Mark Podwal is another Jewish artist who was obsessed with golems. Podwal, who died in 2024, was a self-trained artist who also practiced medicine as a dermatologist. For years he drew op-eds for The New York Times, and his work, which often featured Jewish symbols and themes, is featured in major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jewish museum in Prague and Berlin. In 1977, Elie Wiesel admired one of his op-ed drawings, a drawing about how France had just released the terrorist responsible for the Munich massacre at the summer Olympics, and reached out to Podwal. They became close friends and collaborated on a book, The Golem. After creating the illustrations for The Golem, Podwal had the idea for a golem exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1988.

When Podwal created the illustrations for The Golem, he had not yet visited Prague. His son, Ariel Podwal, recently told me his father fell in love with Prague once he visited in the 1990s, and would go to Prague six to eight times a year. “He had his name on the member seat at the Altneuschul. He made a documentary on the Jewish cemetery in Prague, so he went often; he had a big exhibition in the Jewish museum in 2012. Any project he could do there he did.” Mark Podwal felt his art was understood in Prague.

As Elisheva Carlebach writes in the introduction to the book, Reimagined: 45 Years of Jewish Art, Mark Podwal,“With his art, Podwal has addressed themes that reach into the heart of Judaism, of Jewish history, and of the magical city of Prague. The collection you see here [in the book] is literally inspiring: it breathes life into ancient forms, potency into dusty artifacts, color and shape into the invisible and amorphous.” Perhaps the act of Rabbi Loew breathing life into the golem, which is akin to the act of the artist breathing life into his or her creation, and which is what Podwal does in so many of his works, is what appealed so much to Podwal about the golem legend, and why he returned to it so often.

In so many of his works, Podwal breathes life into Hebrew letters, depicting them as magical, as potent, as animated and alive. He returns again and again to the motif of Jewish texts coming alive, the letters dancing from the pages. In “Mahzor”(1992) Hebrew letters and figures of animals and Jerusalem float and rise from the pages of a prayer book, in “Burning Books” (1981), Hebrew letters float out of the books, rising into the sky, taking on a life of their own, in the same way that Hebrew letters float up from the roof of the Altneuschul synagogue in “The Old-New Synagogue “(1980) and in “The Dream of Rabbi Loew “(1982), they float from the clock of the Jewish town hall in Prague, and coalesce into the floating, rising figure of the golem.

These drawings attest to the power of letters, of language, to create life, just as in the golem story itself, the Hebrew alphabet plays a powerful role in the golem’s creation. In the golem legend, the writing of the Hebrew letters Aleph, Mem and Tav on the Golem’s forehead is what animates him, and the removal of a single letter, Aleph, flips the meaning, from “Emet,” or “truth,” to “Met,” or dead, and snuffs out the golem’s life force. This part of the golem story always seemed to me a clever play on words/letters, an example of a Jewish love of riddles and words, and a testament to the power of language. In Podwal’s golem drawings that appear in Golem, he focuses on Hebrew letters, animating them. As Elizabeth R. Baer writes in The Golem Redux, Podwal’s “emphasis on letters, words, the tools of story, underscores the importance of the imagination and its creations in the legend of the golem and in Judaism.” Indeed, we are the People of the Book, and Podwal often draws books in which the letters rise from the page as if alive.

Podwal’s drawing “Combining Letters,” (1982) makes reference to how in medieval commentaries, there are instructions for creating a golem which involve combinations of Hebrew roles, with particular arrangements of letters necessary to conjure the golem.

And Podwal often focuses on the beauty of Hebrew letters in his non-golem drawings, such as in “Letters” (1982) in which he draws Hebrew letters, and the quill a scribe uses, and the yad we use to read the letters of the Torah.

In his art Podwal also breathes life into Jewish ritual objects and celebrates how in Jewish practice, we make the past come alive through the rituals we enact each year, such as in his drawing “Seder” (1991), in which the seder table physically flows into the Haggadah, into his drawing of the pyramids.

This drawing mirrors how in celebrating Passover, by re-telling the story of our exodus from Egypt, we make the Haggadah come alive, as if we ourselves were slaves taken out of Egypt. At the seder, borders between past, present and future blur, in the same way that Podwal makes the Jewish past come alive in his art. Indeed, he breathes life into the ancient legend of the golem.

In 2017 the Berlin Jewish Museum held a golem exhibition, and Podwal was represented with seven ink drawings of the Golem from The Golem, (1982) for which he collaborated with Wiesel. In these drawings, Podwal seems interested in the relationship between Rabbi Loew and the golem, between creator and his creation. In “Rabbi Loew and the Golem in the Old-New Synagogue” (1982) the two stand facing each other in the shadows of the Altneuschul, as if sharing a private heartfelt moment, and in “Moonlight Shadows,” (1982), the only sign of the golem’s presence is the shadow that appears besides the shadow of the Rabbi. The relationship between creator and creation appears to be a close, mysterious and significant one.

Podwal also created several gouaches of the golem for the children’s book he wrote and illustrated, Golem: A Giant Made of Mud, which portray the golem not as fearsome, as many artists have depicted the golem, but as vulnerable. These are actually my favorite golem depictions of his. “Rabbi Loew with the Golem” (1994) depicts a moment where the rabbi blesses his creation with a spoon.

The golem is painted with incredible tenderness. This golem embodies the fragility and fallibility of the moment of artistic creation. Podwal seems to identify with the golem here, rather than with the creator, or at least one could say he is extending his empathy to the golem. Perhaps it’s fair to say he identified not only with Rabbi Loew, with being a creator, but with being in the position of the golem, being created by a higher power and not sure of one’s purpose. One can see this same vulnerable golem in Podwal’s “Golem with the Castle on His Head” (1994).

Witness the scared expression in his eyes; this golem doesn’t know his own strength. This is the golem as shlemiel. Here the golem doesn’t know his own power, doesn’t realize he has uprooted a castle in his wake and that’s it now on his head. His hands look meaty, hanging at his sides, soft, floppy and useless. The expression emanating from his eyes suggests surprise, befuddlement. Most of Podwal’s other drawings are mystical, clever, deceivingly simple and elegant. These golem gouaches are different; they are tender, heavy with emotion and empathy for the golem. What a mark of an artist to extend empathy towards what we would otherwise fear.

Another artist whose works similarly portray a golem who is not fearsome but vulnerable is the Chicago artist Judith Joseph, who recently had a retrospective at the Northbrook library in a suburb north of Chicago. In the retrospective, which testified to her remarkable range in her work, were three of her golem pieces, one of which was exhibited in the 2021 Jewish Art Salon “Golem in Brooklyn” exhibit. In her woodblock print “The Golem Dreams of Flying” (2018) one feels sorry for the golem, who wants to fly but is tethered to things that also tie human beings down—money, sex, work/responsibility.

His heart and brain are empty and he seems powerless, confounded. As Joseph writes, “The Golem has no soul. He doesn’t understand why his heart and mind are empty. He reaches for wholeness that never comes. He is filled with static and noise; he trembles with rage and flutters with yearning.” It sounds like we have much in common with the poor golem, or that some aspect of the golem is within us.

There’s one more artist’s creation of the golem that I want to mention, because of its parallel’s to Podwal’s golems—California artist Joshua Abarbanel’s sculpted wood golem. One, it is made up entirely of Hebrew letters, like Podwal’s work, emphasizing the importance of letters to the legend. Second, it evokes the same sense of re-animating the past that I feel in Podwal’s work.

Abarbanel was commissioned by the Berlin Jewish museum to create a golem for its 2016-2017 exhibition. After that, his golem was on view at the Jewish Museum in Worms as part of an ongoing exhibition about the Jewish history of the region. Worms is the location of the earliest-known written account of how to make a golem, written by Eleazar of Worms. In October 2025 the work was acquired by the City of Worm for its Jewish Museum. In an interview with the curator, Susan Urbanne, Abarbanel spoke of what it was like for him to visit and see his golem creation in Worms (this quote is taken from Abarbanel’s Instagram):

“I felt hallowed, haunted, hollowed, and vaunted. Walking down Judengasse towards the synagogue is to journey back through time. There is a desire to listen to the stones of the streets and buildings as if they speak for the people who lived here for centuries before me—eating, sleeping, studying, praying, working, laughing, and crying. There is a sense of mournful prayer, of resilient beauty and erudition, of great joy and tremendous pain, seemingly in the past yet simmering just below the surface today. To be in the museum descending the stairs of the exhibition space down to the basement and to find Golem at the bottom is to discover a womb in time. It is also a tomb that is eternal and yet, according to its origins, perhaps only temporary. The work can exist in this space in a way that feels, as my grandparents would have said, ‘bashert.’”

Coming face to face with his own golem creation, the boundaries between past and present blur. Creating art operates like a time machine. And that’s the connective thread to these artists’ golem creations–re-creating the golem is a way of engaging with the collective memory of the Jewish people, of not just remembering the past, but dissolving boundaries between past, present and future. Creating art about the golem is a means to journey back through time, to engage with Jewish memory and cultural inheritance, for the artist and for those that view the art. The golem is part of our collective memory and mythology, part of the stories we tell about ourselves and a reflection of our deepest fears, doubts and desires.

The first is the work of the late Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, whose 36 hand-stitched embroidered panels portraying her experience surviving the Holocaust in Poland as a young girl is currently at the American Visionary Museum in Baltimore. Krinitz only started creating these panels when she was 50, and had no formal training, but was a seamstress for many years. These panels are simultaneously exquisite and devastating. She portrays her life before and after the Nazi invasion of her Polish village of Mniszek. Here is a panel depicting the day in September 1939 when Nazis first entered Mniszek, shattering her idyllic childhood. As her hand-stitched caption says, “They stopped in front of my grandparents’ house, where one got off his horse to rough up my grandfather and cut his beard as my grandfather screamed.”

Her story of survival is so moving and the panels testify to the beauty of the human spirit and the power of art to flourish despite the cruelty men are capable of. (I am writing a longer piece about this exhibit for Lilith Magazine). All the panels have the feeling of fairytales, with their combination of child-like innocence and the darkness lurking in all fairytales, and the panels look so lovely, with their detailed depiction of flora, but at the same time they portray utter horror and heartbreak, including this panel in which she says what will be the final goodbye to her parents and siblings as she flees her childhood home and escapes with her older sister, carrying their belongings in a bag on their backs.

Here is a close-up of some of the faces, so you can see the level of detail:

Turning to contemporary artists, Caren Garfen lives in England. She specializes in meticulous hand-stitching, a painstaking process. One of her series is called “Selection,” and features her hand-stitching the name and description of a Holocaust victim, within a magnifying lens, beneath a black and white photo of them before the Holocaust.

There is something so intimate about hand-stitched words. I felt this also when viewing the hand-stitched captions underneath Krinitiz’s panels. Garfen’s hand-stitching, with its association with domestic crafts, makes one think of home, of comfort, the very opposite of the dehumanization of the Holocaust, and the mechanization of murder. Garfen’s hand-stitching combined with the photos makes the loss of these tender lives feel personal. The people in the photos look so vivacious and beautiful, and individually, the photos look as if they belong on someone’s mantel with other family photos. We aren’t used to seeing Holocaust victims this way. Her hand-stitching the description below each photo makes these feel like home portraits, as if these were our relatives, and in some sense they are. Am Yisrael Chai. When amassed together on a wall, one is viscerally struck by the juxtaposition of this personalization of these stolen lives with the sheer number of these portraits, too many to belong to one family.

Garfen is working on at least two other series which details current acts of hatred against Jews. In these, one can see echoes of the same kind of violent anti-Semitism and rhetoric that was used in the Holocaust and in the years leading to the Holocaust. One series is called “Pinpoint: Network of Hatred,” in which she hand-stitches labels describing incidents of violence and hostility against Israelis since October 7. Each label takes an entire day to stitch. For another series, “Moral Compass,” (2024) she hand-stitches a description of a contemporary act of anti-semitism inside of a compass. Again, this series has such emotional weight because of, sadly, the sheer number of these hand-stitched compasses, making one feel that the world hasn’t learned anything in the years since the Holocaust.

And then there is the beautiful woven tapestry by Chicago-area artist Berit Engen, whom I have written about before . In her linen-yarn tapestry, “Six Yellow Tulips in a Wilted Urn” (2012), this simple image commemorates the six million Jewish lives murdered in the Holocaust, while providing a sense of calm and solace.

The choice of flower, says Engen, “honors the righteous gentiles (especially the Dutch) and makes us reflect upon the courage it takes to conduct oneself morally and ethically in face of danger.”

And finally, here is another evocative weaving by Engen, “The Sounds of this Somber Day” (2012), a visualization of the sounds of a Yom HaShoah memorial service.

Whereas the other two artists use text and image in their works, the imagery of Engen’s weavings conveys what words cannot.

Malcah Zeldis, whose family emigrated from Russia to America in the early twentieth century, is considered a folk art painter. She only started seriously painting in her 40s. She often painted Jewish ritual life in her signature colorful, flat style. Born in New York in 1931, she grew up In a Jewish neighborhood in Detroit, moved to Israel for nine years when she was 18, and then settled in New York.

In the Foreword to a book about Zeldis’ work, Moments in Jewish Life, The Folk Art of Malcah Zeldis, written by her daughter Yona Zeldia McDonough, Lee Kogan, Director of the Museum of American Folk Art, writes, “In an exuberant style, Malcah Zeldis has captured the vigorous spirit and aesthetic beauty of Jewish religious observance and practice in both the home and the synagogue. Her personal memories centered around family and neighborhood life extend through a broader framework built within the context of the emigration of her family in the early twentieth century from the shtetls of eastern Europe. The paintings resonate with an authenticity that is both convincing and deeply moving.”

When I look at her richly detailed painting of the seder, I want to be at that warm, haimish table full of extended family, aunts, uncles, mothers holding babies, and young children.

In the book Moments in Jewish Life, Malcah is quoted as saying, in reference to why she painted a painting of Hank Greenberg, the baseball player, “There was always a kind of insecurity about being Jewish in my family. The traumas inflicted by life in Europe left their scars.” She explains that, as a result, Hank Greenberg became a savior figure, “it was as if his triumphs would protect even humble Jews from the terrors of anti-Semitism.” Indeed, in her Hank Greenberg painting, the figure of Greenberg, and the baseball field, floats above a Jewish family sitting around a table, safe in the interior of their home.

