Born in Melitopol, Ukraine, the son of a carpenter, the artist Aleksandr Tyshler studied in Kiev and, after serving in a propaganda unit of the Red Army, continued his education in Moscow. He worked in various mediums: painting, sculpture, graphic design, and theatrical design. Beginning in the late 1920s and continuing through the 1940s, he designed sets for both the Yiddish- and Russian-language theaters.
In the wake of the Russian Revolution and the lifting of restrictions on Jewish publishing, Jewish theater companies revolutionized theater and scene design and experimented with modernist approaches…
Édouard Moyse’s painting portrays the Grand Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court assembled by Napoleon in 1807 to ratify the answers of an assembly of Jewish communal leaders to twelve questions submitted…