The painter Raphael Soyer emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States with his parents and siblings in 1912. He studied painting in New York and lived there for the rest of his life. He was a staunch social realist, painting scenes of immigrant and city life, as well as portraits of family, friends, and fellow artists. In addition to working in a representational style, he defended it in print against the rising fashion of abstractionism. His brothers Moses and Isaac were also painters.
Soyer’s informal family portrait, Dancing Lesson, has become an iconic image of the American Jewish experience, appearing on many book covers and exhibition catalogs. It was painted about thirteen…
The Spirit was launched in 1940 as a special supplement for newspapers, designed to help them compete with the crime and superhero comic magazines, which were then wildly popular. It ran as a…
Jews first settled in Kaifeng, the capital of Henan province in central China, before 1127. According to scholars, they had come from India or Persia, spoke Persian, and worked as cotton dyers and…