I think, from that same impulse, she made paintings of seders as a bulwark against anti-Semitism, a way to celebrate how she felt safe being Jewish in the U.S. This is a wholly joyous seder – there’s a reason I didn’t select to post Nicole Eisenman’s disturbing seder painting, which puts the viewer in the spot of the person at the head of the table, looking down at one’s thick meaty hands straight out of a Guston painting. The Jewish people are under enough duress right now – Eisenman’s is a masterful painting but not a comforting or life-affirming one. Zeldis is sharing fond memories of celebrating the seder with her family and this positive spirit pervades the painting.

Celebrating Passover is a way we connect to the generations before us. We say that we were slaves in Egypt. We eat specific foods to make us remember the bondage of our ancestors, to make us experience the bitterness ourselves so that we can then appreciate our freedom. The Seder table is a powerful symbol of how we continue as a Jewish people to survive, to overcome hatred and efforts to murder us. Families in Israel are still setting the Seder table in the midst of a war, and the threat of rockets, and the deaths of soldiers. By participating in the seder, we continue to build the fabric of the collective memory of the Jewish people, and at the same time, we continue to create familial memories, stories and traditions future generations will pass on.

Malcah painted several versions of her family seder table. She said, “I paint the Seder over and over because, as a child, it was my favorite holiday. I always put the same people—the members of my family—in my Seder pictures, which is a way of drawing them close to me once again.” May you feel the warmth of your loved ones this Passover, even if they are not physically with you at the seder table. Chag Pesach Sameach.

The most well-known version of the golem story takes place in 16^th century Prague, in which Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the chief Rabbi of Prague, created the Golem from clay from the Vltava River in order to protect the Jews from anti-Semitic threats and blood libel accusations. The Rabbi brings the clay golem to life by placing a “shem” on a piece of parchment in its mouth, or writing the Hebrew word “emet” (truth) on its forehead. The golem proceeds to protect the Jews in the ghetto in Prague and performs physical labor for the Rabbi. But one day the golem gets angry and starts to destroy things. Rabbi Loew either pulls the shem out of the golem’s mouth, or removes the “aleph” from “Emet” on its forehead so that it reads “Met,” for death, deactivating the golem. The remains of the golem are said to still be hidden in the attic of the Altneuschul (Old New) synagogue in Prague.

For several weeks, the Jewish Art Salon has had an exhibit at the Jewish Art Museum in Philadelphia, “Fallout: October 7 and the New Antisemitism,” which closed today. In the exhibit, twenty-nine artists from four continents responded to rising antisemitism with new or existing work. While there is an incredible richness in the diversity of the styles and mediums, I noticed that two of the works alluded to the figure of the golem.

One of these golem works is by New York-based artist Tobi Kahn, who, in addition to his many other works, including gorgeous ritual objects, has been creating paintings evoking the golem since the 1980s. He describes his long-standing interest in the golem to me as an “obsession.” “I believe,” he says, “when you create a piece of art, as soon as it leaves your hands it becomes your own thing. That’s what a golem is. You can create something with all good reasons and people can interpret it in all different ways. That’s fascinating. [The golem has] been a touchstone for me over the years, and I constantly go back to it.”

Kahn’s golem painting in the Jewish Art Salon’s “Fallout” exhibit is called “Shaburh II”:

This golem face is haunting to look at. Created in the wake of October 7, Kahn says he was thinking of how when “someone punches you in the face and you are bewildered.” He was also inspired by the work of Philip Guston and death masks. After October 7, the question “is anyone going to come help?,” was “very much on my mind.” When I said I found the image haunting, he said that was fitting, because he created the work post-October 7 in reaction to feeling “haunted that there was little we could do, that we need help from above, somehow.” Kahn told me that Philip Guston’s early work has been very influential. His “SHABURH II” painting reminds him of a specific Guston work, one of several that Guston made in the wake of his father’s death, an image of which he sent me via text:

Kahn’s pre-October 7 golem works are very different in nature from “Shaburh II”. In an older well-known painting of Kahn’s, OTZA II (1987), he focuses on the generative (as opposed to destructive) aspect of the golem.

“Otza II” was exhibited in the 1988 “Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art” exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. In this painting, an ochre-colored rock formation suggests, in Kahn’s own words, “the finger of God drawing a golem into the world—an allusion to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling with its depiction of God creating Adam.” This work is part of Kahn’s body of work depicting bodies of water and “the close connections between body and landscape” in an abstract pictorial language.

Another of Kahn’s golems focuses on the protective nature of the golem. In a video walk-through Kahn made of his solo exhibition (his 70^th solo exhibition!), “Memory & Inheritance: Paintings and Ceremonial Objects” in 2024 at the Museum at Eldridge Street in the Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York City’s Lower East Side, he explains the genesis of his painting ATSYZ (2012):

As he explains in the video, his beloved mother, whom he was very close to, was buried in Jerusalem.

“When I went to the cemetery [to see my mother’s grave],” he says, “I saw the shadow of a tree, and the image here looks like a golem, from the golem from Prague. When Jews had problems, they always prayed to God to get saved. This looks like an eye and a mouth, and it made me feel like there was somebody protecting our mother. These were little stones [the small red circles] that were put on the stone next to my mother’s grave. It all came together. In my mind, I wanted the blessing from my mother for this exhibition--this is the closest I could get to her, was at her cemetery.”

In all of Kahn’s golem creations, he always focuses on the head and face of the golem. I asked him whether he is at all drawn to the part of the golem myth in which the golem becomes destructive. “As an artist,” he says, “I am trying to make work that heals the world. Sometimes it is more obvious. Sometimes I look at it, and it’s about we need saving. Sometimes the [golems] are bloody looking. Sometimes uplifting. It all depends. The story of the golem starts very hopeful and then gets less hopeful. That fascinates me. I believe artists create work and it becomes its own piece. That interests me as well. What makes the art stands out is it does something for everybody. I am hoping [my art] does (save the world). Everything in life can be that way [mirroring how the golem was created with good intent]: you do things for a good reason and you never know what happens. I am interested in creating a golem to help, that’s what interests me, not what happens when it doesn’t.”

“Over 40 years —-every time something different [about the golem] interests me. I create one when something happens and then I realize this is my new way of looking at it. Or an altered way. It’s like when you have conversations with people. You hear something one day, you think of the golem as redemptive–when you hear something one day [that’s] a disaster, you think what went wrong. I really appreciate that the golem came to do something good-what happened at the end [in the myth] is a separate issue, but it’s also how people reacted to it. “

“Frankenstein has been done so many times—from different vantage points. The golem is more profound than that. . . Sometimes you throw up your hands and hope God will save us, save the world, but it’s not that simple. We are golems ourselves. We can do the acts that save us.”

In Kahn’s work, there’s this interesting dichotomy between the idea that we need to create a golem and the idea that this redemptive power lies within us. Perhaps being an artist, and portraying golems in art, is a way to express the golem within.

The second work in the “Fallout” exhibit that alludes to the Golem myth is “Blood Libel,” by New York-based artist Joel Silverstein, another artist obsessed with portraying golems. Silverstein has made many works featuring golems, typical of other contemporary artists drawn to the subject. This isn’t merely a passing interest, as the image of the golem fundamentally resonates with his vision of being an artist.

In “Blood Libel,” (2025) one of two works in the exhibit, Silverstein invokes antisemitic stereotypes in his portrait of two Jewish men with Stars of David etched into their foreheads.

As the exhibit catalogue states, “the artist asserts the connection between the medieval accusations of Passover ritual slaughter concerning Christian children, and modern accusations of genocide levied at both Israel and Zionists.” The images are “related to stereotypical images of what antisemites expect Jews to be--evil, greedy, cheap, avaricious, ugly, big nosed, all those things that Jews are accused of, as in a Der Sturmer illustration— lascivious world-dominating predators who prey on blond Chrisitan women. It’s mixing metaphors, that of blood libel and golem. Ancient and modern Jews branded with the star.”

The original golem had the Hebrew word for truth, “emet” engraved onto his forehead. The idea was that when one erased the first letter, aleph, it became the word “met,” or “death/corpse.” Silverstein explains, “The changed word then stands for the duality of life and death, creation and destruction. I put Jewish stars in the painting, evoking World War II, the yellow stars worn on clothing, on passports, but looking like the numbers tattooed into the skin. Are the figures golems? I guess they are.” By transforming these two tropes of anti-Semitic figures into golem-like figures, he is transforming the Jewish victim into the Jewish superhero.

This actually reminds me of a painting by the British artist R.B. Kitaj, “The Jewish School (Drawing a Golem)” (1980), which was in the Jewish Museum’s 1988 exhibit on the golem, and is written about in the catalogue by Emily D. Bilski. Bilski writes that Kitaj’s painting is based on a 19^th century German antisemitic watercolor by G.E. Opitz (1775-1841) called “Die Judenschule (The Jewish School)”, in which he portrays a classroom in which students are misbehaving, and one student is drawing on the blackboard “a bearded Jew kneeling behind a pig, the antisemitic motif of the Judensau.” (Note, I looked up what “Judensau” is, because I was unfamiliar with the term, and it’s German for “Jews’ sow,” which refers to antisemitic folk art appearing in Europe from the 13^th to the 16^th century, portraying Jews in obscene contact with a pig, usually found on churches.) Kitaj depicts the boy drawing a golem at the blackboard, transforming an antisemitic symbol of Jewish oppression into a “motif of redemption.” This is similar to how Silverstein takes antisemitic notions of blood libel and caricatures of Jews and transforms them into Jewish superheroes/golems.

“If you take away the last 60 years,” says Silverstein, “few Jews possessed overt political power during the past millennium. That’s why there’s this horror of Israel. It represents Jews with real power, who determine their own fate in their own land with actual political ramifications. Many people are uncomfortable with the very concept. It demonstrates a double-edged sword, the Golem as a protector and monster. He is both Superman and Frankenstein at the same time.”

In his painting “Superman Breaks Time,” (2025), Silverstein depicts the physical meeting of golem and superhero.

Silverstein explains his creation of this work. “In the 80s, when my wife and I went on a concentration camp tour of Germany and Eastern Europe, at Dachau, I did a pen and ink wash drawing of the ovens. I thought about it and then it started popping up in my work. As a background in this piece, I drew one of the ghetto transport areas from a photograph. Superman here is an apocalyptic and Messianic King David figure. . . It’s inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Angel of History,” a mysterious figure breaking time, blowing the ruins of everything away with his wings. Corrupted history will be redeemed, and it will be great. . . [T]he angel blows evil capitalism and Fascism away. I was taken with that imagery, as an apocalyptic, impractical and new kind of quasi-religious parable. Next to Superman, there is a golem figure, strong and muscular, but corpse-like as well.”

He based this central golem figure on images of corpses from the Holocaust. “It’s the interaction between old death and new life and a new time that is about to happen,” says Silverstein. “The golem here is an outsized, giant figure. It’s this marriage of opposites, life/death, creation/destruction, morality/murder, all those things.”

This image of Superman and the golem is one he keeps returning to. “I started to do these in the 2000s, way before October 7^th ,” he says, “envisioning a world for Jews in a new state of consciousness. Then October 7^th and its aftermath happened and everything seemed very apocalyptic and the image of the American Jew was thrown back to Ground Zero. So, here we are. It’s actually a hopeful image in spite of all the trauma.”

“Golem 4” (2025) is another work Silverstein created post-October 7. He was inspired to make it after Israeli hostage posters were being torn down in New York as soon as they were put up.

Explaining the genesis of the work he said, “Forget the posters. Why don’t you--the Anti-Israel protesters--just put an actual Jew up there on the wall and be done with it? That is what you really wanted all along, isn’t it? It was clear that the intent by Progressive protestors and Pro-Hamas activists was not really political, but merely antisemitic.”

The golem face in the center, depicted as if in a “Wanted” poster, is from the seminal 1920 German Expressionist film, “The Golem: How He Came into the World,” directed by and starring Paul Wegener. “Star of Redemption” is a Jewish modernist book published in 1921, by Franz Rosenweig, who died before World War II. There is a five-pointed star from the film, “The Golem,” with scenes and typography from the film surrounding the golem face. The painting seems to reflect a similar artistic impulse to that in his “Blood Libel,” transforming an image of victimhood into an empowering one, morphing from victim to golem.

This diptych work of Silverstein’s, “The Golem Maker” (2017) was created pre-October 7, and I wonder if its bold, bright colors and pastiche of references reflect a pure optimism untinged by despair that is no longer present after October 7.

The diverse juxtaposition of symbols and figures from pop culture, Jewish history, the Bible and Jewish mysticism create a complex iconography. Silverstein explains the references: “The figures on the left holding ray guns are taken from a 1950’s science-fiction magazine, “Amazing Stories.” To the right is the Golem Maker himself, wearing a World War I gas mask. In a way, the mask is protective gear, much like the High Priest’s raiment, shielding him from contamination and direct contact with the sacred. Below him is a model of the Second Temple. Plants and a marble table are painted from memories of my parents’ home, sold over 30 years ago. An Egyptian mummified head rests next to a temple, a reference to the Exodus and a symbol of resurrection. Perhaps this is the Third temple as cited by the Prophet Ezekiel, when Jews will be restored in their own land. A squatting figure references Adam, the first man from Genesis. The large, main figure lying upside-down is a direct reference to Rosso Fiorentino’s “The Dead Christ with Angels”(1525-1526), invoking the Christian story of Jesus and his resurrection, but essentially Judaizing it. There is also a model of the Altneuschul in Prague, the actual synagogue site of the golem’s origin myth. To the right are images of both Dr. Frankenstein and Boris Karloff’s monster from the 1931 movie, giving their blessing. I did several on-site drawings in several old synagogues to get the right feeling, then incorporated them all. Lots of iconography, arches, pillars, stained glass windows, light pouring in. It is a history painting created so you can make your own narrative.”

Silverstein mentioned to me that the estate of artist Mark Podwal, together with the Elie Wiesel Foundation, has recently created a prize for Jewish Art (I will write about Podwal’s golems, as well as those of other contemporary artists, in my next post), and that this year, the third prize winner was Maxwell Bauman for his sculpture, “Emergency Golem.” In this work, Bauman created a small monster figure made from Legos. In case of emergency, you break the glass. As Silverstein says, “It’s pure superhero invocation as a message to ourselves and to our enemies. We go back to these historical images in times of cultural distress for a reason. It is mythic memory, but it is also a summoning.”

