Artists Converge After ‘The Passion’

By David Finnigan
Published on March 31, 2005

Christian children wearing their Sunday best for last week's Easter services understandably could forget, amidst their Easter egg hunts, that the Last Supper of Jesus was a Passover seder.

But in this season of Easter and Passover, connections between the holidays has inspired an art exhibit showcasing Christian and Jewish artists motivated by religious themes. The exhibit is housed in downtown Los Angeles at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Its aspirations and the artworks themselves are impressive, though the effort has suffered from uneven presentation of the artwork.

The "Passion/Passover" exhibit could be viewed as a positive response to Jewish-Catholic tensions surrounding last year's "The Passion of the Christ" by filmmaker Mel Gibson. His film was praised by Catholic church officials, though many Jewish leaders said the film unreasonably cast Jews as villains.

Searching for Cohens

By Keren Engelberg
Published on August 29, 2002

When Andrea Kalinowski was a little girl in Montreal, her father had an unusual ritual. Any time the family stopped in a little roadside town, he would find a phone book and search for Cohens. He would inevitably get excited when he found even one, amazed and proud that his people were everywhere.

However, Kalinowski was more skeptical about her connectedness to Judaism. "What really turned me off from Judaism was that it was difficult to be Jewish," she said.