The photographer Liselotte Grschebina was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. She and her husband settled in Tel Aviv in 1934. From the 1930s to the 1950s, she took photographs for WIZO, the Palestine Railways, the dairy cooperative Tnuva, kibbutzim, and various businesses. Her work was innovative and startling, portraying subjects through surprising vantage points, strong diagonals, and the play of light and shadow, techniques she had learned in Weimar Germany during the early-twentieth-century revolution in photographic art.
This photograph of a discus thrower refers to the Zionist idea of “muscular Judaism,” in which the “new” Jew would celebrate and cultivate the body, sports, and physical fitness. When Grschebina…
Dos naye lebn (New Life) was a Yiddish literary and political monthly founded and edited by Haim Zhitlovsky and published in New York. Among the topics debated in its pages was the question of whether…
The master silversmith Rötger Herfurth was particularly well known for his Hanukkah lamps, most of which have backplates and rampant lions, a style he popularized and which came to be known as the…