Isaac David Knafo was a writer, artist, and activist born in Mogador, Morocco, and educated in Paris. A prominent cultural figure in Morocco, Knafo was well known among the intelligentsia of Mogador for his first book, Les jeux et les rimes and later for his anti-Nazi pamphlet Les Hitlériques. The laws of the Vichy regime increasingly affected the rights and liberties of Jews in Morocco; in 1942, at the urging of the Jewish community, Knafo burned all the available copies of the pamphlet. A sole surviving exemplar was discovered in 1995. Knafo became an active member of the Zionist movement, immigrating to Israel in 1956 and settling on kibbutz Ramat ha-Kovesh. In Israel, he continued publishing poems, stories, and memoirs and exhibited a collection of one hundred paintings in 1973.
In many shtetls throughout Podolye and Volhynia we often find a mound next to the synagogue. Surrounded by a traditional cemetery fence, the mound is known as the Grave for the Bride and Groom. And…
The 1910s were a time of experimentation for Man Ray. Inspired by the paintings of European modernists at the Armory Show in New York in 1913, he began painting in an abstract style, one that…
We’re laughing our heads off:
None of us wears a top-hat
We just go around with heads—or without heads—
But the Rabbi of Uman
Holds up a mirror to the sun.
We laugh our heads off
When a gang comes…