cover image Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York

Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York

David Barquist. Yale University Art Gallery, $60 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-300-09057-4

An artisan's life work is celebrated in Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York by David L. Barquist, an associate curator at the Yale University Art Gallery. During the second half of the 18th century, Myers produced many objects for New York's Jewish community and the city's elite. Jon Butler contributes an essay on ethnosocial relations in the new city, and Jonathan D. Sarna zeroes in on the Sephardim of early New York, describing how the city attracted many ""Crypto-Jews, forced converts who were outwardly Christian but inwardly Jewish."" This admirable book, including nearly 200 photographs of rich rococo silverwork of the first order, is the catalogue to a Yale exhibition curated by Barquist, and delivers a fascinating scholarly look at a previously obscure aspect of pre-revolutionary America. (Oct.)