As Bauman states on Instagram, “[My piece] expands on that tradition of having a protector ready when the Jewish people need to defend themselves. This tiny figure is certainly easy enough to destroy and rebuild if / when it goes berserk.” It’s ironic and darkly comic. If only golems were so easy to build, and so readily available as a bunch of clay-colored Legos.

This golem doesn’t look at all threatening or capable of destroying our enemies. Maybe Jewish humor, and the artistic impulse to create ‘something from nothing’, is the golem readily available within all of us.

Nestled in one corner of the exhibit, are four works by three British Jewish artists—Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud and Leon Kossoff—all in muted tones of brown, grey and cream, and one by Francis Bacon. These four artists were part of the so-called “School of London,” a loosely affiliated group of London-based figurative painters in the second half of the twentieth century which also included David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj. Their styles differed, but all were devoted to depicting the human figure in a time dominated by abstraction.

At first these works seem quiet and unassuming. Their colors (disregarding Francis Bacon’s screaming face which I think beats Munch’s in terms of radiating levels of horror and anxiety) are muted, in tones of brown, grey and cream. They are relatively small, not vivid and radiant like Sol LeWitt’s abstract or Rothko’s mesmerizing “Untitled” work at the Yale gallery across the street, again which I wrote about in my previous Substack).

But if one looks closely at them, standing before them for a while, one can see they are poignant and full of emotion. Here is a photo I took, attesting the universal appeal of these works, and how the paintings, particularly those by Auerbach and Kossoff beg you to stand, and look, closely:

Indeed, I really wished there were more than just these few works by these artists in the exhibit. The description of the exhibition online seems to promise more works by these artists than what’s included. The first sentence online states, “Twentieth-century Britain saw the emergence of some of the most distinctive and influential artists of modern times, including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and Francis Bacon.” One would think based upon this introduction that there would be more works by Auerbach, Freud and Bacon (there are several of Moore’s and Hepworth’s, including a surprising ethereal drawing by Hepworth).

Similarly, the introductory wall text to the exhibit, which is only three paragraphs in all, devotes two sentences to these artists: “At the same time, Britain became a haven for émigré artists and intellectuals fleeing authoritarian regimes. They brought their own traditions and perspectives, informed by exile and displacement.” So, based upon this intriguing introduction, I expected to see more paintings from these artists. (Maybe they aren’t in the permanent collection, I wondered?) In any event, the exhibit made me want to see more work by these amazing artists.

Francis Bacon’s work, “Study of a Head,” (1952) is the outlier here in a few ways. First, he isn’t Jewish (surprise!) but an Irish emigree. Second, his portrait is loud, visceral and unsettling, full of extreme, heightened emotion. The man seems to be in a hospital or mental institution bed and screaming in either physical pain or mental anguish. The frame of the bed is bright yellow. Also, this is not a painting of a specific person, but a symbol or archetype, a “haunting embodiment of human suffering and the fragile line between creativity and despair.”

Next to it is a painting by the Jewish British painter Lucian Freud (1922-2011), a grandson of Sigmund Freud, who was born in Berlin in 1922 and emigrated to England with his family in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. This painting, “Girl in a Dark Dress” (1951) seems to be of his first wife, Kitty Garman, as it resembles the woman in his paintings “Girl with a White Dog” (1951-2) and “Girl with a Kitten” (1947) [neither are in this exhibit] which were of her. He often painted portraits of his family members. As he said about his paintings, a bit cryptically, “The subject matter is autobiographical. It’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really.” This painting, with its smooth surface, is in shades of grey and brown. The young woman’s eyes look luminous and her expression, her distant gaze, is sad and pensive.

Then there are two paintings side-by-side by Jewish painter Frank Auerbach (1931-2024). I have never seen his work in person before. I was surprised by the thick visceral layering of the paint. While the colors are muted, there is energy in the thickness and shmearing of the paint (I was trying to think of the right verb, and shmearing came to mind). As with Action Painting, one can imagine the physical motion of the painter as he created these swirls, though obviously more restrained than Pollack’s wide energetic motions.

Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931. His parents sent him to Britain in 1939 to save his life in the onslaught of the Holocaust. They stayed behind in Germany and were both murdered in Auschwitz. There’s a small painting here of his entitled “Portrait of Leon Kossoff” (1955).

Kossoff was Auerbach’s close friend and fellow British Jewish painter; they took art classes together taught by British painter David Bomberg from 1947 until 1953. In the introduction to a book on Auerbach, art critic Robert Hughes writes that having been exiled to England at 8, and then “orphaned by Hitler soon afterwards, Auerbach is possessed by filiation.” Perhaps this obsession with filiation, his having had to flee his homeland as a little boy, is why he chose to paint Kossoff as, what looks to me at least, like a lost, little boy.

As is Auerbach’s trademark, the surface is impastoed: paint is thick and layered onto the surface, as if the paint has become sculptural, as if he is not painting a portrait but using paint to breathe life into the boy. The paint swirls and oozes, and still at the same time manages to evoke the sadness and loneliness of a forlorn little boy. Auerbach was likely thinking of himself as an orphaned boy, leaving his parents behind forever when he left Berlin for England.

Similarly, in Auerbach’s “Seated Figure II,” (1961) the oil paint is thick and layered, smeared and encrusted, the figure in the chair taking on the three-dimensional aspect of sculpture.

It’s amazing how this layering of paint can convey the tremendous isolation of this figure. It reminded me of Giacometti’s sculptures of the human figure, such as Femme de Venise II (1956), (though she is standing), something about the lumpy texture, and the way the depiction limns the border between representation and abstraction.

Next to Auerbach’s “Seated Figure II,” is “Seated Figure” (1960) by the British Jewish artist Leon Kossoff (1926-2019), whose portrait Auerbach painted in “Portrait of Leon Kossoff” (1955). Unlike Bacon, Freud and Auerbach, Kossoff was born in England. This is a close-up of a seated figure, with a similar style to Auerbach’s of layered, thick creamy paint in earth tones of umber, black and red.

Again, it’s astounding how impasto, these thick brushstrokes and smears, can give the feeling of a sad, lonely figure, hands clasped, in need of an embrace. Here is a close-up so you can see the texture:

As with Auerbach’s paintings, I can feel the emotions Kossoff felt while creating this painting, the gestures of his arm moving back and forth in a fevered way, as he tries to capture the anguish of the subject. This figure doesn’t seem to have a gender, but when I looked online for more paintings by Kossoff, I found “Seated Woman” (1961), which is in the same palette and whose position, with seemingly clasped hands, resembles that of this figure.

The Jewish experience in the twentieth century, like the human one in general, is full of pain and turmoil, physical suffering and mental anguish. And yet the Jewish experience, and art made by Jewish artists, can also embody joy, and an embrace of life, as seen in the four paintings at the Yale University Art Gallery that I wrote about last week.

It’s comforting to find out, as I read more about Kossoff after my visit, that late in life he turned to the subject of cherry trees. In these paintings of cherry blossoms, as a Tom Teicholz wrote in a March 2022 Forbes article about a posthumous exhibit of Kossoff’s work, “there is a lightness that appears to speak to a journey from his earliest dark paintings to acceptance and hope of spring.”

Here is one of those paintings, “Cherry Tree Winter” (2007).

This shows how his palette changed later in life, from a muted, earthy palette to a pastel one, and from vigorous to calm brushstrokes. He is aware of the darkness in the world, of the suffering and tragedy of the Holocaust and the discomfort of post-World War II England, but he is painting here with lightness, with a sense of peace. It’s a painting that seems appropriate now, as we all look forward with expectation to spring, and with the hope in our hearts of eventual peace. And it’s a reminder that in a world of stress and unknowns, it can be helpful to go out into nature and focus on its beauty.

I’m reminded of this quote by poet Dana Levin which she said (impromptu!) in a poetry workshop at Yetzirah in Asheville, North Carolina last summer, which I included in a July post about artists at Black Mountain College: “We need the message of the robin. Be local. Be in person. . Be with art, making it, encountering it—it is so crucial to keep hold of your natural ecstasy and not let this moment paralyze you or make you feel what you have to say doesn’t matter. The most subversive thing you can do now is write about a tree, an authentic poem about love or nature, not ignoring this moment but how to do it in this moment.”

First off, there is Wall Drawing #681E, by the late American artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), which greets you as you enter as it’s right behind the check-in table. This is not the first installation of this work; the first installation was in Madrid in 1996. This current installation, done in india ink and color ink washes, was in 2021. As the wall text says, it’s a “wall divided vertically into four equal squares separated and bordered by black bands. Within each square, bands in one of four directions, each with color ink washes superimposed.” This piece is so striking and energizing. It’s taller than human height and takes up the entire wall. The colors and combinations are vivid and bold. The lines seem to shimmer and move like electric bars of light and it literally wakes you up when looking at it, readying you to see the works in the rest of the museum.

On the third floor, there are two large paintings by mid-century American Jewish artists, in the same room. Artist Helen Frankenthaler’s “Island Weather II” (1963), an acrylic painting, makes me think of a sunrise over a beach. The egg-yolk yellow, which runs off the canvas, feels like the sun is warming your face. The cerulean blue evokes a tranquil ocean. The painting was likely done during one of the artist’s summers in Provincetown and one can feel, looking at the painting, the radiance of being in that coastal town, or really any coastal locale, on a warm summer day.

Right near Frankenthaler’s work is a gorgeous untitled oil painting on unprimed canvas from 1954 by the late Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko (1903-1970), just about the same size as “Island Weather II.”

A golden rectangle seems to float within the bright orange top half of the painting. Standing before the painting, I feel like I’m immersed in warm liquid sunlight. The surprising color combinations are so visually pleasing, it’s hard to move away from this luminous work. It holds you in its thrall.

Finally, there is a work by Rothko’s co-Abstract Expressionist, Adolph Gottlieb . In 1943 Gottlieb and Rothko co-authored a letter published in The New York Times, which was the first formal declaration of the concerns of Abstract Expressionist artists. It is thought that Gottlieb’s “Burst” series, which started around 1957, helped lead the way for the development of Color Field painting, which Rothko’s work exemplifies. “Hot Horizon” seems to me to be a bridge, perhaps, from Gottlieb’s pictograph paintings to the “Burst” paintings. He had been struggling to find a new way to express himself in art, a new language, in the wake of World War II, and came up with the pictograph paintings, which he started painting in 1941, and created until 1951. He described his new approach of creating pictographs: “My whole conception is primitive—of a certain brutality. I think life is a mixture of brutality and beauty.”:

But “Hot Horizon,” above, is a decade after the end of the war. While there are black scrawls reminiscent of the automatic drawing in his pictographs, this painting is full of the bright colors that his pictographs lacked. The band of warm orange at the top suggests the setting of the sun on the horizon. To me, this painting is suffused with a positive, playful energy. It reflects a consciousness that yes, there is brutality in the world, but here, for now, let’s focus in on the beauty. It’s a fitting thought going into Shabbat, with Israel bracing for war. There is solace and hope in focusing on warmth and beauty.

These figures of maternal happiness resemble his many sculptures of graceful circus figures--another of his obsessions--of tumblers and acrobats dangling from each other’s bodies.

Sometimes, the subjects merge, as in “Baby Balancing,” and mother and child seem to be actual acrobats.

In his sculptures of mothers and children, their connecting bodies seem to form a circle or oval in space, suggesting they are in an eternal, loving state. All I knew of his sculptures and drawings was their joviality, their lightness, their joy.

What a shock then to see his sculpture “In Memoriam: My Sister Sarah, Victim of Nazi Atrocities (ca. 1950s) for the first time at the Eskenazi exhibit. The work literally stopped me in my tracks.

The sculpture is life-size, so there is an energy, an aura, as if the mother and child are exuding life-force. In contrast to his sculptures of joyous mothers with children, here the mother’s body and the child’s body make one figure, not separate ones. The mother’s body curves slightly, sheltering her child.

Unlike his sculptures of circus figures and mothers playing or dancing with children, this sculpture conveys stillness. The wall text says that this bronze sculpture is modeled after the original 1947 wood one, which is at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and that in it, “Gross memorializes his sister Sarah Welzer and her fourteen-year old daughter Mirele, who were murdered in the Holocaust. . .When the wood version was exhibited at the Associated American Artists Galleries in New York in fall 1947, the press release stated that the sculpture symbolized ‘the sculptor’s grief for the whole world in his memorial to his sister who was tortured by the Nazis.’”

One would not know without the title that this is a work referencing the Holocaust. Instead of portraying the horrors of the Holocaust, the barbarity what happened to his sister and niece—I’m thinking of the writhing figures in the Miami Holocaust Memorial, which I wrote about here---Gross memorializes the lives of his sister and niece, not their deaths. He chose to show a mother holding her child against her chest. The mother’s face looks a bit sad but peaceful. The child is calm.

Only by knowing the context of the work, as clued in by the title, does one realize that Gross made a choice to remember his sister and her daughter in a loving embrace, rather than depicting his sister and her daughter in any pain or distress. But after reading the title, this awareness of context makes one read the mother’s face differently; her peaceful face now looks as if she is expressing a dignified acceptance of her fate.

Here is an image from the Eskenazi exhibit catalogue (published by Yale University Press) of the original wood version of the sculpture. It is made out of Cocobolo wood, which he liked to use. He was known for using the technique of “direct carving,” selecting blocks of wood or stone and discovering the subject and structure as he carved. He did do prepatory drawings though, before carving into the wood or stone. I can imagine that the effect of seeing this sculpture, with the warmth of its wood, is different from viewing the bronze version. (After thirty years of the direct carving method, removing material from solid blocks of wood or bronze, he turned in 1957 to the additive process of making bronze sculptures.) This 1947 wood sculpture is owned by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Art critics have said that “In Memoriam” child evokes images of the Madonna with her child. Curator Jennifer McComas, the Eskenazi Museum of Art’s Curator of European and American Art, writes in the catalogue for the exhibit, “Although a personal memorial, the sculpture’s monumental size and its evocation of Christian Madonna and Child imagery also depersonalizes the figures and gives the work a universal resonance (not unlike Crucifixion imagery). When the sculpture was displayed in Gross’s solo exhibition at the Associated American Artists Galleries in fall 1947, the press release articulated its inherent tension between personal and universal memory: it is a ‘noble and tragic carving in wood, symbolizing the sculptor’s grief for the whole world in his memorial to his sister who was tortured by the Nazis. . .It is bound to bring all who behold it a poignant awareness of our present universal dislocation.’”

