Ariel Paige Cohen

Dr. Ariel Berger is a cultural historian focused on American Jewry. She earned her BA in History and Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, MA in Art History at Columbia University, MA in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and MA and PhD at the University of Virginia. She lives in Los Angeles, where she currently holds the Sally Priesand Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (2023-2024). Dr. Berger tells the founding stories of American Jewish museums with women as protagonists. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women were excluded from the highest levels of Jewish communal institution-building because of their gender. Several Jewish women of the early 20th century envisioned art exhibitions that could offer a contextually new kind of belonging and identity to American Jews – one their male peers offered in more conventional realms. The then-contrarian work of these women reverberates into the most established American Jewish museums today, which still work to visually articulate American Jewish identity in a fragmented world, put Jews on the American cultural map, and centralize Jewish visual culture in places of Jewish worship, learning, and practice.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gK8qN100OByhKQashbOnlKXPL8Wo3gxy/view

Available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee, both in person and online. Languages: English.