A new art exhibition titled 'Golden Age: Nostalgia for the American Jewish Century' has opened at the Altneu, an Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The show features seven artists, including Jacqueline Kott-Wolle, whose oil paintings depict scenes of ordinary American Jewish life from the 1970s through the 1990s—an era she and others describe as a 'golden age' of comfort and visibility. The exhibition was curated by Anne-Marie Helwaser and organized by co-chairs Diana Gordon and Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, who is also the synagogue's rebbetzin. It responds directly to a rise in antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, which many Jewish artists say has made their work unwelcome in mainstream cultural spaces.
This exhibition matters because it represents a deliberate reclamation of Jewish creative expression within a religious institution at a time of heightened communal anxiety. By hosting contemporary art in a synagogue basement, Altneu challenges the exclusion of openly Jewish and Israeli artists from secular galleries and museums. The show also taps into a broader cultural conversation, sparked by a 2024 article in The Atlantic, about whether the 'Golden Age of American Jews' is ending. It underscores how visual art can serve as both a nostalgic record of a vanishing era and a defiant assertion of identity in the face of rising antisemitism.