Perhaps Gross was alluding to imagery of Madonna and Child in order to gain the sympathies of Christians for the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust, much as Chagall, Abraham Rattner and others did by painting Crucifixion imagery, (which I have written about here). But even without an awareness of the possible reference to Madonna and Child, or of the title, the sculpture’s universal expression of maternal love is tremendously moving; it becomes even more emotionally powerful with an awareness that Gross is memorializing his sister and her daughter.

On display in the exhibit was also Gross’ sketchbook, from October 28, 1944, open to a page showing a pair of larger-than-life chained hands, surrounded by dead bodies, flames and men wielding axes.

As the curator’s text says, while Gross was envisioning “the violent atrocities the Nazis were inflicting upon the Jews, [he was] probably drawing on memories of World War I-era pogroms he had witnessed.” One of 10 children, Gross had a happy, loving childhood, but his childhood innocence and his sense of family and home was shattered in 1914, when Chaim was 10, when Russian troops occupied his town of Kolomyia in Galicia (which is now Ukraine), killing and raping Jews in a pogrom. On the first day of the invasion, the Cossacks invaded his house and he saw them brutally attack his mother and father. He escaped with his brother Abraham to a neighbor’s house. When he and his brother later returned, they saw their parents lying unconscious on the floor. In 1916 he and his family became exiles, trying to escape anti-semitism by moving to Austria; he later left for Budapest, and then when he was 17, he and his brother Abraham emigrated to America, arriving at Ellis Island in 1921, where they joined their brother Naftoli.

Seeing his “In Memoriam” sculpture” in person, and learning about the murder of his sister and niece, and his experience witnessing the pogrom and seeing his parents viciously attacked, I had an epiphany: Gross’ creation of his many works of pure maternal joy was a radical act, a deliberate choice to refuse to stay mired in sorrow despite his harrowing experience of loss and trauma. An awareness of Gross’ personal history of loss gives heft and weight to his sculptural figures which otherwise often seem light as air, floating like ethereal Chagall figures.

I now see his compulsion to create sculpture after sculpture of these joyous maternal figures as his conscious effort to insist on joy despite his awareness of the darkness in the world, to try to populate the world with loving mothers and children embodied in wood and bronze which become armor and shields against sorrow, not only his personal sorry, but the sorrow experienced by so many. The exuberant joy of his sculptures is only possible because of his awareness of suffering.

How fitting that Gross’ larger than life sculpture “Mother Playing” is permanently displayed outside the Mother and Child Pavilion of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem, ever since it was donated in 1964. With the Judaean Hills as a backdrop, Gross’ sculpture, like the State of Israel itself, is a symbol of hope, joy and new life raising from the ashes.

“In middle school I recall asking my mother about Great Grandfather Godel while working on a family tree project (the worse kind of project for children of Holocaust survivors. We grew up in homes without old photos or heirlooms. And there were unspoken truths about missing family members that we children always sensed). My mom didn’t say much about him and brushed away the discussion. In my adult life I miraculously came across a photo of Godel, uploaded onto the @holocaustmuseum website. It was his Krakow Ghetto identity car and the first photograph I had ever seen of my great grandfather. I finally asked my mom to tell me his story. I heard my mother’s words like sound-bites: ‘they used him for science experiments’ and ‘they injected him with gasoline.’ It’s no wonder she didn’t share details about him when I was in middle school. I can barely put words to it now. I suddenly realized that he has no grave and that his story was so close to being relegated to the dustbins of history. I could almost feel his soul lingering in the heavens with no peace. I decided to provide Great-Grandfather Godel with a small monument to honor his life. As best I could, I created this painting out of a photo that was taken in an act of hatred. My studio took on a sacred quality - I was able to reach across time and space and recreate an image of my great grandfather’s face, but this time with love. Every brushstroke felt important. A powerful moment happened when the music on my iPhone looped to the Leonard Cohen song, "‘You Want It Darker.” Just as I felt I had captured Godel’s likeness I heard the haunting words of the chorus singing: ‘Hineini—Hineini’ (which means ‘Here I am’). My eyes filled with tears.”

“The background pattern is from my dining room wallpaper - the room where Godel’s great-great grandchildren come together every week to celebrate Shabbat and continue living our Jewish heritage - the real heirloom that has been passed down from generation to generation.”

“May you find abundant peace from heaven dear Great Grandfather Godel.”

I find this piece, and Kott-Wolle’s entire series, so poignant. It’s telling that she mentions how she, like other children of Holocaust survivors, grew up without many family photos. It seems like her series is an effort to re-create those missing family photos in a permanent, vibrant and beautiful way, not just for herself but for others to bear witness to. Creating this series is a way to give life to those who have died and also a way for her to honor the lives of her relatives who perished in the Holocaust. When she explains how she suddenly realized her great-grandfather has no grave, I saw her portrait of him as an effort to give him the love and respect and honor that he died without. This reminds me of an interview I heard with the artist Bisa Butler, who makes gorgeous quilted portraits of black people, well-known figures and everyday people. Butler described in the video how she saw a photo of a poor boy without shoes so when she created her fabric image of him, she made sure to give him those shoes, to give him what he didn’t have in his life.

Here are some more paintings from the series, as well as Kott-Wolle’s own words describing her inspiration behind them:

By honoring the beauty of these lives—those rebuilt and those cut short—Kott-Wolle’s paintings become acts of remembrance, calling us to remember on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and every day thereafter.

One work I had not seen before was Ben-Zion’s “Hands,” (1942). Ben-Zion was born Ben-Zion Weinman in 1897 in the Ukraine; he immigrated to the U.S. in 1920, eventually settling in New York, where he was a founding member of “The Ten,” in the 1930s, a group that included Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb.

In this gouache and water color, multiple disembodied hands reach up, stretching towards something in the distance, perhaps beseeching God or asking humans for succor, evoking murdered Jews reaching out of the ground of the concentration camps. I remembered that Ben-Zion often focused on hands in his paintings. As I wrote in March 2025 in my post about Ben-Zion, when I toured Ben-Zion’s magical former home in Manhattan, and saw a retrospective of his at the Maor Art Gallery in Brooklyn, I saw how in many of his paintings of Jews praying or reading Torah, he focused on hands, making them appear larger proportionally than they were in reality. This largeness makes the hands seem all-powerful, which is fitting since it’s with their hands that people pray, or hold the Torah, just as artists create with their hands. Here the hands are severed from their bodies, but they become a synecdoche for the holiness of these millions of murdered souls, Jews who can no longer pray or learn Torah.

Another work by Ben-Zion in the exhibit is part of his series, De Profundis: In Memory of the Massacred Jews of Nazi Europe (1943), in which he memorialized millions of murdered Jews. This work features the faces of bearded Jewish men surrounded by barbed wire, wearing tallises over their heads.

As a writer in Art News wrote in December 1946, “[r]endered in subtle color and punctuated by the artists’ characteristic ropy blacks, the[se works] achieve a dolorous dignity and beauty.” The men’s faces, clustered in what seems a dark pit, are solemn and sad, though colored in pale pastels like the colors of of early crocuses. Ben-Zion felt obsessively compelled to create works remembering those who were killed, and this piece and series is mournful.

But while Ben-Zion’s boldly colored paintings of Jews at prayer and reading Torah, such as “Crowning of the Torah” (1945), “Crowning of the Torah” (1945), “Jew Studying,” (1948), “Jew Praying” (1950), which were not in the exhibit, do not explicitly mention the Holocaust, they are just as much a response to the Holocaust as “Hands,” and “De Profundis.”

Ben-Zion’s paintings of Jews at prayer are a celebration of Jewish survival, a symbol of how Jews will continue praying and studying Torah despite the efforts of others to annihilate us. As I wrote on March 18, 2025 in my Substack, “These images of religious Jews in the act of praying and reading Torah were created as a bold and brave act of memorializing Jews and Yiddishkeit lost in the Holocaust, and of giving hope that the Jewish faith will continue into the future.”

Two works in the Eskenazi Museum exhibit by the late Jewish artist Hyman Bloom, show a similar push / pull between the artist’s desire to remember the horrors of the Holocaust and the artist’s desire to celebrate the resilience of the Jewish people. Bloom was born in Latvia in 1913, and immigrated to Boston as a child, where he died in 2009. De Kooning famously called Bloom the “first Abstract Expressionist,” but for many years Bloom, living and painting in Boston (and perhaps due to his subject matter) was overshadowed by the Abstract Expressionists in New York. In July 2019-February 2020 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston held a major retrospective of his work.

On one wall of the exhibit, Hyman Bloom’s painting “Female Corpse (Front View)” 1945, loaned from the Jewish Museum for this exhibit), hung next to Leon Golub’s “Torso I”(1961) from his “Burnt Man” series.

In portraying the dead body, which he did in several corpse paintings, Bloom was able to depict, in his own words, “the paradox of the harrowing and the beautiful.” The elderly female body is decaying and yet there is beauty in the iridescence of the colors and the swirls of the thick brushstrokes.

Looking closely at “Female Corpse,” reminded me of the vivid colors and round, mottled shapes I saw when looking closely at his painting “Chandelier No. 2” at the MFA.

Critics, such as Clement Greenberg, have made the connection between Bloom’s corpse imagery and the Holocaust, though Bloom denied it. As the wall text states, in 1954 “art historian Sydney Freedberg contended that Bloom’s paintings, while exploring the universal state of death, were motivated specifically by the recent genocide.”

If you weren’t familiar with Bloom’s work, and there were no wall labels, you wouldn’t think the same artist created the warm and celebratory painting, “The Synagogue,” (1940) that was in the exhibit. Bloom made this painting of the interior of a Boston synagogue during the Kol Nidre service at the time Jews in Europe were being murdered, yet instead of portraying the death and destruction of European Jewry, he shows Jews passionately praying in an American synagogue during the holiest service of the year.

The rabbi’s face is tilted so far back, it’s almost horizontal, as if the fervor of his spiritual feeling is literally weighing his head down; the faces of the young boys praying mirror the angle of his head, though not quite as thrown back. Light bounces off the surfaces in the painting, from the glass chandeliers on the ceiling of the sanctuary, to the shining bulbs of the menorah, to the silver breastplate and rimonim (the silver finials on the top) of the three Torahs; all this shimmering of light is set against the deep rich red of the velvet Torah dressing and the railing around the bimah, suggesting how the Torah itself is a source of light. Bloom presents the warmth of Jewish community and religiosity as a talisman against the mass destruction of European Jewry, and as McComas points out, he presents “this American synagogue as a locus for cultural continuity.”

At this time, most Jewish artists, with some exceptions, such as Ben-Zion, weren’t making art explicitly about the horrors taking place in Eastern Europe. There was tremendous pressure to assimilate. Bloom’s creation of a painting about the strength, dynamism and holiness of Jewish prayer and Jewish community in an American synagogue was a way to respond to the attack on Jews in Europe, to assuage the anxieties of American Jews by showing a portrait of Jewish vibrancy and survival, of Jews living Jewishly.

Both artistic impulses are worthy and are essential to being Jewish –Zakhor, to remember who and what we have lost, and to remember the horrors of the Holocaust, and also Simcha, to celebrate being Jewish, to celebrate the beauty of Jewish prayer and Jewish community.

In the same way, after the massacre of October 7, there was an impulse on the part of artists and non-artists to mourn, to remember the dead, and to remember the horrors of what occurred, and then also a countering impulse to find joy in being Jewish.

The work of contemporary Israeli-American artist Andi Arnovitz comes to mind. She has created work recounting the horrors of October 7 by creating simple still life watercolors of objects left behind, as as I wrote about here in the Forward, and she also created this magnificent work, “What We Bring,” celebrating the contributions of Jewish women (though this work was started pre-October 7) which was recently acquired by the Jewish Museum in New York and is now exhibited there.

Interestingly, this exhibit at the Eskenazi museum didn’t mention it, but art critic Hilton Kramer, himself Jewish, writing in Commentary at the time, compared his feeling looking at Bloom’s “Synagogue,” to the “dismay one feels on finding gefilte fish at a fashionable cocktail party.” In other words, the painting was “too Jewish.”

But just as one response to today’s rising anti-Semitism is to embrace one’s Jewishness, and live more Jewishly, the visible Jewishness of these mid-century works, haters and art critics be damned, helps make them so powerful, and resonant today.

It just so happened that several friends posted yesterday a a newly colorized video of Nazis herding Jews onto trains. The way the Nazi officers stood around calmly, chatting, as if it’s an ordinary day, while Jewish children, women, men, and elderly were led onto cattle cars destined for concentration camps was chilling, and eerily mirrored the images I had just seen of ICE standing around, following orders, and showing callous disregard for human life. The sheer lack of empathy, the dehumanization.

And now I turn to art, which promises the hope of empathy and connection, solace and understanding, as well as resilience and re-birth.

Continuing with my previous post's idea of art as a vehicle or expression of resilience, last month I reviewed the new graphic novel The Woman with Fifty Faces: Maria Lani & The Greatest Art Heist That Never Was in Lilith Magazine.

This beautifully drawn book, written by Jonathan Lackman and illustrated by Zachary Pinson, tells the story of Maria Lani, born Maria Geleniewicz, an impoverished Jewish girl in Poland, who re-invented herself as a famous actress when she traveled to Paris with her husband in the late 1920s. With this newly-crafted identity, she managed to convince 50 prominent artists in Paris—including Chagall, Matisse, Soutine, De Chirico, Man Ray--to paint (or sculpt) her portrait as part of a supposed film, The Woman of the Hundred Faces, that she was going to star in.

Someone wrote in response to my last post (using a pseudonym, Neural Foundry,) about Zoe Buckman’s series “Who by Fire,” that “those hanging threads giving the portraits an unfinished quality is a brilliant touch – feels like the subjects are still in process of defining themselves.” I really like that insight. And I think that concept of re-defining oneself applies here, too – Maria Lani was re-inventing and re-defining herself, and at the same time, each artist re-invented her. In each work, she looks remarkably different, whether that is because of the artist’s wildly varying styles or her chameleon-like ability to present herself differently, is unclear.

