The Empty Couch: Jewish Art from a Jewish Perspective

This webinar is presented by David Raskin, Ph.D.
Date: Monday, October 26, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm PT/ 5:00 pm MT/ 6:00 pm CT/ 7:00 pm ET

Webinar length is approx. 90 mins. The ZOOM link will be sent in a registration confirmation email and will be emailed directly to you a few days before the event.

Judaism’s supposed hostility to images is not an ancient prohibition but a nineteenth-century idea about Jews that Jews came to believe. Beginning from Frédéric Brenner’s 1994 photograph of the New York Psychoanalytic Society gathered around an empty couch, this lecture traces that diagnosis from its invention to its refusal in the work of modern and contemporary Jewish artists.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this presentation, participants will be able to:

Describe the nineteenth-century origins of the claim that Judaism prohibits visual representation and identify at least two bodies of historical evidence that contradict it.
Explain how psychoanalytic concepts can function as analytic tools in the interpretation of visual art and archives.
Discuss the clinical and cultural implications of internalized external diagnosis, using the work of Charlotte Salomon, R. B. Kitaj, and Bracha Ettinger as case material, emphasizing their relevance to contemporary discussions in Jewish art and psychology.

David Raskin, Ph.D., is the Mohn Family Professor of Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches art history and ekphrastic writing. He studied visual art and psychology at Brown University before earning a doctorate in art history. Best known for Donald Judd, a Yale University Press monograph supported by fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, he has contributed to exhibition catalogs from Tate Modern, Moderna Museet, MCA Chicago, the Ludwig Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, and Ca’ Pesaro. Raskin has taught and lectured on Jewish art at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies and wrote on Chagall’s White Crucifixion after October 7 for the Chicago Tribune. He is a member of the board of Metro Chicago Hillel. This is his third presentation to the Association of Jewish Psychologists. www.davidraskin.com