BIBLICAL SCHOLAR JACOB MILGROM'S WIFE, JO, is a midrashic assemblage artist:

Your Trash, Her Treasure
An Octogenarian Artist Finds Biblical Meaning in Discarded Objects
By Daniel Estrin (The Forward)
Published May 05, 2009.

On a recent afternoon, Jacob Milgrom pored over the Book of Ezekiel in his Jerusalem study. The 86-year-old, one of the foremost biblical scholars alive today, took slow breaths and carefully marked the Hebrew text in pencil.

On the opposite side of the house was his 80-year-old wife, Jo Milgrom. She, too, was pondering biblical meaning. In her hands, though, were long, punched strips of old printer paper. “It’s like paper lace,” Milgrom said. “I saw this at the printer’s and said, ‘Don’t throw it out, it’s beautiful.’” Milgrom wanted to set up a fan so that the paper strips would float in the air — a depiction of God’s hovering spirit from the Genesis story of creation.

This is not arts and crafts hobbyism: Milgrom is an assemblage artist. She calls her work “visual midrash,” referencing the Jewish literary tradition of supplementing the biblical narrative with commentary, often in the form of colorful homilies. Traditional midrash was written from the third to the 12th centuries, but Milgrom believes there’s just as much of a place for creative midrash today as there is for the kind of scholarly interpretations her husband writes. She’ll promote artistic approaches to the Bible on May 15 at Temple Israel Center in White Plains, N.Y., when she gives an interactive lesson titled “Through the Looking Glass at Mount Sinai.” And next month, the TALI Education Fund in Israel will launch an online image database of more than 2,000 biblical- and Judaic-themed artworks, collected by Milgrom over several decades.

“Jo’s work is indispensable,” said Jacob, whose Ezekiel commentary is forthcoming in the Anchor Bible series. “He’s the left brain, and I’m the right brain,” Milgrom added. She went on to quote Elie Wiesel: “Midrash is to Bible as imagination is to knowledge.”

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