Here is Soutine’s soulful portrait, owned by MOMA and currently on display there:

And here is Man Ray’s take:

And Matisse’s:

From my Lilith article:

“In writing this book, [author Jonathan] Lackman honors not only Maria, but also his own grandmother, Lola Lackman, who was imprisoned in Bergen Belsen. The last time he visited her, Lackman learned his grandmother was born in Czestochowa, the same Polish town as Maria. When he discovered this, he says, “I felt like working on Maria’s book was a way of honoring and keeping my grandmother alive.” . .

In essence, the telling of Lani’s fantastic story, both figuratively and literally, came from the depths of the darkness and destruction of the Holocaust. Art, in and of itself, allows for re-birth.”

The exhibit title “Who by Fire,” refers to the Leonard Cohen song, which itself is based upon the Unetaneh Tokef prayer recited on Yom Kippur (“On Rosh Hashanah it is written and Yom Kippur it is sealed. How many shall pass on and how many shall come to be; who shall live and who shall die; who shall see ripe old age and who shall not; who shall perish by fire and who by water; who by sword and who by best; who by hunger and who by thirst…”) The connection between the title and the works isn’t obvious. The portraits, which are based on her photographs of friends and family (and herself), that she then embroidered and painted onto vintage cloths, seem to celebrate resilience rather than various ways of dying. And maybe that’s the point.

Buckman’s works in this series celebrate life, the way we cling to it. In recent years Buckman has strengthened her Jewish identity. Even before October 7, her works focused on violence and trauma on women’s bodies. Right after October 7 she condemned on social media Hamas’ atrocities, the murder and rape of innocent Israelis, and was shocked at the backlash against her; instead of silencing herself, she refused to stop being outspoken in support of Israel, losing some of her long-term friends, as well as relationships in the art world, in the process.

One simple piece, “crows on the tracks” (2025), plays off 18^th to mid-19^th century embroidered schoolgirl samplers. By stitching verses or poems on samplers, the hope was that young girls would learn stitching techniques, while at the same time stitching these “sentiments on cloth would foster virtue, publicly exhibiting moral and needlework accomplishments.”(1) Samplers were framed and displayed as historical records of girls’ formal education.

In Buckman’s sampler, the lesson about womanhood is one that Buckman learned personally: “& still women / will tell a woman or / what remains of / her bones / that they are lying.” Framed and hung on the wall it’s a quiet yet powerful statement, a response to the silencing of the voices of Israeli women who were raped on October 7, to Buckman’s learning that many women wear their anti-semitism, their calling Israeli women liars by doubting their testimony, as a false flag of virtue and morality.

This is a small exhibit. I wonder if there are more works in the series. The portraits are not of religious Jews; they are of Buckman’s friends---most wear tattoos. Two works reminded me of Nan Goldin’s photography, those that captured her and her lovers in intimate, frank moments, enlarged so they’re larger-than-life. In “before they became an outline,” (2025), the man wears a gold chai necklace; the woman, sprawled on his lap, has a tattoo of a lotus flower and a ying yang symbol.

In another work, “trace your ridges,” (2025), a woman sits on her bed, legs bent at the knee. A garden of violet, green, cyan and dark turquoise flowers blossom on the comforter underneath her. She looks straight at you, refusing to look away. A tattoo in Hebrew on her left arm reads, possibly, Malkah, or queen.

Here is a close-up of the tattoo:

You can see in both close-ups how these threads hang straight down, as if they are hairs coming off the textile, as if Buckman is still in the process of creating the work, just as the subjects are still engaged in the process of creating their identities. The hanging threads call attention to making of the work itself. Similarly, the stitching here of the tattoo onto the fabric mirrors how a tattoo is etched onto skin, and evokes the number tattoos imprinted on the arms of Jews in concentration camps. Here a tattoo elevates, though; it’s not dehumanizing numbers but the word “queen.”

In “clocks the exit” (2025) a woman sits in her underwear on her bed.

The bed is often the backdrop for these embroidered works, that locus of intimacy and also, sadly, sometimes sexual violence; the crimson comforter plays on that dichotomy—there is a pretty pattern of flowers but the color also suggests blood. The woman’s shirt says “I’m A Good Girl.”

In another, “smells like light,” (2025), the vintage cloth resembles a tallis; the necklace the woman wears looks like a silver hostage necklace.

One can see the tiny grey stitches making up each link of the chain. Her hair is wrapped in a yellow scarf, from which threads hang. Indeed in many of Buckman’s works, threads hang suspended, like strands of hair, or seemingly strands of streaming blood, that give the feeling of the works being unfinished, undone, not static but alive. At the same time, the works are beautiful to look at; you can see how carefully Buckman has embroidered the works, the tiny stitched details of flowers and hair.

Leaving Miami, I drove past the Holocaust Memorial. From a distance, you don’t see all of the sculptured gaunt bodies; at first all you see is an erect arm, a hand raised straight up.

In this video, artist and architect Kenneth Treister, speaks movingly about the creation of the memorial, how he spent five years designing and building it. He wasn’t only concerned with portraying anguish and suffering. He also wanted to create a place of beauty to honor the six million who were murdered without being buried in cemeteries, so he designed a park around the memorial, including a reflection pool surrounded by trees, and an arbor with bougainvillea.

He describes how there was resistance by neighbors who didn’t want the memorial next to their property. A Miami Beach Planning Board meeting was held on November 27, 1984, with 500 people attending, including dozens of Holocaust survivors. Treister talks in the video about a woman who spoke at the city meeting of how she had been a violinist and her husband a pianist, and during the Holocaust the Nazis amputated one of her arms, and one of her husband’s arms, to ensure that neither could ever play music again. She held up the picture of the memorial and said, this is going to give me my arm back. The mayor responded: we are going to build the Holocaust memorial. It was installed on February 4, 1990.

That defiance—in the woman’s words, and in the out-stretched hand of the memorial—resonates with Buckman’s works. Art—creating something beautiful—can be both a way of remembering the suffering of the past and a statement of resilience, a celebration of the refusal to live quietly.

“And who by fire, who by water, who in the sunshine, who in the night time, who by high ordeal, who by common trial, who in your merry merry month of May, who by very slow decay, and who shall I say is calling?”– Leonard Cohen, “Who by Fire”

We don’t really have a say in how we die. We do have some say in how we live.

1 – Valerie J. Davis, The ABCs of Schoolgirl Samplers: Girls’ Education and Needlework from a Bygone Era. Milwaukee Public Museum.

Berit Engen’s “And 5,999,846 More”

Berit Engen’s “A New Life Under the Ancient Sun”

The juxtaposition of the two—co-existing together side-by-side—really spoke to me, the way the light and joy of the one exists, refusing to be extinguished by the somberness of the other.

In 2007, Berit started a project called “Weft and D’rash—A Thousand Jewish Tapestries.” In this undertaking she returns to the ancient craft of weaving to engage in midrash, making commentaries on Jewish texts and responding to Jewish life, creating “midrashic tapestries.” She made both of these tapestries originally as part of a series based on Yiddish songs that were written, composed and sung during the Holocaust. This series became too complex, she says, and so she then divided the series into three. These two weavings are now part of a third series, a work-in-progress, “The Unimaginable and in Spite of It.” How fitting a title. What keeps happening is unimaginable, the horror of men murdering innocent Jews celebrating Hanukkah, and yet we continue to bring light, in spite of it.

The second weaving, “And 5,999,846 More” represents the Shoah, and also the darkness we feel now. Here is the image again:

In her own words, “The black semi-disc on top of the tapestry symbolizes the weight of the Holocaust. I used metallic thread in some of the Shoah tapestries when weaving the Creation, pointing out that the Holocaust did not happen in grey and black as most photos are in, but with God’s own Creation as a backdrop and witness. (In this tapestry, the metallic thread might be depressing to some. For me, with my Scandinavian sensibility, it is a beautiful November sky, albeit without sunshine. . .In a way, the top part is the sun and the sky. The grey ovals below are people. Maybe heads. When I was done with the tapestry, I put a pin in each head. Then I pulled them out and counted them. I subtracted from six million—thus the title of the tapestry. . . There is perspective in the tapestry. People are wandering into the distance, into the black sun, into disappearance and extinction. The black is both the industrial murder and the weight the Jews lived with after the Shoah.”

There is no light in this weaving. The black sphere hangs heavy and ponderous. The oval-shaped figures stand together but they aren’t connected to each other I can feel the weight of the sadness.

And yet there is the illumination of the second weaving. Engen calls this bright, colorful tapestry “A New Life Under the Ancient Sun,” inspired by the song “Mir Zainen Do!” (“We Are Here!”) by Hirsh Glick. Engen says the title reflects “the move to British Mandate Palestine, beach life in Israel, and Yom ha’Atzma’ut.” The Jewish community in Sydney, many survivors of the Holocaust, also created a new life and warm community in the sun, by the beach. Here again is an image of that tapestry:

To me that spirit of “We are Here!” evokes the sense of “Hineini,” we are here, we survive, despite the existence of darkness and the suffering that others continue to inflict on the Jewish people. Those different colored diamond shapes represent the Jewish people, so many beautiful, varied skin colors, but all one people, facing the sun and the bright blue ocean, refusing to succumb to hatred and darkness, seeking out the light, basking in it, and insisting on saying “We are here!,” “Hineini.” As a family friend of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, murdered at Bondi beach, says in an interview, explaining what she knows he would say if he were alive, and why she turned the menorah back on outside her house (she runs a Chabad Center in Randwick with her husband), despite her children’s fear of being targeted, “We won’t turn off our menorahs. We don’t go down in darkness. We shine light.”

Find the light, be the light. Happy Hanukkah

I have written about Rattner’s breathtaking stained-glass window before on my Substack. The subject of the window is God’s creation of the world and the creation of light, separating light from darkness; this feeling of the suffusing of divine light in the stained glass fills the sanctuary with the feeling of radiance and inspiration.

I was pleased to see a photo of the window, and an extended discussion of it, in the catalogue of the exhibit “Remembrance and Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940–1970” at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University--which closes this Sunday and I hope to get to see—in an impressive essay “The Holocaust in Midcentury American Art,” by the museum ‘s curator Jennifer McComas. In the section “Judaism Renewed,” McComas writes that “Rattner drew on a theme that was becoming associated with the concept of Jewish rebirth—the midrash about the primordial Torah, the blueprint for Creation, written in black fire on white fire.” These words are taken from his own handwritten notes. Perhaps that’s why the window resonates so much for me, and feels such a fitting background to conversations about Jewish literature --– the window is a powerful visual midrash on the Torah, on the words that are written in the Torah with “black fire,” on how we are the People of the Book.

McComas mentions how Rattner includes many Jewish symbols in the window, in his own words, “I tried to adapt and transform the usual form of the symbol to the new conditions of our time.” One symbol he revises is the Jewish Star of David. The Jewish Star appears in the right panel, a large one, and a smaller one below it.

These Stars of David always pop out at me, but I hadn’t noticed that the burst of light above the ark is a stylized Star of David, until I read McComas’ essay. I actually found online at the Smithsonian American Art Museum web site a study for the window that Rattner made that shows clearly that there is a six-pointed star in the light emanating above the ark:

Rattner is re-working the Star of David, transforming it and making it his own. McComas quotes Rattner’s own words, “I gave the form of the Shield of David a complex one because its significance has become deeply involved in the struggle for survival of the Jew as part of a threatened people. The intensity of [the people’s] determination to be alive intensifies [the Star’s] value as a symbol.”

By re-claiming and re-sanctifying the Star of David, which Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear, the window becomes an expression of Jewish resilience and re-birth after the Holocaust. In the same way, after October 7, every time I see the window I find its beauty uplifting, and I feel a sense of hope and re-birth emanating from it. As McComas writes, “Rattner remained deeply tormented by the antisemitism that continued to pose a threat to Jews after the Holocaust, yet his monumental window expresses a vision of strength, courage, hope, and resilience.”

Hosting a joyous celebration of Jewish books and Jewish writers in the sanctuary with the window ablaze in its bold colors, it felt as if the writers were in conversation with Rattner, and like the window itself, it felt like a reaffirmation of Jewish creativity, continuity and light.

Chagall’s “The White Crucifixion” (1938)

I always loved to stand in front of “The White Crucifixion” and feel Chagall’s presence. It’s a provocative work, meant to challenge viewers. He is purposefully re-Judaizing Jesus, making his figure on the cross the center of this large canvas, and it was always shocking to see the tallis draped across his figure. I would stand there and feel Chagall’s intent, his powerful attempt to stir empathy in the hearts of viewers, to make them aware of the suffering of Jews in 1930s Germany. Chagall purposefully chose to position the crucified Christ in the center of this painting in order to make an emotional appeal to non-Jews to care about the plight of Jews, but it always stopped this Jew in her tracks. I would look at the small details, a Nazi wearing a swastika armband, a mother clutching her baby to her chest. It’s a bold work, and so unlike what we typically think of Chagall’s sentimental work, the floating figures of lovers mid-kiss, of fiddlers standing on roofs. The palette of “White Crucifixion” is completely different, largely black, white and grey, except for isolated swatches of color, the flames pouring out of shtetl homes, the tongue of flame burning from the synagogue and turning the Nazi’s face red, the red flags of Cossacks mid-pogrom, the blue shirt of a Jew with open palms (in an earlier version of the painting the placard around his neck clearly read “Ich Bin Jude,” (“I am a Jew” but Chagall painted over it), the green cloak of a Jew fleeing with his belongings on his back. [A few months ago Judith Magazine published a poem of mine about fire in “White Crucifixion” and other Chagall’s paintings; it’s the first poem in the folio.] All these suffering Jews trying to escape terror.

On the ground floor of the Art Institute, of course, are Chagall’s bright, cheerful “America Windows”(1977), his celebration of America at its bicentennial, which is also a celebration of the arts—the bright blue panels feature symbols of music, theater, dance, painting and literature—and features the Statue of Liberty and the Chicago skyline. There is also still Chagall’s painting in the Modern Wing, “The Praying Jew,”(1923), a portrait of an observant Jew wearing tefillin on his head – a stereotypical view of a pious Orthodox male Jew. When I was there last week, I heard a visitor explain to his companion that this was a painting of a rabbi. Yet this painting doesn’t challenge any norms or conceptions. It’s a depiction of an observant Jew that conforms with stereotypical visions of a pious Jew: tefillin on his head, bearded.

