The painter and graphic artist Ben Shahn was born in Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania) and, in 1909, came to New York City, where he received formal training in art. From the late 1920s until about 1950, he worked in a social realist tradition, attacking injustice, prejudice, and brutality. During the Great Depression, he was employed as a photographer by the Farm Security Administration to document the unemployed and the poor, government homestead projects, and rural, small-town life. After 1950, his work became more allegorical and symbolic, and he turned increasingly to producing illustrated Hebrew texts.
This calligraphic print appears in Ben Shahn’s book Alphabet of Creation, based on a tale about how God created the world through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet taken from the Zohar, a thirteenth…
That is how it is with the Jews. They shed many a tear for the past. That they fared better under liberalism does not guarantee the justice of the latter. Even the French Revolution, which helped the…
This page from a kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot). Visualization plays an important part in kabbalah, and these diagrams provided a divine cartography…