The painter Yosef Zaritsky was born in Ukraine and studied art in Kiev. In 1923, he settled in Mandate Palestine, where he became a prominent figure in the development of Israeli art. He associated with the younger generation of artists who were rebelling against the academic style of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. During his long life he worked in a number of styles. In the 1920s, his watercolors of Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem combined an intense focus on the Israeli landscape with a commitment to quasi-abstractionism. His later work was more rigorously abstract in style.
Zaritsky was a member of what is known as the Land of Israel movement, a group of artists who, in the 1920s, drew on the ideas and practices of post-impressionism to create a modern art of Jewish…
At noon in the kasbah
When the souk was packed
I’d be walking around
My chest toned and hard
And they’d all be saying: What a guy
And as I walked down the alleyways
From every window…
During the seventeenth century, Shalem Shabazi, one of the most prominent rabbis of Yemen, wrote deeply spiritual, kabbalistic poetry that couched his subject— the love of God—in the erotic language…