Photo of Chagall’s “The Praying Jew”(1923) by Laura Hodes

But in place of “White Crucifixion”, though in a different location in the Modern Wing, there is a different Chagall painting that’s now exhibited, “The Birth”(1911-12). Its color palate is the opposite of “White Crucifixion”. The mother’s body and her newborn baby is a warm pink red. The canvas is painted as it to resemble stained glass, and geometric panes of the background are painted forest green and bright blue like the blue background of “America Windows”; the floor is painted in warm, rich brown like the color of fertile earth. The figure of an acrobat jumps upside-down into the sky, smiling faces look in from outside at the scene within; one of the figures relaxing at a table seems to be a goat. The room is full of busy, happy even fanciful figures. The painting depicts the birth of Chagall’s younger brother. This family may live in a one-room house, but the warm colors and glow of the mother and baby makes the tableau seem haimish. The painting romanticizes shtetl-life. It’s the type of Chagall painting that critic Clement Greenberg once condemned as “too ripe, too sauced and sweetened.” It’s a beautiful painting but arguably Jewish kitsch, as sweet as Kedem wine, a tad cliché, though beautifully executed. It conforms to comforting, non-challenging conceptions of Jewish life.

Photo of Chagall’s “The Birth” (1911-12) by Laura Hodes

In contrast, in “White Crucifixion,” there’s no respite for the viewer. It subverts expectations. As art historian Ziva Amishai-Maisels wrote in an essay on the painting in 1991, “[I]n the “White Crucifixion” [Chagall] preached [his message] loudly and clearly, stating that was happening in Germany was a recrucifixion of the Jewish Jesus, an act that only a world forgetful of Christ’s teachings could tolerate. He wanted this message to be understood by the Christian world, and to have a positive effect on that world’s behavior. For this reason, Chagall chose in the ‘White Crucifixion’ not to follow his usual penchant for using his art as a vehicle for personal expression with ambiguous messages that could often be fully understood only by people whose background was similar to his own. On the contrary, he chose clear imagery, hoping that his painting would be a means of political communication with an unresponsive world.”

Doesn’t it seem odd timing to remove the “White Crucifixion” from view now, when the world is so unresponsive to Jewish suffering? It’s certainly possible that the Art Institute just wants to display more work from its holdings, and this is just a temporary re-location of “White Crucifixion” to its archives, but there seems to be more than enough room in the Modern Wing to exhibit three Chagall canvases simultaneously. At a time when anti-semitism, and antisemitic attacks on Jews, are at a high, Chagall’s iconic effort to arouse empathy in the hearts of non-Jews needs to be seen and witnessed now more than ever.

The current exhibition at Northwestern’s Block Museum, “Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper,” open till December 14, focuses on her printmaking, in lithography, etching, woodcut and screen-printing, featuring a recent gift of 34 prints by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Though Frankenthaler was Jewish, she does not make overt references to Jewishness in her work.

In the Block museum’s words the exhibit “calls attention to moments of chance, accident, and the unintentional and unpredictable forms that emerged from Frankenthaler’s process” and comes from Frankenthaler’s own description of her approach to printmaking as one of “pouring, flooding, spilling, bleeding.” Seeing these prints made me question this vision of Frankenthaler as creating prints in an improvised, impromptu fashion. And ironically, I wondered if this vision of Frankenthaler (that the exhibit title perpetuates) as “pouring, flooding, spilling and bleeding” feeds into gender stereotypes of the time, suggestive of women being unable to control their own spilling, bleeding bodily fluids.

It’s true that when art critics describe Frankenkthaler’s work, they often note the sense of improvisation and softness in her work. Ori Z. Soltes writes in his book Fixing the World, Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century (my own italics added), “The technique of Frankenthaler’s work draws from accident and improvisation, and, with her tendency to soft-edged colors and fluid shapes, also seems to mediate, in visual and textual effect, between oil and watercolor. The softness is enhanced both by the water consistency of the paints soaking into the canvas and by the way shapes run against each other without sharp linear interventions.”

Yet after seeing this exhibit, I wonder if this vision of Frankenthaler’s work as “soft” relates to stereotypical gendered associations of women with softness. Indeed, the other prominent art critic of her time besides Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, dismissed her early paintings as “sensitive, but more timid than sensitive.” He refers to another of her paintings as “vague spongings,” in contrast to his description of the “decisive locking of forms” of action painter Lester Johnson. In contrast, Greenberg and Rosenberg viewed Pollock’s action painting as male, aggressive, muscular.

And yes, I sense the fluidity and dreaminess in images like Frankenthaler’s print “Door” (1976-1979), with what seems a small golden door floating in a sea of purples and shadowy black, which is displayed in the exhibit next to Sam Gilliam’s “One”(1970), one of his signature drape paintings. The colors of “One”, rich yet subdued, resonate both with “Door” and with Sol LeWitt’s neighboring tryptich of “Brushstrokes in Different Colors in Two Directions” (1993).

View, from left to right, of LeWitt’s “Brushstrokes,” Gilliam’s “One” and Frankenthaler’s “Door”. Photo by Laura Hodes

While Frankenthal’s works do not make explicit references to Judaism, to me, “Door” evokes Rothko’s paintings with their floating rectangles, and at least one critic, German art historian Werner Haftmann, as pointed out by Avram Kampf in Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century, compares the “advancing and receding planes” in Rothko’s canvases to doors and corridors, inviting one to look and then drawing the veil, “ancient Jewish metaphors for the hidden God of whom it was forbidden to make an image.”

Yet what I was most struck by in this exhibit is the very opposite of uncertainty, softness and timidness – yes, her images seem soft and fluid, but what comes across is her confidence, steely determination and professionalism. One sees the incredibly controlled way she worked in printmaking, altering colors of ink and paper as well as shape until she found just the right combination. This careful, iterative process seems the very opposite of accident and improvisation.

Indeed it’s clear from the prints in the last room, and the video that plays right before entering it, that Frankenthaler evinced tremendous control in her print-making. The exhibit is worth visiting for this room alone. Here reside all the proofs of a single print of Frankenthaler’s, “Divertimento” (1983), 23 prints along three walls. “Divertimento” is the only print for which the Block Museum has all the proofs. In September 1981 Frankenthaler began a collaboration with master printer John Hutcheson at the Hartford Workshop. Over 18 months the two of them spent hundreds of hours creating trial proofs, changing the print’s orientation and the color of the paper, and testing ink colors. The final product, the print “Divertimento,” is on display here, as well as all 23 trial and working proofs.

“Divertimento” (1983) Lithograph on paper. Printers: John Hutcheson and Fred Wessel

View of the 23 trial and working proofs of “Divertimento” in the exhibit. Photo by Laura Hodes

To stand in this room and be surrounded by these prints, witnessing how Frankenthaler tested out different color inks, different color paper, constantly making only slight variations until she felt she got it right, is to experience Frankenthaler’s power and determination, her tremendous patience and strong sense of her artistic self. While there might be the illusion of chance and aesthetic surprise, one feels the powerful presence of Frankenthaler at work. These prints were made when she was 55 so perhaps her confidence and strength is associated with being an older, more assured artist than the young woman who created “Mountains and the Sea,” although she seems to have possessed self-confidence at a young age. In any event, instead of a sense of softness, of pouring, flooding, spilling and bleeding, I felt her iron will.

It’s also fascinating to see here her words scrawled on one proof, “Ok to print! Enfin!,”her declaration to the printer, the artisan, in this case John Hutcheson, that she is done with the many iterations and that this print embodies her artistic vision.

One can see Frankenthaler’s handwriting on the print. Photo by Laura Hodes

This magic moment when an artist knows he or she is “done,” that the image “works,” is mysterious and private, and here her written words lift the veil on this moment. On another print one can see she writes what looks like “generally red ‘lighter,’ a little more open and right edge softer.” In Color Field painting we don’t see the artist’s brushstrokes--the human presence of the artist seems removed--so it’s exciting to see here the physical touch of the artist in her handwriting.

Right before one enters this room of “Divertimento” prints, there’s a film playing, “Ok to Print,” in which Frankenthaler talks about her years of collaboration with printer Kenneth Tyler, of Tyler Graphics print shop in Mount Kisco, New York (July 1994). (The two of them ended up working together for 26 years, till Tyler closed his shop in 2001.) The 10 minute video illustrates what a close, warm, even intimate relationship the two of them had: she calls him Ken and compliments him as a “terrific colorist”; he puts his arm around her, smiling, and the two joke about each other, evincing mutual fondness and a sense of ease, as well as mutual respect. When we think of this era, we think of Abstract Expressionism and the male dominance and misogyny of figures like Pollack and De Kooning – to see these two working together as equals is refreshing.

She confidently and comfortably asserts her artistic power, saying she gets the final say with her colors: “And Ken loves to make my colors, too. . .sometimes I’ll say I want a crimson and he’ll come over and he’ll say , here are three something else’s. And I’ll say, great, I’ll play with that, you know? So, that’s good. But essentially, just as in, I don’t want people to change my line, I don’t want someone to monkey with my colors, in the same way that I wouldn’t pretend to know how to work that magnificent proofing bed out there. And, uh, that’s their domain. And the others are mine.”

She’s aware that her strength and confidence is often viewed negatively—though she doesn’t say it, people likely viewed a powerful woman who insisted on her artistic vision in a negative way--until they actually got the chance to work with her:

“When I work someplace and I’m working with somebody new, either a new artisan in a familiar workshop or a new place, the word is that I am so fussy, so particular, such a perfectionist. . . . But in order to have something really move and work and be beautiful, it takes a lot of time and effort, and being explicit and being demanding and being controlling . . . and I think then the print comes out, it all comes off, it looks beautiful. And we are happy. And then sooner or later I’m talking to one of the artisans, the workers, and they’ll say, you know, you’re really not so bad. You know, you aren’t a monster. I learned a lot from you.”

Women who wield power are often construed by as monstruous. Frankenthaler was able to deflate this misconception through her professional, collaborative relationships with men.

There’s a 1964 photo of Frankenthaler working with a printer (perhaps Kenneth Tyler or John Hutcheson) taken by the photographer Hans Namuth who took iconic black and white photographs of artists in the years between 1950 and 1981. I only noticed after visiting the exhibit how Namuth framed the shot in a way that Frankenthaler’s left arm blends with the printer’s right arm so it is as if in this moment they are one being. He beautifully captured how in her working process she was able to transcend any limits placed on her because of her gender.

Photo by Hans Namuth of Helen Frankenthaler at work (1964)

It’s not only her art that was inspiring and uplifting, so was her example as a professional woman who earned the respect of those she worked with.

For this work, which Arnovitz created for the 6th Jerusalem Biennale, she transformed her own wedding dress (after splitting it into two) by laser cutting 2611 names of powerful Jewish women from white bookbinding cloth, so that the names, in her words, are “bursting out of this wedding dress.”

Andi Arnovitz’ “What We Bring”(2023) at the Jewish Museum - Photo by Ram Ozeri

I asked Arnovitz how she felt seeing her work at the Jewish Museum. “The real ‘pinch yourself’ moment of seeing my work in a museum setting, beautifully lit, with Eva Hesse across the room and Elaine Reichek on the wall aside my piece as just thrilling. No words. It is a quarter of a century of working and hoping my work will eventually be seen and touch people. This is one of the highlights of my life.”

I am so glad this work has found a worthy home, where people can experience its power. As I wrote in my March 19, 2004 Forward piece about Arnovitz's piece, “Though created before Oct. 7, ‘What We Bring’ speaks to the resilience of Jewish women; it reclaims and reasserts Jewish women’s power after Hamas’ barbaric use of rape to try to humiliate and degrade Jewish women. The dress, suspended in air, cascading to the floor, is both ethereal and powerful, graceful and strong, a symbol of the strength and beauty of Jewish women, in Israel and the world. ‘It is a Jewish feminist statement that’s badly needed right now,’ Arnovitz said.” While the work is part of the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection, it likely will not be up permanently as it is a textile and so it’s too fragile. All the more reason to go see it now!

I also see that Tobi Kahn’s “Zahryz tzedek box” (2021) is on display on the revamped third floor. In April 2023 I wrote for the Forward about the tzedek box exhibit, “Tzedek Boxes: Justice Shall You Pursue” at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in New York. Andrew Kaplan Mandel, who was then a fifth year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union, and is now a rabbi at Central Synagogue, had the idea for a Tzedek Box project. He gave artists a prompt to create their vision of a tzedek box, a new Jewish ritual object in which instead of coins, people would insert written reflections on their acts of tzedek, or righteousness, their efforts to improve the world. The idea was that once a year, on Yom HaTzedek, one would open one’s own tzedek box and reflect upon one’s acts of tzedek during the year. I thought this was a beautiful concept, one that lost momentum with the utter devastation of October 7. The first artist Mandel approached with his tzedek box concept was Tobi Kahn, who made seven boxes, one of which was in the Heller Museum exhibit.

Tobi Kahn’s Zahryz tzedek box, 2021 at the Jewish Museum - photo by Ram Ozeri

The blue color of Kahn’s tzedek box, which reminds me of Yves Klein’s trademarked blue, according to the artist himself, as written in the Jewish Museum’s text, “suggest[s] sky, water, and the greening Earth, with glazes that form a translucent surface to signify the importance of protecting our fragile planet.”

I’m excited to see the rest of the works in the reimagined third floor of the Jewish Museum, a combination of Jewish art old and new that testifies to the power and beauty of Jewish artistic expression.

But the exhibit left me wondering, what is the purpose of a Jewish museum? Should an exhibit of a Jewish artist at a Jewish museum be fundamentally different than if it were at a standard arts museum?

Ben Shahn was born in Russian-controlled Lithuania in 1898 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1906 with his Orthodox Jewish family, growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The Jewish Museum’s exhibit’s focus is on Shahn’s belief in “nonconformity;” as the curator’s text informs us, this belief “proposed that the precondition for all great art and historical change is dissent—from tradition, the status quo, and passing trends.” In creating his powerful, striking works of social protest, Shahn resisted giving in to the trend of abstraction and refused to abandon figuration. The curator’s text informs us that he “staunchly defended individualism, civil liberties, and humanism in art.” The exhibit attests to his defense of humanism, with his work decrying the miscarriage of justice in the Sacco Vanzetti case and in the Mooney trial, drawing attention to the plight of African-Americans, to black South Africans under apartheid, critiquing the potential of nuclear war and decrying the brutality of the Nazis.

The exhibit does an excellent job of displaying Shahn’s photographs – included here are images he took of sharecroppers, tenant farmers and coal miners in the South and Midwest in the 1930s – adjacent to the paintings he created based on these photographs. Photography was another medium in which he extended empathy to people not like himself, a Jewish immigrant, and used his art to condemn injustice; for example, his images of destitute farmers and sharecroppers in the 1930s serve as a critique of racial discrimination in Jim Crow South.

