Since his retirement in 2002, Matthew Baigell has continued to research and write about Jewish-themed art and culture in America. His numerous articles have appeared in journals such as Woman’s Art Journal, Shofar, Ars Judaica, Images, and Sh’ma. His most recent books, all published by Syracuse University Press, include Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art (2015), The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877-1935 (2017), Jewish Identity in American Art: A Golden Age Since the 1970s (2020), a study largely of boomer generation artists and their revolutionary iconography, and Heritage: Jewish Artists in America Since 1900 (2026), in which he defined a recognizable Jewish art stream that appeared around 1900 and continues to this day separate from mainstream American art.
Recent Publications:
Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).
Co-editored Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art. (Rutgers University Press, 2001).
Co-author of Peeling Potatoes, Painting Pictures: Women Artists in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia, and Latvia. (Rutgers University Press, 2001)
"American Art Around 1960 and the Loss of Self," Art Criticism, 1998 (in press).
Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
Co-author of Soviet Dissident Art: Interviews after Perestroika. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
"Barnett Newman's Stripe Paintings and Kaballah: A Jewish Take," American Art 8 (Spring 1994): 33-43.