the interesting history and transformation of the word “resilience,” which comes from the Latin resilire, which means “to rebound” and was understood as a characteristic of an object. It was not a term that was applied to people. People could not be resilient. Materials were resilient if they could bounce back after stress or pressure and resume their original form. They can bend; but they do not break. Somewhere along the line, we began to apply this term to people as well. But the meaning is not quite the same. “As opposed to resilient materials or ecosystems,” writes Schwartz, “a resilient person acts with intention and agency.”
We survive, as Jews, because we act with intention and agency.
It was almost uncanny that I had been thinking about these things when I met the sculptor Jonathan Prince at an art exhibit opening in Florence, Italy earlier this year. In a dimly-lit room full of artists, curators and aesthetes, all floating around the space with Champagne in hand, Prince stood out. Standing well over 6 feet tall with close-cropped hair and a welcoming grin, he’s hard to miss in a crowd. His sculptures are stunning—there’s no question about that—and I was delighted to meet him and chat briefly about his work. But when he made a reference to everything being different after Oct. 7th I was confused. “Are you Jewish?” I asked, realizing I had missed an important detail.
Of course Jonathan Prince is Jewish.
But it means something different to him since Oct. 7th, the day that changed what it means to be Jewish for many Jews around the world. And it means something different for his art as well. His work may not be emblazoned with explicit Jewish symbols, but being Jewish informs everything that he does, and once you know this, you can’t not see it in his work.
A few months later at the opening of the Venice Biennale (which runs until Nov. 20 of this year) I saw his piece “Fissure,” which is part of “The Contours of Otherness,” an exhibit hosted by the Jewish Museum of Venice. “Fissure,” weighing more than 1,000 pounds and crafted from CorTen steel, is a large cube that depicts two mountain ranges split by a deep, dark abyss: a metaphor for the division of families, cultures, and social connections. There is a chasm between the two sides, but they are “from the same block, the same earth, the same people,” says Prince. It’s a show-stopping sculpture, and it’s hard not to be pulled toward it upon entering the space where it is currently held. It commands the room. It asks to be read deeply and critically.
I immediately noticed something in particular: It is the space between the two large sides that is most pronounced. The absence is what speaks the loudest. From the absence, the crack, the fissure comes something from which we cannot turn away. What is it? The piece was created as part of the exhibit’s exploration of the migration of people and the ways in which these upheavals impact identity and understanding of the self. But it’s hard not to see in that space, that fissure, every collective tragedy that the Jewish people have experienced from the beginning of time. It’s hard not to find in the cavernous expanse the secret of what it means to bend but not break. The piece is aptly named: “Fissure.” Sacred Jewish texts like the midrashim draw our attention to the spaces, absences, and ellipses that exist between words and sentences. The words and letters written on Torah scrolls are black fire, but it’s the white fire, the spaces between them, that give us the deeper meaning of Torah. Throughout centuries, even as Jews have moved throughout the world and even as we have adapted to the cultures in which we have found ourselves, that space has been preserved.
The words and letters written on Torah scrolls are black fire, but it’s the white fire, the spaces between them, that give us the deeper meaning of Torah.
We see it in Prince’s piece.
Prince knows a lot about what it means to move and change and adapt. He is man of vast and varied talents and forms of knowledge. This past summer I visited Prince and his wife, art advisor and curator Stephanie Manasseh, at Berkshire House, their home in Massachusetts that also houses Prince’s state-of-the-art studio. Berkshire House is a magical space. A gorgeously renovated 1900s dairy farm, it has also become a place to bring creators and others together to make and have dialogue about art. There’s truly no place like it, and it’s hard to ignore the powerful juxtapositions of art and nature that characterize the property. Two of the massive pieces from Prince’s “Liquid State” series, which explores a conversation around geometric forms transformed and softened through the applied will of the artist, can be seen on the property, which is quintessential Berkshires with its vast expanse of lush greenery. But here, the idyllic green land and endless blue skies are also a canvas for something else: the CorTen and mirror polished marine grade stainless steel of Prince’s piece “G2V.” Driven by the idea that we can focus our attention on the liquidity of light rather than of matter is what drives this piece and the others in the series.
But there’s a unique level of genius in the placement of these pieces in a pastoral setting. They become even more striking in this environment. The movement of clouds in the sky and the shifting of light as the sun moves through them and across the sky itself ensures that the piece is in a constant state of change: the liquidity of light that shines from the gap or break in the piece. I can’t help but think that even this is a metaphor for what it means to be Jewish right now. “We want people to understand how amazing it can be to live with these things,” said Prince. “And when [the pieces] are inside, they’re sort of out of context when they’re that kind of scale.”
One would think from the Prince’s success in the art world that he had spent a lifetime in the field. But while he has done sculpting as a passion for most of his life, he was always reticent to try to make a living at it. He worked for many years as a maxillofacial surgeon before moving on to become first a movie producer, even producing a feature with William Hurt and Robert Duvall, and then a special effects director. He also worked in computer animation, as well as an internet media company and an optical media company, among other pursuits. At his last gig in 2002 before making the official transition into full-time sculpting, he had raised 27 million dollars in venture capital for a streaming media technology he developed. But his return to sculpting was, as he said, “the end of a long dream.”
