The painter Isaac Dobrinsky was born in Makarov, Ukraine, into a traditional Jewish home and received a yeshiva education. When his father died suddenly, Dobrinsky moved to Kiev to study sculpture. In 1912, he left for Paris, where he remained until his death. Within a year of his arrival, he abandoned sculpture for painting. He and his family spent the first two years of World War II in Paris and then fled to the Dordogne. In the 1950s, he painted a memorable series of about forty portraits of Jewish boys and girls from an orphanage whose parents had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Calvary was not the first time Marc Chagall portrayed the crucifixion in a painting, and it would not be the last. Chagall saw the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as a symbol of Jewish suffering. In this…
Though he also worked in other media, Dmitry Borisovitch Lion preferred to work with ink on paper. His drawings have feathery, broken lines, and sometimes include text, illegible letters, and shapes…
Grace Mendes Seixas Nathan was born in Connecticut in 1752 to a patriotic, literary Jewish family. In 1780, she married the British merchant Simon Nathan, a supporter of the American Revolution who…