Told as a series of reflections, of wanderings down the roads of Shekhinah - the female presence - of Purity, Meditation, and Companions, Kabbalah and Art traces the common ground between cultures as diverse as pre-Vedic India, medieval Central Europe, and late nineteenth-century France. An array of seemingly unrelated artists - from an anonymous first-century Buddhist stone carver to Giovanni di Paolo, from Piranesi to Degas to Paul Klee - is encountered and woven together.

And braided throughout, at once separating and connecting, is the majestic presence of the Kabbalah and the correlation between art and this mystic Jewish thought. Kabbalah and art. Leo Bronstein makes vivid the special correspondence between spiritual and ethical aspects of Judaism - of what it means to be a Jew - and the creative drive to make art.