The Hungarian painter Isidor Kaufmann was born in Arad (now in Romania), where his father commanded an army regiment in the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. Kaufmann studied at the Budapest Drawing School and later in Vienna, where he spent the remainder of his life. Winning an award for his painting The Skeptic at the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873, he would go on to become particularly known for his paintings of Hasidic folk-life and for his genre scenes of Jewish life in East Central Europe, including The Rabbi’s Visit (1898/9), Friday Evening (1897/8), and Young Rabbi from N. (ca. 1910).
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…
[ . . . ] Moreover, the ideal of Torah as an end in itself was never felt to be in opposition to the ideal of Torat hayyim—“the Torah as a gateway to life.” Whatever the logician might argue…
In The Dead Class, the most famous of Kantor’s theater pieces from the 1970s, the main characters of the play are elderly men (who are to be understood as being dead), who return to their school desks…