But his return to sculpting was, as he said, “the end of a long dream.”
Prince started sculpting as a child when his father introduced him to the Jewish-Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipschitz, a family friend, who had fled Europe for the United States to escape the Nazi regime. Later in life, Lipschitz returned to Jewish religious life, abstaining from work on Shabbat and even wearing tefillin at the urging of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Schneerson. The parallel between Lipschitz’s return to Jewish observance and Prince’s own reinvention of his Jewishness is intriguing. Their work together when Prince was young is perhaps foreshadowing. At the time Prince met him, Lipschitz was working on the memorial bust of John F. Kennedy and he asked Prince to help him put some clay on it. “He was doing a bronze casting, and I fell in love with it and Lipschitz fell in love with me and invited me to come and be his apprentice, every couple of weeks for a year.” After that, Prince created a studio in his parents’ basement. “And I never stopped sculpting,” he said.
Still, the path to art as a profession was a long one, full of many twists and turns and reinventions. “I thought I’d be a famous sculptor in five years. It didn’t work out that way exactly. It really took five years to sell the first piece, and it took 10 years to get any recognition. In 15 years, the practice began expanding.” But “it took Steph to really introduce it to the world.”
Prince’s wife is the force that has helped to drive not just the success of Prince’s work, but also his return to Jewishness. Manasseh, born to a Sephardic/Israeli Jewish family in Montreal, is an art advisor and curator, and she met Prince when she was looking for artwork for a client and discovered Prince’s work. The living space of Berkshire House is in part a testament to her work with Jewish artists, as one of the walls of the living space is covered by a massive Wall Drawing by Sol LeWitt on permanent loan from the LeWitt family and their foundation. Manasseh curated an exhibition of LeWitt’s works for the Jewish Museum of Belgium and consulted on the recent show in Amsterdam. But of Prince’s work she reflects: “I came here, and I said, there’s so much beautiful work here, and hardly anyone knows about you. It’s time to introduce your work the world.”
Manasseh understands the nature of artists and the workings of the art world well. As the founder of Accessible Art Fair, a 16-year project committed to giving underrepresented artists a platform in upscale environments, she has a history of bringing together some of the most important movers and players in the industry and has showcased some of the most significant emerging artists around the world in cities including Tel Aviv, New York, and Brussels, where she and Prince will be opening another studio and art space called Maison Berkshire. So when she discovered Prince’s work and saw his reluctance to self-promote, she knew exactly what to do. Years later, Prince is redefining the way people see and collect art—directly in contact with the artist.
Over a beautiful outdoor lunch of salmon grilled by Prince, I asked him about being Jewish. “With the last name Prince, nobody ever thought of me as Jewish,” he said. “So there’s good news and bad news because people not knowing that I’m Jewish means I get a lot of people saying things like, ‘that cheap Jew’ in front of me, and I say, ‘Hey guys, I’m Jewish, and you’re fired.’”
“You fly under the radar,” I responded, which is really what hooked me in the first place—the idea that someone who has increasingly become more Jewish over the past year, and whose work is so strongly infused with Jewishness, could so easily pass as non-Jewish.
“It’s good and it’s bad,” he said. “It allowed me to not really identify so much because I didn’t have to, because it wasn’t pushed in my face. But Oct. 7th was a slap in the face, and the following antisemitism was the real slap. I think Oct. 7th was really important, because for the first time ever, I had a strong connection to Israel. Suddenly it actually meant something to have some attachments to Israel.” But even when it came to this realization, Manasseh played a critical role.
But Oct. 7th was a slap in the face, and the following antisemitism was the real slap.
“I think that if I wasn’t with [Stephanie], I would have thought, oh, my God, this is horror. And, then sort of just gone on with my business. But knowing how it affects people and family, and having that direct connection was different. I saw Stephanie suffering, and that made me suffer alongside her. And then when antisemitism started raising its ugly head again, it just reminded me that we’ve always been hated, and this is just another great excuse to talk about it. Now it really felt like something. And so identifying as Jewish for the first time in a long time was different for me, and powerful.”
“Is there Jewishness in your work?” I asked the question even though the answer was already clear to me.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Prince. “There’s me completely and so yes, of course, there’s the Jewishness of the work as much as my cultural upbringing has allowed me to be who I am today. You know, one of the beauties of art … is that no matter what I’ve done, it shapes the conversation for me, and I’m allowed to investigate all the things from all of the disciplines that I’ve looked at and studied and that have interested me, and so as an artist, I’m a professional manifester of ideas into structure. My studio is a laboratory and it’s a laboratory where I go through ideas, no matter what they are, whether they’re science or spiritual or material, or, you know, from a philosophical and from a material point of view. It’s a beautiful profession to have, especially when you’ve had a varied life, because it can all come together and be meaningful.”
