The pioneering modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein was born on the Lower East Side of New York. He studied art in New York and Paris and settled in London in 1905. Much of his early work, with its explicit sexuality, rough-hewn composition, and indebtedness to non-European sculptural traditions, challenged taboos on what was appropriate for public art and aroused intense controversy. Later he became known for his bronze sculptures of the heads of public figures.
The first version of The Rock Drill, exhibited in 1915, was a white plaster figure sitting astride a real drill, an amalgam of man and machine. The sculptor, Jacob Epstein, originally intended it as a…
David Oppenheim (1664–1736) was the chief rabbi of Prague. Born in Worms, he was the son of a communal leader and nephew of Samuel Oppenheim (1630–1703), financier and war contractor to Habsburg…
Louis Mitelberg drew this cartoon in ironic response to a 1967 comment made by French president Charles De Gaulle in the wake of the Six Day War, in which he described the Jewish people (now that they…