PLENTY JEWISH

In her article about the art exhibition “Too Jewish?” Kristine McKenna writes that “the many Jews who played important roles in Modernism--Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko--. . . suppressed their ethnicity” (“ ‘Too Jewish?’ Hardly,” Feb. 2). No doubt many Jews in many fields choose to suppress their identities; however, her choice of these four seminal figures is rather curious.

The many published essays by critic Harold Rosenberg include “Rediscovering Judaism,” “The ‘Jew’ in Literature,” “Jewish Identity in a Free Society” and “Is There a Jewish Art.” The subject of whether Jewish artists were creating a particular Jewish vision was very much a concern of Clement Greenberg as well.

The paper trail of Newman and Rothko is a bit thinner, but there is ample evidence to suggest that, far from suppressing their identities, their works were profoundly shaped by their Jewishness.

In the New York art world of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, with the likes of Rosenberg, Greenberg, Newman, Rothko, Meyer Schapiro, Ilya Bolotowsky, Lee Krasner, Adolph Gottlieb, Herbert Ferber, Alexander Liberman, Philip Guston and many others, one would find it very difficult to suppress one’s Jewish ethnicity. What the “Too Jewish?” exhibition has obviously failed to convey to Ms. McKenna is that ethnicity can be expressed in many different ways.

DAVID SCHOFFMAN

Venice