The exhibit starts with a focus on how Shahn created art to condemn “travesties of justice” by featuring works from his “Sacco and Vanzetti” series, a total of twenty-three small gouache paintings and two larger temperate panels, his reaction to the trial and 1927 execution of two Italian-Americans many think were unjustly convicted of murder. The series serves as a critique of the bias and fallibility of the U.S. justice system.

The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931-1932

In “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti,” (1931-32), on loan from the Whitney, a judge and two university presidents stand over the two men’s coffins with deadpan expressions, the caskets open and showing the grey faces of Sacco and Vanzetti, with the courthouse looming in the background and Judge Thayer, who had presided over both the case and its appeal, raising his hand in the window as if swearing on a Bible. Shahn makes clear the utter indifference of the three men to Sacco and Vanzetti and the false religiosity of the Judge. In another painting, he portrays Sacco’s family after the verdict, showing the devastation of his wife and the apparent stoicism of his children.

Sacco’s Family after the Verdict, from The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti series, 1931-32

In another, he depicts Sacco’s mother, father, nieces and nephews (interestingly, a copy of the pamphlet page featuring the photo this painting was based on is on display). The style is flat, a bit cartoonish, but Shahn makes Sacco feel like a real, ordinary person, with the pain of his family writ large in these works.

The exhibit then shows works from Shahn’s “Mooney Case” series (1932-33), the fifteen gouaches and one tempera panel he created in reaction to the case of Tom Mooney, an Irish American labor leader thought to be wrongfully convicted for a 1916 bombing at a World War I Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco. The “My Son is Innocent” (1932) work from this series is striking. His mother is wearing a black coat, and a white sash across her torso with the words emblazoned, “My son is innocent.”

My Son is Innocent, 1932, from The Mooney Case Series, 1932-1933

At first I assumed Shahn had added that sash, a symbol or manifestation of how she passionately fought for his innocence. So I was pleasantly surprised and intrigued to see in an adjacent display case the photo which served as raw material for Shahn, published by the International News Photograph Service, of Mooney’s mother, 84, waiting with her daughter for the governor’s decision in the pardon plea of her son; in the photo, she is wearing this same sash. The photo’s caption says, “A few minutes after this picture was taken she was in tears—her prayers had been denied.” Shahn’s act of making paintings about this case, humanizing Mooney by portraying the effects on family members of this likely miscarriage of justice, creates a permanent memorial and a historical testament – few would otherwise know about Mooney, or consider the effect on his family. These works, like the retrospective as a whole, make one consider the powerful role art can play in provoking people’s consciences, and making them aware of social injustices.

Yet I wondered, why didn’t the exhibit include the series that came before these two, Shahn’s Dreyfus series of works, “The Dreyfus Affair: The Ben Shahn Prints “(1930) which was actually his first foray into creating art to protest travesties of justice? Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish French army officer who was wrongfully convicted of treason in 1894 based on false evidence, in a case fueled by deep-rooted anti-Semitism in the French military and justice system. Shahn writes about the creation of his Dreyfus prints in his book The Shape of Content (1957):

“At just that time I was absorbed in a small book which I had picked up in France, a history of the Dreyfus case. I would do some exposition of the affair in pictures. So I set to work and presented the leading malefactors of the case, the defenders, and of course Dreyfus himself. Under each portrait I lettered in my best lithographic script a long or short legend setting forth the role which the original of the portrait had played in the celebrated affair.

What had been undertaken lightly became very significant in my eyes. Within the Dreyfus pictures I could see a new avenue of expression opening up before me, a means by which I could unfold a great deal of my most personal thinking and feeling without loss of simplicity. I felt that the very directness of statement of these pictures was a great virtue in itself. And I further felt, and perhaps hoped a little, that such simplicity would prove irritating to that artistic elite who had already – even at the twenties – begun to hold forth ‘disengagement’ as the first law of creation.” [The Shape of Content, pp 36-37.]

So here, in the Dreyfus portraits he created, was the birth of Shahn’s subsequent works critiquing the bias and wrongs of the justice system, a system enacted by fallible and prejudiced men. His creation of these works led the way for him to create the Sacco and Vanzetti and Mooney works. Therefore, the exhibit’s omission of the Dreyfus images made me wonder, is this a case of not wanting the exhibit to seem “too Jewish” (ironically, the very theme and title of a 1966 exhibit at the Jewish Museum)? Is Shahn’s expression of empathy towards a fellow Jew in his art not as worthy of attention, not as much emblematic of his compassion, as his works about the injustices suffered by people of other ethnicities and cultures?

As I walked through the exhibit, I was reminded of Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting of Emmet Till in his casket at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and the reaction to it (Schutz herself is a Jewish artist). The presence, the very existence of her painting based on photographs of Emmet Till in his casket, was protested against; a black artist, Parker Bright, stood in front of it, preventing people from seeing it; a British-born black artist and writer, Hannah Black, wrote a letter to the biennial’s curators arguing that the painting should be not only removed but destroyed. Mr. Bright said in a Facebook Live video of the protest, “I feel like {Schutz] doesn’t have the privilege to speak for black people as a whole or for Emmett Till’s family.” Curator Laura Katzman refers in her essay in the Shahn exhibit’s book to New York Times critic Roberta Smith’s March 2017 article, “Should Art that Angers Remain on View?” and writes that Smith “stated that the [Schutz] controversy brought to mind artists like Shahn (white and Jewish) ‘who crossed ethnic lines in their depiction of social trauma.’” Katzman then adds her own comment in parentheses “(Shahn, in fact, shared with Sacco and Vanzetti an identity as an immigrant)” a comment that needlessly undermines Shahn’s act of extending empathy towards these two men from an ethnic group to which Shahn did not belong. Katzman then writes, “Smith’s words suggest that Shahn’s approach manages to avoid exploitation and voyeurism, and even does justice to the horror and pain experienced by others.” While I agree Shahn’s work avoids exploitation and voyeurism and does justice to the suffering of others, as this wonderful exhibit demonstrates, I think Schutz’s painting also does justice to the suffering of others, and is neither exploitative or voyeuristic.

Would Shahn’s work be accepted today? Or would it be protested against, just as Schutz’s painting was? Is the climate such today that a Jewish artist would not only not be praised, but his or her extending of empathy to people unlike himself or herself, telling their story, would not be tolerated, as was the case with Schutz? (Sadly, I think if Shahn were creating work now, he would not get his work shown. Unless, perhaps, he disavowed Zionism.)

Is this also why the Dreyfus paintings are not included in the exhibit, but the Sacco and Vanzetti and Mooney paintings are? Is it not worthy and valuable for Shahn to have expressed his empathy towards his fellow Jews in his art, and something meaningful for people to see in a Shahn retrospective? Especially in the Jewish Museum? The exhibit mentions Rabbi Hillel’s three sayings, which Shahn included in a work: on display here, “Flowering Brushes” (1968).

In the work he writes the sayings in Hebrew; the translation is: “[Rabbi Hillel] used to say: ‘If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I care only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?’” All three sayings need to co-exist in relation to each other – it’s not good if one is only for others, or if one is only for oneself – one needs to live the ethos of all three. I love this work and it seems to embody the task of any artist, and of Shahn himself. As the curator’s text states, it “embodies the eternal struggle of the artist on the cusp of creation—reaching within and without to make meaning of and for the world.” I wish the exhibit had had a bit more focus on Shahn’s efforts to reach within, to tell the story of the struggle of the Jewish people.

It is true that Shahn himself made few direct references to the Holocaust in his art; the exhibit can’t include what doesn’t exist (Perhaps he felt pressure himself as an artist not to seem “too Jewish.”) The exhibit does include “Warsaw 1943, 1963,” a work Shahn created commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto.

But it’s not clear just by looking at the image that it’s about Jews rising up against the Nazis. Indeed, the wall text states Shahn based this figure of an anguished man on a news photograph of a criminal awaiting trial, not on a photograph of a Jew in the Ghetto.

There is small “Spirituality and Identity” section of the exhibit, which shows Shahn engaging with his love of Hebrew lettering, and a work, “Where Wast Thou?” (1964) in which he grapples with the mysteries of the universe, including Hebrew text from the Book of Job, and a lithograph of “Flowering Brushes.”

Yet in one key work – “Study for Jersey Homesteads mural”(1936) - one of the few works in which Shahn does make a clear, direct reference to the Holocaust - the exhibit seems to downplay its Jewishness and not give it the attention it deserves.

Study for Homesteads mural - photo by Laura Hodes

Shahn was invited to create a mural in 1937 for the Jersey Homesteads community in New Jersey (later called Roosevelt, New Jersey in 1945 after President FDR died)—a planned settlement to provide affordable housing and cooperative living for Jewish garment workers from New York City—reflecting its mission to offer economic stability and a sense of community to working-class Jewish families. (Shahn himself moved to this community with his second wife, Bernarda Bryson, and settled permanently there.) The exhibit’s wall text states: “In this study, somber immigrants leave the oppressive, antisemitic conditions of Europe for an unknown American future, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty looming in the distance. Jews pray in Jerusalem, another refuge for them outside Europe. In the final mural below, Shahn notably changed the location from Jerusalem to New York City. He added a figure of the world’s leading physicist, Albert Einstein, who fled to the United States in 1933. Shahn thereby merged the first wave of Eastern European immigration (18802—early 1900s) with Nazi-era emigration from Germany.”

Final Jersey Homesteads mural, Roosevelt, New Jersey

Close-up of top left of the Nazi soldier in the final Jersey Homesteads mural. Original photograph by Gabrielle Louise Balon. From Fig. 25 in Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals by Diana L. Linden

The exhibit makes note of Shahn’s deletion of the original scene of Jews praying at the Kotel in the final mural, which he painted between 1936 and 1938, and mentions the addition of Einstein in the final mural, but doesn’t point out several other significant things: 1) ) the depiction of a pogrom in the top left of the study, showing Jewish suffering in Eastern Europe, a reason Jews immigrated to the U.S; 2) in the final mural, Shahn makes a direct reference to the Holocaust, again something he rarely does—instead of the pogrom in Eastern Europe, he paints the small figure of a Nazi standing in front of a shop window holding a sign that says in German, “Germans! Defend Yourselves! Don’t shop from Jews!” An adjacent sign says, “Attention Jews, visit forbidden”, which is pasted over the nameplate of a Dr. I. Koch. According to Diana L. Linden, historian of American art, and author of Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene, Shahn selected these warnings from the Nuremberg Laws; 3) in the tableau at the top right of the study, there are men gathered at a Passover seder; one can tell it’s a seder because the man at the head of the table has a pillow on his chair, and holds a glass of wine.

Close-up of top right of the Study for Homesteads Mural - Photo by Laura Hodes

This presence of the seder (again, which isn’t mentioned in the exhibit) suggests that the idea of Passover, and its trajectory from slavery to freedom, was in Shahn’s mind, giving credence to the Linden’s assertion that there “are parallels between Shahn’s mural and the Haggadah.” As Linden writes:

I ask that you consider Shahn’s entire mural as a recasting of the biblical story of Exodus as the recent mass immigration of the Jews to America. In so doing, Shahn transforms the story into a secular, socialist tale. Why, then, did Shahn remove earlier references to Passover that appeared in his sketchy list of subjects and studies? He did so to privilege contemporary American life and working-class identity over elements of Jewish religious tradition and ritual. [p 61]

Shahn’s removal of the image of Jews praying at the Western Wall makes America, specifically the New Jersey Homestead, the promised land. His mural was an effort to create a new collective memory for the Jewish people, an attempt to inspire American Jews to, as Linden writes, “take charge of their own history.”

Indeed, Linden sees the tripartite structure of the mural as mirroring the three-part narrative structure of the Haggadah (slavery, deliverance, redemption) and suggests that the mural “reinterprets the religious text of Passover, which celebrates freedom and deliverance from Pharaoh as a secular, class-based epic.” The mural functions to make viewing it experiential, much like the experience of participating in the Haggadah seder and saying that we, not our ancestors, left Egypt. But, as Linden writes, “in the mural slavery has been recast from ancient Egypt onto the darkness of tsarist Russia, with its murderous pogroms, and onto working as wage slaves in the crowded, dangerous garment factories on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the tenements of New York. Deliverance comes from joining unions and forming cross-union bonds, and ultimate redemption comes through housing communities sponsored by the New Deal, which join together home ownership, factory work, and farm labor as the new generation of American Jews work for themselves and each other.”

This vision, of a Jewish farming utopia in New Jersey, ultimately failed. But the story Shahn paints in the final mural (which still exists today in a local elementary school) of redemption from slavery in tsarist Russia and from extermination and murder in Nazi Europe is inspiring, and, at least to me, embodies the very spirit of non-conformity the exhibit focuses on.

While in downtown Asheville during a free morning, I learned about another creative community that sought connection, support and inspiration in the mountains of North Carolina--the historic artistic community that inspired generations of artists, Black Mountain College, which opened 15 miles east of Asheville in 1933 and operated until 1957. I had heard of Black Mountain College (BMC) but wasn’t very familiar with its origins or which artists had taught and created there, and how its culture of experimentation and interdisciplinary risk-taking allowed many well-known artists to develop their innovative work: Buckminster Fuller; Ruth Asawa; Robert Rauschenberg; William De Kooning; John Cage; Jacob Lawrence; Cy Twombly.

The original Black Mountain College sign at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (Photo by Laura Hodes)

Before visiting the small Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in downtown Asheville, I wasn't aware of the significant connection between the Bauhaus—-the German school founded by architect Walter Gropius—and the BMC. In July 1933, the Bauhaus faculty, led by director Mies van Der Rohe, decided to shut down the school rather than comply with Nazi party requirements such as hiring party members to teach there. BMC happened to open its doors four weeks later and needed an additional art teacher. The BMC school founders, Ted Dreier and John Rice, asked architect Philip Johnson, curator of architecture at the MOMA for suggestions; Johnson was aware of the Bauhaus’ closing and suggested they ask Josef Albers, who was a professor at the Bauhaus school from 1922 till June 15, 1933 when his contract was terminated. When Dreier invited Josef Albers, he leapt at the chance, even though he’d never heard of North Carolina and didn’t speak English. Josef ended up leading BMC’s visual arts program until 1949, emphasizing experimentation with materials and color, and becoming an influential color theorist. Later he led the Department of Design at Yale until his retirement in 1958.

