Showing Results 1 - 10 of 16
Anatoly Kaplan’s painting Pakhar’ both commemorates the lost Jewish world of his childhood and reflects accepted Soviet iconography. The Yiddish inscription that frames the central image reads,…
Iofin’s portrait of his parents, painted before his emigration from the Soviet Union, was a sly protest against Socialist Realism. He painted in the style but parodied it by overloading his picture…
Ḥad Gadya (One Little Goat) is a song customarily sung at the end of the Passover seder. It recounts a sequence of events beginning with a young goat purchased by the protagonist’s father that is then…
Felix Lembersky’s three Babi Yar paintings were among the first artistic representations of the Nazi massacre in Kyiv, when, over the course of two days in September 1941, over 33,000 Jews were…
Shterenberg is famous for a series of paintings he did in 1917 and 1918, which are sometimes known as “hungry still lives.” A single object, such as a herring or a loaf of bread, is the focus of the…
Solomon Mikhoels (1890–1948), a Yiddish actor, director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (GOSET), and later chair of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was an iconic figure of Soviet Jewish…
Tomb of an Israeli Soldier I was one of a series of works painted by Michail Grobman at a time when any sympathetic gesture toward Israel was, for Soviet Jews, an act of defiance. Grobman’s very style…
The Traveler was painted soon after the Russian Revolution, around the time that Marc Chagall was appointed commissar of the arts for Vitebsk, the site of Yehudah Pen’s academy, where Chagall had…
Eric Bulatov created many paintings that paired nature scenes with Soviet slogans, suggesting that the control of the Soviet regime was everywhere, in every corner of its citizens’ lives. In Red…
The Russian Revolution initially lifted restrictions on Jewish publishing, sparking a burst of creativity among Jewish writers and artists. Jewish theater companies experimented with modernist…
