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A nice video from the Philip Mendlow exhibit at the American Jewish Museum.

Amazing Afternoons, an early child care program at the JCC, have an little exhibit with models of Pittsburgh buildings, like the USX Tower, Mellon Arena and the Hilton.

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If you're a member of the Jewish Community Center, you've probably been asked recently to fill out a membership survey. It includes questions about how members use the center, what they think about the staff and the facilities, and also whether they think the JCC is being effective as a center for Jewish life in the city.

The survey got me curious, so I called the JCC last week. I spoke with Assistant Executive Director Alexis Winsten Mancuso, who told me that the survey is part of a larger benchmarking effort by the Jewish Community Center Association. That's an umbrella group for local Jewish Community Centers across the country. The membership survey is just one part of the larger benchmarking effort. It also includes a survey of JCC staff, a program to analyze the finances of the JCC and a look at the demographics of the JCC.

The benchmarking efforts allow JCCs to compare themselves against other JCCs.

“It helps to inform future decisions," Mancuso said.

The JCCA began offering the benchmarking program to local JCCs four years ago.

Mancuso said that 39 JCCs in 43 locations — some JCCs, like ours, have multiple locations — are participating this year. Our JCC is one of 11 participating for the first time. Mancuso said we were only able to take advantage this year because we recently got the infrastructure, like financial software, needed to participate.

The survey end tomorrow. You can take it online here.

Self-Portrait, 1993

David Brooks' column this morning is about two differing views of human character. The "philosopher's view" holds that each of us has a set personality that reveals itself in every situation we face. The "psychologist's view" holds that we behave differently in different contexts. Brooks uses this distinction to analyze "Where the Wild Things Are," the new film adaptation of the classic book by Maurice Sendak:

"At the beginning of the movie, young Max is torn by warring impulses he cannot control or understand. Part of him loves and depends upon his mother. But part of him rages against her.

"In the midst of turmoil, Max falls into a primitive, mythical realm with a community of Wild Things. The Wild Things contain and re-enact different pieces of his inner frenzy. One of them feels unimportant. One throws a tantrum because his love has been betrayed. They embody his different tendencies."

This idea of competing tendencies has been resonating with me this morning as I've been working on a story about the new retrospective of Philip Mendlow at the Jewish Community Center. Mendlow spent decades working and teaching in Pittsburgh, becoming very well-respected in the local arts community. As I've been asking people to describe Mendlow as a person, I've gotten an incredibly rich and contradictory list of adjective: sly, quiet, mischievous, challenging, intense, individual, reticent, prolific, incisive, introspective.

His work shows all these sides. Self-Portrait at Mirror (1960) is sly: what appears to be meaningless color and form up close is revealed to be a close-up on a pair of glasses when seen from afar. Stroke (1998) is intense: a bust carved from pine with a metal bolt under the left temple representing the medical malady of the title.

Brooks writes that the two views of personality offer differing paths to a good life. The philosopher's view requires directly attacking flaws and vices, while the psychologist's view demand a more indirect approach to match the "instincts and impulses" hidden deep within each of us. Art, Brooks writes, is one such approach:

"But it is possible to achieve momentary harmony through creative work. Max has all his Wild Things at peace when he is immersed in building a fort or when he is giving another his complete attention. This isn’t the good life through heroic self-analysis but through mundane, self-forgetting effort, and through everyday routines."

You see this in the Mendlow exhibit. Mendlow clearly used his art to understand himself. This really comes through in one section where a cluster of painted self-portraits from the 1960s sit next to a carved face of King David from 1995, which sits next to a pair of sculptures carved in the mid-1990s of the faces of Hasidic men.

Mendlow's search for meaning and understanding starts with himself, but eventually turns to more collective traditions: the communal archetype of King David, and his family heritage in the Hasidim of Eastern Europe.

Mendlow's nephew Eric Mendlow said those pieces show, "that psychological searching for the self: Who are we? What is our place in the world?"