The CJM Blog

Ezra Jack Keats, "After breakfast he put on his snowsuit and ran outside." 1962. On February 21, 2013 the Contemporary Jewish Museum hosted the awards ceremony for the Ezra Jack Keats bookmaking competition. An annual New York City school tradition for over 25 years, this was the first time the event was ever held on the West Coast, owing to our hosting of the exhibition The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats . The schools of snow-free Northern California are no strangers to  The Snowy Day , published in 1962 and the  first modern full-color picture book to feature an African American protagonist. Students from San Francisco Public Schools and Bay Area Jewish Day Schools were invited to participate, and o ver 50 entries from 19 schools were entered into the competition. So how was the New York spirit and playful sensitivity Keats was known for interpreted by Bay Area students? Here are some of the winners:

by Dan Schifrin, Director of Public Programs In the second Museum LINK talk, Estee Solomon Gray threw down the gauntlet early: “The link, not the book, is (and always has been) the core of Judaism.” Mashing together educational theory, Talmudic dialogue and social technology, Estee spun out an integrated vision of Jewish community innovation evolving rapidly from a focus on “covenant and commandedness” to one of “community, commentary and conversation.” But even in olden times, she reminded us, Jews “evolved radically linked architectures” of text and community. Crossing the Talmud and the Internet is an inevitability, not a joke. Web 2.0 is an opportunity to experience the next generation of Jewish creativity in real time.