Habitus

by David Gutherz · 07/08/10

Ronen Eidelman is an artist with roots–to borrow from a popular lyric–on several sides of the sea. Born in New York, based in Tel Aviv, with an MFA from Bauhaus University in Germany, Ronen’s new project attempts an imaginative re-rooting some of Lublin’s dispossessed Jews. In a gesture at once critical and elegiac, Ronen has “returned” a number of photographs of Jews from all walks of life to the houses where their subjects once lived. Each photo is accompanied by a question, which directs itself both to the observer and observed.

Also, for some creative contrast, check out this video posted on Tablet: three generations of an Auschwitz survivors family (including the survivor himself) dancing to some Gloria Gaynor.

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by Habitus · 04/28/10

Last year, Habitus editor Joshua Ellison introduced Mexican American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans to Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky. Soon afterward, the two began a collaboration, re-imagining the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book that was once beloved throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as a vehicle for literary experiment and political commentary.

Once 9:53, forthcoming later this year in Spanish and English editions, is set in Buenos Aires’ historically Jewish Once neighborhood, in the hours leading up to the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center building. As the story unfolds, photojournalist Roli Gerchunoff stumbles across the bomb plot—and realizes that he may have a chance to change its outcome.

Stavans and Brodsky have shared an early draft of the book with Habitus, and in the video below speak about their work on on the project, their reasons for reexamining the AMIA bombing, and their enduring affection for the fotonovela.

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