by Cieslafdn | Jun 9, 2014 | Rosenwald Fund
A new documentary by filmmaker Carey Lundin, entitled Jens Jensen: The Living Green will be shown at Millennium Park in Chicago on June 19th, with a simultaneous broadcast on the Chicago area public television channel WTTW.
The film is about Jensen, a Danish-born landscape architect, naturalist and designer of many Chicago area green spaces. In addition to Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory and Columbus Park, Jensen designed two parks on the north shore connected with the Rosenwald family. We’ve written about them on this blog. Jensen designed the estate of Julius Rosenwald’s suburban home in Ravinia (which today lives on as “Rosewood Beach”) and was a close acquaintance of Augusta Rosenwald, who has a commemorative boulder in the town of Highland Park’s downtown pocket park, “Jens Jensen Park.”
Lundin’s film looks to be an excellent history of Jensen’s life that also brings out what his work can offer for those designing and improving today’s urban spaces. For more information about the screening in Chicago, go to jenjensenthelivinggreen.org.
by Cieslafdn | Jun 9, 2014 | Connections
Ever since the new Degas/Cassatt show opened at the National Gallery of Art here in Washington D.C. a few weeks ago, I’ve been meaning to check it out. The NGA came up recently on The Rosenwald Schools production when I interviewed Linda Levy, whose grandfather Lessing Rosenwald (JR’s first son) donated a substantial amount of art to the venerable gallery.
Lessing Rosenwald in later years
Photo credit: The estate of Nancy Salazar
Because I had two good reasons to visit the NGA this weekend I decided to make the trip with my editor, Marian Hunter. When I arrived at the gallery, I asked a tour guide where I might find Lessing Rosenwald’s contributions to the museum and she directed me to Room 75 upstairs.
It was only once I arrived at the “Lessing Rosenwald Room” that I realized his donated artworks were part of the wonderful temporary exhibition of works by Degas and Cassatt. Six pieces donated by Rosenwald have made their way into this show.
It’s great to know that Lessing Rosenwald’s contributions to the NGA remain vital and interesting to museum-goers and remain publicly available, as was his wish. Rosenwald also donated many materials to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., and they have a “Rosenwald Room” that is set up to resemble Lessing’s reading room at “Alverthorpe,” his home in suburban Philadelphia (which is now a park belonging to the borough of Jenkintown, PA).
The Degas/Cassatt exhibition is open at the NGA until October 5th, so take the time to visit before then.
by Cieslafdn | May 28, 2014 | Connections
And I don’t mean Julius Rosenwald.
I was at a dinner party Sunday night and was discussing the new work in progress of The Rosenwald Schools which is all about Julius Rosenwald’s father, Samuel, who worked as a pack peddler when he first arrived in Baltimore in the 1850s. Because of this great story, mid-19th century Jewish peddlers are a central subject in the new work in progress (which premiered here at the Washington D.C. JCC on April 13th). One of the guests at the dinner party, Art Allen, said his great-great-grandfather had been a peddler of some renown, and went on to describe a photograph of him, Mr. Isaac Wolfe Bernheim, as a young pack peddler in Kentucky.
It didn’t take long before I realized that I knew this photo well and had actually included in the peddlers section of my new work in progress. I first encountered the image on the cover of Dr. Hasia Diner’s book A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880. Dr. Diner will be in the film, describing Samuel Rosenwald and the fascinating trade of the Jewish peddler. The original photograph lies in the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Louisville, and we licensed it from them for use in The Rosenwald Schools.
A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880
Like Samuel Rosenwald, Bernheim quickly made his way out of the profession of peddler and became a very wealthy man who established the the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest near Louisville, Kentucky. Art tells a colorful version of his great-great-grandfather’s story, which I’ll share with you here with his permission:
As for I.W., he was cranky and short and settled in Louisville after creating his whiskey business in Paducah, Ky., where he and a former Civil War vet called their whiskey I.W. Harper. Last I heard it was popular in Japan. I heard a lot of stories about I.W., many of which may even be true. Someone told me that when Prohibition hit, I.W. sold the whole business. He went into philanthropy and became an advocate of extreme assimilation, once holding a debate with Rabbi Stephen Wise over his (I.W.’s) proposal to change the Sabbath to Sunday and rename synagogue “church.” He committed suicide at age 95 in 1945 by jumping out of the window of a hotel in San Francisco. He left $1 million to each of his five kids, who fought over the money. They were known in Cincinnati circles as “the battling Bernheims.” One of his sons became a famous Johns Hopkins surgeon — Bernard Burnham (many of the kids WASPified their names); a skinny little grandson everyone called Tubby Burnham created Drexel Burnham Lambert. He died a few years ago.
Many thanks to Art for sharing this wonderful coincidence with me.
Arthur Allen is an editor at Politico and a freelance writer in Washington D.C. He’s the author of Vaccine: the Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver (WW Norton, 2007), Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato (Counterpoint, 2010) and The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl (WW Norton, July 2014).
Edit, May 28, 2014: After reading this blog post, one of our recent interviewees, Rabbi Howard Berman shared some more information about Bernheim with us. Isaac Bernheim endowed the first library building on the campus of America’s first rabbinical seminary, the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. This library became the home of the American Jewish Archives in 1948
by Cieslafdn | May 28, 2014 | Film Production
The great American poet and memoirist Maya Angelou has passed away. The New York Times has posted an obituary that includes a video of Angelou delivering the inaugural poem at the 1993 swearing-in of President Bill Clinton.
According to the Times, Angelou had been in poor health for some time, but she appeared here in Washington last month at the unveiling of her portrait at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. We covered the event on this blog.
Maya Angelou speaking in 2007
Photo credit: NPS via Wikimedia Commons
Angelou recorded an interview for the 1993 documentary entitled The Great Depression in which she described growing up under Jim Crow in rural Arkansas. One of the bright spots she talks about was the Rosenwald School she attended (the Lafayette County Training School in Stamps, Arkansas) where she began her love of reading. We are using parts of this marvelous interview in The Rosenwald Schools documentary.
by Cieslafdn | May 28, 2014 | Social Justice Work
In a much-discussed new article in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a compelling case for reparations. The whole article is worth reading, but we took note of a specific passage about one Coates characters, Clyde Ross. Ross, who later became a housing activist in Chicago, was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi and yearned to attend his local Rosenwald School as a child:
Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.
You can read more at The Atlantic. Coates will appear at sixth&i in Washington D.C. on June 12, 2014.
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