Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Sex, Miscegenation, and the Intermarriage Debate
I sometimes wonder if the Jewish community’s hysteria about intermarriage is actually sexual in nature, a response to the one-two punch of infidelity—sex outside of the community, and infertility—an…
The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival
Blessing Before the Meal
Let us bless the source of life
that brings forth bread from the earth.
N’vareykh et eyn haḥayim
hamotzi’ah léḥem min ha’áretz.
Sh’ma: Communal Declaration of Faith
Hear…
The Day of Atonement
In 1919, when Kramer painted The Day of Atonement, modernist art depicting Jewish rituals was considered new and radical, especially in tradition-bound England. When the Jewish community of Leeds…
Of the High Priest’s Tribe
An important Jewish genre painter, Kaufman drew inspiration for his romantic depictions of traditional Jewish life from trips to Moravia and Upper Hungary, Galicia and Bukovina and areas of Russian…
Barnett Freedman
Rothenstein was one of the best-known and most prolific British portraitists of the first half of the twentieth century. His style confounds easy characterization. He considered himself both a…
East Side Girl
Gross was known for his wooden sculptures and his focus on the human figure. He first studied art on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when he came to the United States and he later taught there at the…
Porter Nat Gutman, Warsaw
Vishniac’s photographs of Jews in Eastern Europe, which were among the last to document these communities before their destruction in the Holocaust, have become iconic images. The best known of them…
The Travelers
In The Travelers, one of a series of “Mother Paintings,” Marie-Louise Motesiczky depicts herself and her mother, Henrietta (the white-haired woman at right), escaping from Nazi-occupied Austria…
Memories of a Peaceful Time
Emmanuel Evzerichin was one of several Soviet Jewish photographers who documented the battle of Stalingrad. Many of his photographs were unusual in that they focused not on combat, but on the effects…
Untitled, Execution: Babi Yar series. Nizhny Tagil or Leningrad
Felix Lembersky’s three Babi Yar paintings were among the first artistic representations of the Nazi massacre in Kyiv, when, over the course of two days in September 1941, over 33,000 Jews were…
Lower Eastside Façade
Erika Stone’s photography frequently features odd juxtapositions. Here, the face of a woman on a huge advertisement painted on the brick wall of a tenement building provides a striking contrast with…