Unorthodox Art of an Ultra-Orthodox Community

When Shoshana Golin-Cahn set her sights on attending fine-arts school almost 30 years ago, she did what many Orthodox Jews do when faced with a big decision: She called her rabbi. He told her the one limitation she would face was that she was not to draw live male nude models, because the rabbi felt that doing so would be immodest for a single woman. Growing up in a large Orthodox community in Monsey, New York, Golin-Cahn, who's 53, felt like an anomaly when she decided to pursue fine arts professionally; community members looked at her askance. "It was like art was too materialistic, like I was too concerned with portraying the world around me, what it felt like, the colors and the textures," she told me over Zoom. "People felt like it wasn't frum [religious], like it was too world-based."