In the year since the events of Oct. 7th, the question of what it means to be Jewish has been answered in competing ways. But one answer that keeps rising to the forefront of these dialogues is that to be Jewish today means to embrace the Jewish value of putting things that are good and meaningful into the world. It’s about doing everything with intention and excellence, creating things that will last: a legacy. This is one reason that Prince decided to do the piece (“Fissure”) for the Jewish Museum in Venice.
“I’ve never wanted my work to be about politics or religion or anything else. I just wanted it to be about what it is for me. And I thought, especially now, this would really be a very political type of statement.” Prince recalls thinking about all the followers he had amassed, and what placing such a substantial piece in a Jewish museum might mean, how many he might lose. “And I said, I don’t care, all of a sudden I feel Jewish, and I would like to make a statement about what I’m supporting.”
Prince’s work explores many themes but the common thread that runs through the work is integrity. While some artists have their work made by others and then simply make an addition at the end to call it their own, Prince doesn’t do this even though it’s more economical when it comes to both time and finances. Everything is made in his studio, which is not common. “Who’s going to have a studio [like mine] where they can build [a piece] and not cast any part of it or have it made, and bend all of the metal from plates of steel and do it by hand and care about it?” Prince’s commitment to excellence extends to every detail of his work. “We polish to 100,000 grit because we really want to push this idea that we’re doing the best that the human hand and spirit can do. And that’s what these works are so much about. And if you look at it culturally and what we [the Jewish community] do and how we care about life and education and music and culture—it goes back to our roots and what we’re brought up to be.”
Prince’s practice and his life are one and the same. “The three most important principles I stand on with my life are love, open heartedness and creativity, and those things are what I’m trying to explore in all of this work. Integrity is crucial, and that’s why these pieces are made here and not by somebody else.”
“The three most important principles I stand on with my life are love, open heartedness and creativity, and those things are what I’m trying to explore in all of this work.”
What Prince and Manasseh have created with Berkshire House is a powerhouse of art and innovation. And every bit of it is infused with what it means to be Jewish. Historically, Jews have always cared about education and intellectual pursuits. We care about books and music and art and philosophy. The intersection of the artistic and the intellectual has long been a space where Jews thrive. We’re curious. We love learning. The value of questions as opposed to answers is built into the very structure of Jewish thought. And isn’t that what art is—a snapshot of a moment in the intellectual and creative process?
What Prince and Manasseh have created with Berkshire House is a powerhouse of art and innovation.
In the world of sculpting, Prince has found his final home. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t constantly reinventing himself through his work. His newest project is a collaboration with the Medici Archive Project that delves deep into the historical and intellectual legacy of the famed Medici family in Florence, Italy. Prince has long been fascinated with alchemy, “an ancient practice that lies at the intersection of science, mysticism, and transformation—mirroring the Renaissance era’s thirst for knowledge and discovery, which the Medici patronized.”
Through his research with the Medici Archive Project to explore alchemical texts previously hidden from public view, Prince examines “the philosophical implications of the creation and transformation of knowledge.” His newest work, “Opus Alchemicum,” in its final stages of production, is the culmination of this research.
The concept behind “Opus Alchemicum” draws on the roots of epistemology—how knowledge is created and passed down through generations. Just as the biblical “Tower of Babel attempted to unite disparate voices in a common pursuit, Prince’s sculpture reflects the convergence of diverse ideas … an architectonic structure that stands on the brink of balance, where chaos and order coexist, and the line between spirit and knowledge blurs.” Ever a man of changing times but also inspired by classical Renaissance innovation, Prince is merging “ancient alchemical principles with cutting-edge technology,” using artificial intelligence (AI) “to reimagine how art can emerge from the intersection of human creativity and machine learning.” It’s a convergence of art, technology and science.
The piece, which will be displayed eventually in Florence, is made of individual steel blocks, “meticulously assembled to evoke a sense of both magic and structure. Each element, like a fragment of knowledge, contributes to the whole, while simultaneously embracing the unpredictability of form.” The sculpture is a unique combination of materials and concepts, “provoking wonder at the delicate interplay of chaos and order, tradition and innovation.” It reflects on the human desire to parse through the mysteries of the world and makes a “bold statement on the future of creativity.”
Resilience requires that one be both flexible and unbreakable.
Resilience requires that one be both flexible and unbreakable. It sounds like a paradox, but it’s not. One must bend and move and transform in order not to break. This is what it means to be Jewish today; maybe this is what it has always meant to be Jewish. I return to the moment at the party when I met Prince, when he said that everything is different for him after October 7. Many of us have expressed similar sentiments; we are no longer who we were. But while many of us simply long to return to the previous state, Prince has the gift of adapting to the changes in our world, both good and bad, and using them to create things that matter. Perhaps there’s nothing more Jewish than this.
Monica Osborne is a former professor of literature, critical theory, and Jewish studies. She is Editor at Large at The Jewish Journal and is author of “The Midrashic Impulse.” X @DrMonicaOsborne
