Born into a wealthy, Russian-speaking family that settled in Berlin after the Bolshevik Revolution, the photographer Roman Vishniac traveled extensively in Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, photographing pious and impoverished Jews. The images he created, which were widely distributed in the postwar period, shaped popular perceptions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. He came to America in 1940 and after the war worked extensively in photomicroscopy, building on his earlier training in biology, zoology, and endocrinology.
Beginning in 1958, Orkin took photographs from the window of her fifteenth-floor apartment overlooking New York City’s Central Park. She wrote that she spent a lot of time waiting “for the clouds to…
Sholem Aleichem’s grotesque story “The Haunted Tailor” tells of a poor, witless tailor who is sent on a mission to buy a milk-giving goat, who turns out to be possessed. In the Soviet Union, it was…
The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord after King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to proclaim a release among them— that everyone should set free his Hebrew…