{"id":2450599,"date":"2019-10-31T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=315310"},"modified":"2019-10-31T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T22:00:00","slug":"the-star-of-david-tells-its-story-to-the-world-through-aspen-artist-marc-bennetts-collages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/the-star-of-david-tells-its-story-to-the-world-through-aspen-artist-marc-bennetts-collages\/","title":{"rendered":"The Star of David tells its story to the world through Aspen artist Marc Bennett\u2019s collages"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Artist Marc Bennett teaching children with his “The History of the Star of David.”<\/strong>
Courtesy photo<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Artist Marc Bennett crafted his \u201cHistory of the Star of David\u201d as a gift to the Chabad Jewish Community Center on Main Street in Aspen, when the congregation\u2019s new building was opening in 2014.<\/p>\n

The work, which collages together 18 iterations of Judaism\u2019s iconic symbol through nearly 2,000 years of history, has taken Bennett on an unexpected and gratifying journey since then.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never thought it would be more than this beautiful thing to celebrate this building,\u201d Bennett said recently, seated beneath the 8-by-10-foot collage on aluminum in the JCC atrium. \u201cBut shortly after it went up, people started asking about buying them for their homes, for other synagogues, for museums. It kept growing and growing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the past five years, Bennett has made variations of the piece for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, for Sinai Temple in Los Angles and crafted an interactive version for Steven Spielberg\u2019s USC Shoah Foundation. His biggest commission yet is a massive outdoor 16-by-24 version, to be installed in the courtyard of a new cancer center at the Soroka Medical Center in Negev, Israel. (The artist is giving 10% of sales from StarofDavidArt.com<\/a> to the hospital.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also become the centerpiece for children\u2019s curriculum on Jewish history and has brought the artist around the U.S. to speak to students about it.<\/p>\n

The colorful collage juxtaposes historical versions of the Star of David. Images range from an ancient carved stone found in a synagogue the Sea of Galilee to today\u2019s Israeli flag. It includes the image of a page from the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew bible, dating to 1009 Egypt, engravings and seals from Europe in the 17th through 19th centuries, a cemetery stone and the yellow badge used by the Nazis to identify Jews during the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that it was used as a marker of exclusion and hatred, and that it ended up being on the flag of Israel \u2014 if anything symbolized hope and persistence, that was it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A career artist, theatrical set designer and filmmaker, Bennett moved to the Roaring Fork Valley in 2007. (\u201cI came to visit one summer and I was like, \u2018Wow, people actually live here? This is possible?\u2019\u201d the Brooklyn-born Bennett recalled.)<\/p>\n

He bought his home outside Carbondale from the JCC\u2019s Rabbi Mendel Mintz. A donor had given it to the congregation to sell in order to raise funds for the Main Street facility. Once Bennett settled here, he offered to make a piece of artwork for the new building, imagining it would be something small, perhaps for Rabbi Mintz\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

Seven years later, as the opening of the grand new Arthur Chabon-designed JCC was looming, Bennett wanted to make something ambitious enough to match it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw this incredible mountain modern building, so I was inspired to do something more,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

When Mintz and JCC leadership offered Bennett a prominent first-floor wall, facing the entrance, the idea of exploring the history of the Star of David came to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI came up with this idea about the Star of David because it\u2019s one of the most recognizable symbols on the planet but so few people know its journey,\u201d Bennett explained.<\/p>\n

Soon after the opening of the Aspen JCC, Bennett started getting inquiries about reproducing \u201cThe History of the Star of David\u201d and telling the Star\u2019s story. He\u2019s been called upon to talk to students at universities and yeshivas and JCC kids\u2019 programs around the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew when I was making it that it told a story, but I didn\u2019t realize it would be a teaching tool,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Those experiences led Bennett to another creative opportunity he hadn\u2019t anticipated: directing an animated film adaptation of the children\u2019s book \u201cThe Tattooed Torah,\u201d which introduces the history of the Holocaust to children. Bennett is working with film and television legend Ed Asner, who voices the main character in the film. (Mexican telenovela star and part-time Aspenite Fernando Allende is doing it for a Spanish-language version.)<\/p>\n

The creative team for \u201cThe Tattooed Torah\u201d includes Aspen\u2019s Melinda Goldrich, who is an executive producer on the project.<\/p>\n

Amid this recent and prominent work on Jewish history, Goldrich pointed Bennett toward the Ride for the Living, an annual community bike ride from the Auschwitz concentration camp to Krakow, Poland. The event aims to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive by retracing the steps of survivor Marcel Zielinks, who walked from Auschwitz to Krakow when the camp was liberated in 1945.<\/p>\n

Bennett traveled there this year to film the ride with a 21-person film crew.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought it was such a unique and bizarre idea, to do a ride from a concentration camp to this town 60 miles away,\u201d Bennett said.<\/p>\n

But once on the ground, he found a story that will continue and broaden the mission he began with his Star of David artwork. The film, with the working title \u201cI Ride for the Living,\u201d tells the story of the resurgence of the Jewish community in Krakow since it was decimated during World War II and profiles the friendship \u2014 forged through the bike ride \u2014 between a young cyclist from the U.K. and an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor. Bennett is crafting it to raise awareness about more contemporary acts of genocide around the world. For the film he recently interviewed Benjamin Ferencz who, at 99, is the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials.<\/p>\n

Bennett is crafting a film that he believes might tell a larger story about Holocaust remembrance and the power of empathy to prevent atrocities.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan we harness the power of empathy, the way that perpetrators of genocide have marshaled fear and ignorance, bigotry and anti-Semitism?\u201d he asked rhetorically. \u201cIs it possible to convert mere remembrance into empathetic action? It\u2019s bigger than a little thing about a bike ride.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artist Marc Bennett teaching children with his “The History of the Star of David.”Courtesy photo Artist Marc Bennett crafted his \u201cHistory of the Star of David\u201d as a gift to the Chabad Jewish Community Center on Main Street in Aspen, when the congregation\u2019s new building was opening in 2014. The work, which collages together 18 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2450599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-19 10:27:39","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2450599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2450599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2450599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2450599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}