The December 5, 1933 Asheville Citizen newspaper reporting on the Albers’ arrival at Black Mountain College

The Black Mountain College Museum in downtown Asheville aims to “continue the legacy of educational and artistic innovation of Black Mountain College;” it has a permanent art collection, oral histories, a library and rotating temporary exhibits. The current exhibit is “viewshed,” which “maps the transmission of ideas across generations, staging a vivid conversation between the past and the present,” bringing together the work of important BMC figures and contemporary artists to show how the BMC’s experimental ethos has influenced contemporary artists. On display are several silkscreens from the first edition of Albers’ influential book Interaction of Color published by Yale University Press in 1963.

While this isn’t at all the exhibit’s focus, I was surprised to discover to what extent this avant-garde artistic community at BMC was a refuge for Jewish artists fleeing Nazi Germany. Alexander (Xanti) Schawinsky was one of the original members of the Bauhaus and when it shut down he then escaped to Italy. In 1936 Josef Albers secured safe passage to the U.S. for Schawinsky and his wife. (A poet I was with, Hadara Bar-Nadav said, perhaps Albers should be considered a Righteous Gentile.) Schawinsky taught painting and drawing at BMC, and then became involved with its printing press and theater; he is credited with bringing Bauhaus avant-garde theater to the U.S.

Untitled (1953) Oil on canvas by Xanti Schawinsky (1904-1979) Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center - Photo by Laura Hodes

Several other Jews also found an artistic home at the BMC: at the 1950 summer program, critic Clement Greenberg taught ‘The Development of Modernist Painting and Sculpture from their Origins to the Present Time” and an art criticism class based on Kant; in the summer of 1951 Ben Shahn taught painting and Aaron Siskind taught photography. In the current exhibit, several Siskind photographs are on display, showing his obsession with the details of surfaces: patterns of peeling and decay make his photographs verge on becoming abstract paintings. (In 2016 I wrote a review about a Siskind exhibit at the Art Institute in the Forward.)

Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) San Luis Potosí 16, 1961 Vintage gelatin silver print. Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

The Black Mountain College Museum itself doesn’t draw attention to the religious or ethnic backgrounds of the artists. I only learned that Anni Albers, Josef’s wife, who taught textile design at BMC, was Jewish a few days later from a volunteer at the Asheville Art Museum who told me that Anni Albers was born Jewish but had converted, but that being born Jewish was reason enough to flee Nazi Germany. There’s no mention of Anni Albers being Jewish in the “viewshed” exhibit. However, a 2022 New York Times article stated that “[Josef] Albers was out of a job, but the more salient issue was that his wife, Anni, a master weaver and former Bauhaus instructor, was Jewish in an increasingly menacing atmosphere. It was at this time that a telegram from Black Mountain College arrived. ‘I don’t speak English,’ Albers replied. Rice, ever the maverick, wrote back: Come anyway.’”

Indeed, the more I looked into Anni Albers, the more Jewish-identified she seemed, despite her conversion. In 1965, the Jewish Museum in New York commissioned Anni to make a work memorializing the victims of the Holocaust; she created the weaving Six Prayers, consisting of six panels, 73 1/4 x 19 1/4 inches, the largest of what she called her “pictorial weavings.”

© 2003 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

Maurice Berger described Six Prayers in the book Masterworks of the Jewish Museum (2004); here is his description as posted on the Jewish Museum’s web site:

“[Anni] Albers's elegy is composed of six vertical tapestries woven of beige, black, white, and silver. While the use of so limited and somber a palette might call attention to the problem of differentiation in response to mass murder, Albers varies the weave, allowing one of these colors to dominate in each of the six panels, thereby giving each segment a unique tone. Against the structural grid of warp and weft, Albers sets meandering threads of black and white whose spontaneous irregularity is suggestive of an individual will-or individual wills-charting some personal terrain across an imposed order of overlapping verticals and horizontals. Poised within the restrained quiet of abstraction, these ambling filaments are texts that spread across the scroll-like tapestries, transcending the limited utterances of verbal language for a more universal elegy. Words are at once evoked and denied by the appearance and disappearance of these threads. Though the six commemorative stelae are solemn in their monumentality, there is an intimacy to the tapestries. Weaving-which consists of the intertwining of disparate threads-symbolically suggests the process of tikkun, or social repair.”

Six Prayers is not on display currently at the Jewish Museum, but in 2018, the Tate Modern in London hosted an exhibition of Anni Albers’ work and featured Six Prayers. In an interview with the Art Newspaper, co-curator Briony Fer said that Six Prayers “shows [Anni] thinking on a much larger scale than we might have expected, and using ideas about writing and pictographic forms and hieroglyphic forms, to imagine a monument in textile, a monument that’s haptic as well as optical. You can really feel those textures… It’s as if they’re six prayer rolls, and she’s using and drawing on certain conventions within the Jewish tradition. It’s the one instance in her work where we see her really engaging with the question of Jewishness. She is a Jewish woman and Josef Albers was not Jewish, but obviously this—and not only the closing down of the Bauhaus—was the reason why it was essential for the Albers’ to leave Germany.”

It's worth noting that the Tate curator saw Anni as a Jewish woman and her Judaism as the primary reason the Albers’ had to flee Germany, while the Black Mountain College Museum does not mention Anni’s Jewish identity at all. One can imagine the sense of solace and refuge that the Black Mountain setting provided Anni as well as other European Jewish refugees. This sense of comfort allowed BMC to become a place of artistic experimentation that attracted artists of all different backgrounds.

Fers went on to describe how Anni Albers used thread in Six Prayers to create an illegible language: “There’s something very abstract about the script and the scriptural nature of it, but it’s deliberately illegible, it’s not as if we are invited to read the message… It’s a very enigmatic work. It has these metallic threads, so it has a mystical, contemplative effect. So it’s a much quieter space in the exhibition, to really look long and hard.” This description of the illegible script in the weaving reminded me of looking at Siskind’s photographs of crumbling and peeling painted words on buildings.

Interestingly, this idea that the very weaving of Six Prayers demands that viewers “look long and hard” resonates with what Josef Albers said his mission was upon arriving at the BMC. As Harris writes in her book, The Arts at Black Mountain College:

“When asked on his arrival at the college what he hoped to achieve, Albers responded, ‘to open eyes.’ He often quoted for his students a statement by John Ruskin: ‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion --all in one.’”

So it’s not only that the artist that has to heighten his or her powers of observation by opening his or her eyes: in turn, the work the artist creates hopefully will demand the attention of readers and viewers, allowing them, too, to see the world more clearly.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been surrounded by other poets 24/7. At Yetzirah I noticed how observant my fellow poets were to the natural world around us – one poet drew our attention to how the sun shone through an opening in a building, another to a bird that flew past us with blue on its wings, another stopped to take a photo of dragonflies on a rock in the water. In another moment, at the end of the Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service someone spotted a rainbow through the window and called everyone’s attention to it. People jumped up out of their seats to get a better view.

Photo by Poet Lis Weiss Gorowitz

As poet Dana Levin beautifully said in her workshop at Yetzirah, after discussing Ginsberg’s poem Howl, “We can feel so overwhelmed in our cultural moment, so many things calling our attention, so many moments of cruelty and violence and inequity, can make us feel, why write? We need the message of the robin. Be local. Be in person – see a friend, talk to your sister. Be with art, making it, encountering it—it is so crucial to keep hold of your natural ecstasy and not let this moment paralyze you or make you feel what you have to say doesn’t matter. The most subversive thing you can do now is write about a tree, an authentic poem about love or nature, not ignoring this moment but how to do it in this moment.” To see clearly is poetry.

In order to create, despite the many horrors and sorrows of the world, the aim, as Josef Albers said, is to “open eyes,” and truly see what’s around you – that robin, that tree, those beautiful, sheltering mountains.

Photo of Yonia Fain with his painting of a slain bull, Untitled (1954-1955)

Fain was born in what is now Ukraine in 1913, then fled to Vilnius, Poland with his family as a child. When Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 he was living with his first wife in Warsaw. They escaped by foot to Russia, where he was conscripted into the Russian army as an artist. He refused to create propaganda art and so he was in danger. He falsified documents and a visa which was signed by the famous Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, and escaped through Siberia into Japan, living in the Shanghai ghetto and becoming part of a third wave of Jewish refugees in Shanghai in the fall of 1941. In Japanese-controlled Shanghai he made a living by painting portraits of Japanese officers and their families. In Shanghai he wrote poetry and had exhibitions of his paintings. While he and his wife escaped Europe, no one else from his family did. From 1947 to 1953 he lived in Mexico City (where he and his wife divorced) and taught at the University of Mexico; he became close friends with muralist Diego Riviera. In 1953 he moved with his second wife to New York City, which was the center of the art world after World War II, where he exhibited in city galleries and taught at the Brooklyn Museum, then NYU, and then Hofstra from 1971 to 1985, when he retired. He was named faculty emeritus by Hofstra in 2013.

In New York City after WWII, Abstract Expressionism was at its height, but Fain didn’t want to conform. Karen Albert, director of the Hofstra University Museum of Art, said in a April 29, 2021 lecture “Yonia Fain: Witness to History,” “Yonia didn’t fit into any of those categories [of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism or Pop Art] as an artist. It gets harder for an artist to fit into the gallery system when he is not working in the most popular manner. He didn’t want to give up representation [in his art]. He really felt he was a witness to what had happened in his life and he didn’t want people to forget. The idea of not forgetting and remembering was very important to him. He said it all the time.” Fain’s refusal to conform to the popular style of art, his commitment to representative or figural art as the best way to be a witness to history, despite it being opposed to the popular style, prevented him from becoming well-known. Still, he kept painting and teaching, which Albert says, he enjoyed very much.

I actually saw Fain’s work for the first time three days after October 7, 2023, when I went to see an exhibition of his work at the James Gallery at the Graduate Center, CUNY, “Modern-ish: Yonia Fain and the Art History of Yiddishland.” Many of the works were from the permanent collection of Hofstra University Museum of Art, which owns 122 of Fain’s works. His work spoke to me then, not fully aware of the horrors of October 7 as accounts were still dribbling in. I was in a state of shock at the knowledge that Hamas terrorists had invaded kibbutzes and the Nova Music Fair and murdered many Israelis, though I didn’t yet know the full account, the rapes, the burnings, and glee with which Hamas committed their brutality, nor how protests would erupt on American campuses against Israel and for Hamas, and hostage posters would be torn down.

Prisoners (1970s), photo by Laura Hodes

His paintings are incredibly emotionally expressive. Several of the paintings spoke to me in their portraits of anguish and suffering. In Prisoners (1970s) five figures seem to be possibly hanging, their garments suspended in space. They are lifeless and have lost control of their fate, their figures lined up in a row. Some think the uniforms are hanging without bodies, as Albert puts it, “representing people dead and missing from his life, the empty uniform a recurring motif.” I see the ghoulish facial features in one figure, though, suggesting the presence of bodies. The pastel blues and greens contrast with the suffering presented, suggesting the indifference of others to the prisoners’ pain. I don’t think I knew then about the hostages, but the inhumanity of how men could seize life and freedom away from other men spoke to me.

Crucifixion (1966)

Similarly, there was a Crucifixion painting (1966), Fain one of several mid-century Jewish figurative painters, including Chagall and Abraham Rattner, who painted the Crucifixion not as a religious expression, but to convey man’s inhumanity to other men, and to stir the empathy of viewers towards the suffering of another person different from themselves.

Holocaust (no date), photo by Laura Hodes

Fain’s large painting, Holocaust (no date), the largest in the exhibition, is more abstract than his others; one can make out the image of an anguished horse in the center, and on the lower right, a pair of human arms clutching at each other, evoking the hands in Picasso’s Guernica, and in the upper left, scythes or blades, a repeating motif of his – but the overall impression is a maelstrom of upheaval and pain.

Storm (no date), photo by Laura Hodes

Similarly, Storm (no date) shows an atmospheric storm of wind and blood overtaking a town or shtetl, threatening to wipe it out. To me the painting evoked a foreboding sense of looking down at the kibbutzes on the eve before they were invaded. I stood before it and could feel the sweep of terrorists’ storming the peaceful kibbutzes, burning homes, blood staining the walls.

Two of his paintings evoke pure horror – Untitled (Dying Horse) (no date), a horse in state of anguish, wailing, and The Scream (1997), a distorted face of a man with an open maw making a similar wail of suffering and pain.

Untitled (Dying Horse) (no date) photo by Laura Hodes

The Scream (1997), photo by Laura Hodes

Interestingly, Karen Albert, who knew Fain for many years when he was at Hofstra, spoke in a 2021 lecture about how visiting his studio, with walls stacked with his paintings of grief and anguish, was overwhelming because of the depth of emotion emanating from the works. “But to talk to Yonia himself,” says Albert, “he was a kind and very gentle person. He couldn’t have been warmer and more welcoming. The difference between the person I knew and the images he painted was very dramatic.”

Fain was also a prolific Yiddish poet, authoring five books of poetry, and for a time he was President of the Yiddish Pen Society--and several poems were displayed in the exhibit. One seemed to speak about his personal mission, his internal drive that kept him painting daily until his death at 100. Here is an excerpt of one poem:

Paint the Day at Night (translated by Sheva Zucker)

Paint the day

By night

And the night

By day,

A picture

Is the landscape

Of thought,

A corner,

Where old age

Has spent

Its youth,

A burned down door

To a longing

Opened once more.

Don’t paint what you see,

Paint what you can not

Forget. . . .

Make the unknown

Known,

Paint fogs –

Letters from the mountain to the valley,

Paint,

The voice of silences,

And their echo,

Paint the intelligence

That makes the paintbrush

Serve

Your hand.

These words speak of Fain’s drive to “paint what you cannot forget,” to paint his experience of the Holocaust and of being a refugee in order to “make the unknown known,” to make people that have not experienced these horrors aware of them, so that others would not forget, to “paint the intelligence that makes the paintbrush serve your hand.”

In 2012, Fain began to experience macular degeneration, yet he continued to create drawings on paper every single day even as he lost his vision. To continue to paint is a hopeful act, one of resilience and survival. As the words of this poem suggest, Fain knew he was a servant to his paintbrush, to the imperative to paint what he could not forget so that he could make others remember.